An enjoyable but buggy game. Recommended to be played with the 1.5 patch.
User Rating: 7.6 | Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines PC
This is the sequel to the Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption. Although the game is a sequel, I don’t believe it carries on any story from the original as I have never played the original but had no difficulty in following this game’s story. The story is that you are a fledgling, a newly embraced vampire in L.A. The vampires are split up into about four major factions. These factions all want full control of the city’s Vampire community. You work with the Camarilla, this sect believes that all vampires should follow the Masquerade whether they know of it or not. The Masquerade is the rules of not showing that you are a vampire to the human society. As breaking the Masquerade will result in vampire hunters trying to kill you and then eventually vampires will kill you. So it is a good idea to not show off that you are a Vampire to humans. I do like the story as it shows that vampires are up to date in the world and know the risks of being found out by humans now as the numbers of vampires compared to humans is tiny. So it’s important for them to keep secret. I also like the range of missions from killing to stealth to negotiating and to collect things. They are all usual sorts of quests, but you can do most of them how you see fit. You can kill everyone. You can just be stealthy. You can even talk your way through some people. It is pretty good they let you be open about what you’re doing. Plus you have to worry about committing crimes at the beginning of the game as you are rather weak to begin with and the police will be able to overpower and kill you. But the police never try to arrest you, which you’d expect if you are unarmed and just standing still not resisting, arrest but taking a beating. But you can easily evade them. Character creation within the game consists of selecting what race of vampire you are. There are 7 clans to choose from and each has some uniqueness about them. My favourite is the Malkavians. These vampires are able to see more from people than people may reveal, but they are made crazy because of this. Their madness is noticeable whilst you play so it’s not that you are mad but you cannot tell. Other clans include the Nosferatu, Brujah, Tremere and others. They have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Selecting gender is also important as characters will react differently depending on gender. But the only problem is you cannot customise their looks at all. The graphics are using the Source engine that originated in Half Life 2. This is shown most of the time, but unfortunately. The graphics are some what rushed at times as their characters that look really good and are animated really well when talking. But there are generic NPCs that just walk around and they look really bad. They are really basic and don’t show any work done for them. Areas within the game look good most of the time as the good places have atmosphere. There may have been a few places that I wasn’t impressed with but they were rather small. Another horrible graphical problem is that water is only made to look good in a few areas of the game. As that water reflects and looks just as good as Half Life 2’s. But there are some areas where the water has graphical bugs like it flashes chunky pixels. It’s most noticeable in the sewers towards the Warrens and in the Warrens themselves. It is rather noticeable when it occurs. Animations are also somewhat irritating as the 1.2 patch didn’t have characters opening doors with an animation I think. But the 1.5 unofficial patch makes characters kick doors open pretty much all of the time. It looks amusing to begin with and then just irritates me. The sound in Vampire: Bloodlines is good on the vocals, but the sounds in general weren’t as good. The voices were good as they showed how the characters were feeling, especially in characters like Damsel. But there are some bugs where they only say so much but the subtitles show more, like their voices cut out during their speech. But most of the time, the voices say more than the subtitles show. The music in the game is rather good in most of the places. When you aren’t in heavy combat, you may hear just some background music. But when you get into a fight, the combat music takes over and it’s pretty good and loud for making you want to kill people with. Some areas of the game has good music, whereas others have rather irritating tunes. Gameplay in Vampire: Bloodlines has been corrected in the 1.5 patch, which means no more laggy controls. But I still find it irritating to press buttons when in 3rd person mode, as they are hard to locate when you got your vampire’s body in the way. But 3rd person mode is important for hand to hand combat. So when being attacked and there’s a button to drop something from a crane to crush some one, it’s hard to press. Combat in this game ignores all the damage caused by shooting some one in the head. So Jack’s little tutorial of what will harm you and what doesn’t have its flaws. As you can pummel a person with a sledge hammer but it may cause little damage. It’s all your stats compared to another character, so you don’t get any authentic FPS style damage like some games. Combat using firearms is another story. It is an all or nothing situation with them when they concern weapons with a scope as having just one point less than the maximum will result in the scope swinging about and being rather difficult to control. Also there are no points for scoring headshots in this game as it’ll do just the same amount of damage as shooting them in the foot. Plus there are times when guns are practically useless against some things. This game is rather riddled with bugs, it would take some time type all of them. I’ll just say that the game may crash when it wants, that’s rare. But there are times when events scripted events don’t play out like they should and the game cannot continue as the event hasn’t finished. But it can’t. There are also performance problems as some areas and some fights make’s my pc stutter to an unplayable standard for a short period of time for unknown reasons. As my CPU has no problem with this game as I tested this game with a better graphics card and slower CPU, they had the same problem at the same places. So this could be another issue due to how the game may have been rushed to be finished. As long as you see past the errors and problems. This is a rather good game which is easily replayable as I’ve played through the game twice and found new things in the game and keep finding new things with each play. As long as it's at version 1.5 it won't be very irritating with bugs. 
