Almost perfect
I struggle to find criticisms of this game, - all the main things that matter in this type of game are there. It looks beautiful, the environments look real, and the characters are life like. The background music is not intrusive and adds to the feel of the settings. The voice acting is of a good standard. The missions are challenging without being stupidly hard. The story line is engaging and enjoyable. Obviously the concept is far fetched (I mean it deals with vampires!), however the way that the story is presented is believable. The whole concept of a vampire society complete with its own politics and conflicts existing and making efforts to make sure that humans never find out about it is more believable than standard vampire stories.
The missions are good fun and there is a wide variety of different challenges to complete. Some missions involve fighting through bad guys to reach a boss, while others involve stealth and others are more puzzle orientated. While ultimately its an action adventure, at times you are required to think and work out how to get through situations instead of simply clicking your mouse repeatedly on every enemy that pops up. There are some missions that are so good that they stay with you for a long time after you've completed the game. Of particular note are the disused hotel mission, the plague missions and of course the haunted house (I didn't know that I could get that scared sitting in front of my PC!)
The game has great replay value too. Dialogue options and fighting styles change for each different class of vampire, plus the missions are interesting and varied enough for you to be keen to play through the game several times. Even though you know what will happen in the end after you've played the game once, there is such variety in the characters that it is still fun to play a different style of character to reach the conclusion a different way.
Its a great shame that Troika have shut down. Hopefully someone else will take up the franchise and someday there will be a third VtM game.
I cannot recomend this game highly enough. It is a gorgeous, immersive and exciting game that has an incredible story and balences action, adventure and puzzle solving perfectly. Yeah there are some minor technical bugs but they can all be fixed with the patches that have been released, so do not detract from the experience. Ultimately I've never found a perfect game, though this is the nearest I've come so far.