Despite running on a beta Half Life 2 engine, this very gothic themed game has atmosphere that can be genuinely scary.
That minor aside, the game is quite gripping in places and genuinely spooky. Play the hotel mission late at night or some sections of the sewer at ANY time and be somewhat spooked. For a more cerebral thrill - listen to the tapes in Grout's mansion - a lot of care and effort went into describing the descent into his madness.
General gameplay handles quite well, the controls are responsive and movement is clean - there's no problems getting stuck on objects or the like. Combat can be a bit of a slash fest with a melee weapon or unarmed, it's satisfying but sometimes it does feel like "how fast can I click this left mouse button" sort of thing. However, since your attacks are underpinned by actual character stats, so with weak stats, it doesn't matter how well you button mash, you're probably still "lunch" to some monster.
One thing I'd like to concentrate on is the open endedness of the quests. The quests are cohesive enough to add a sense of plot and structure to the game without becoming a straight jacket - most are optional and many have different endings depending on your actions, and a fair few can have later repercussions that you hadn't thought about at the time. Admittedly, not as much as I'd actually like - some of the quest NPCs I really did want to continue to talk to in some meaningful manner because I enjoyed their dialogue and nature (particularly Jeanette and Therese Voerman and Gary Golden) and you get enough of a taste to appreciate them ... but not any more! Gah. The game is definitely crying out for a sequel set in the same area - but unlikely with the doom of Troika.
That brings me to the wealth of NPCs in Bloodlines - the voice acting is generally excellent and the responses are often very amusing or just very apt - your own character's possible responses vary widely and also become altered by certain skills - Intimidation, Persuasion and Seduction offer their own dialogue options when possible, not to mention the disciplines of Dominate and Dementation which can give you some rather "extreme" responses to situations!
The open endedness to the quests extends to the endgame, although without spoiling it too much, due to the rather boolean nature of the final quest object, there's not many ways that it could turn out. Ahh, well.
One thing that did irk me though - some stages of the game the difficulty factor/learning curve jumps markedly - you can progress to stages where you are quite incapable of achieving your objective and have no way of progressing to the next position without those abilities. I had to restart characters regularly because they couldn't get past certain sections. A wholly social character is going to be smacked around in a pure combat scene like the Sabbat warehouse, while a close mouthed mook may have issues talking through some quests. And yes, you don't want to hear about my stealth-less Brujah trying to blunder his way through the Nosferatu quests!
Due to these factors, you're going to have to be mindful of shaping your character from the beginning of what's going to happen next and be aware that some situations you may be weak to the point of completely pointless and adjust yourself accordingly before that happens.
A fairly solid game that will give you a run for your money - at the time there was a complete scarcity of decent action RPGs and Bloodlines definitely didn't leave gamers ... thirsting.