One of the most underrated games ever

User Rating: 10 | Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption PC
For me, video games have always been all about the story. This game in my mind and heart is almost right up there with classics such as Gabriel Knight The Beast Within, as far as storytelling goes. It is, in a way, incredibly romantic, and the voice-acting is great, I can just feel the despair in Christof's voice about the curse that had fallen upon him...This will sound blasphemous to some, but in my opinion Redemption is more atmospheric than e.g. Fallout 1 or 2 or Baldur's Gate ever was. 2 things that are very important for immersing you into a game's story in my opinion, are the soundtrack and the voice acting, and Redemption delivers both in spades.
Graphics-wise, I think the game was very good for its time, and it still stands well today, with the exception perhaps of some of the animations (if you really want to nit-pick). If you absolutely must have state of the art graphics to show off your brand new Radeon 5870, this isn't the game for you. But I was never a graphics person, other things in a game were always more important to me,so your opinion might vary. A good thing is that its hardware requirements are ridiculous by today's standards, and almost anyone should be able to play it maxxed out with no problems.
The gameplay is good, typical party-based action RPG with few annoyances in NPC AI perhaps. The only real problem was the absence of a save-anywhere system, which was fortunately fixed with the 1.1 patch.
The Gamespot review states that "the characters and story are forgettable". I am sorry, but I strongly disagree... You are telling me that the characters in Fallout 3 or Oblivion, to name but a few so-called "class A" RPGs, are more memorable than e.g. Pink? Please...And the story? In almost all games, we have to save the world from aliens or mutants or some virus or some crazy genius wanting to take over, I am sick of it! In Redemption, the core of the story is the forbidden love of a crusader with a beautiful nun, who then turns into what he fought and hated all his life, a creature of darkness!...if there is one thing the story should be praised for, is its originality more than anything else.
So to wrap it all up, if you 're looking for a game to really draw you into it's story and make you feel things rather than just look at pretty graphics (which is the case in 99% of the games coming out today), you must play this game.