Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

Things that stood out to me in this game: voice acting, dialogue, story and atmosphere. First time playing it in 2020 and in my opinion it's aged quite well, even better than RPGs that came out around the time it did (ie: Oblivion). Facial animations in this game are surprisingly good. The music adds to the dark theme wonderfully too. Another great aspect to this game is the side quests, virtually every quest you do is completely different to the last and a lot of quests can be completed in a variety of different ways - keeps things interesting the whole way through. The game falls short with combat though. Very repetitive mouse clicking, brace yourself for carpal tunnel if you choose a melee route. In fact the combat is about the only thing I can say I didn't completely enjoy. Some people in the reviews have said they have issues running the game, however I didn't encounter a single crash in my 30 hr playthrough. There were a handful of bugs (the funny sort, nothing game breaking) but no crashes running it on Windows 7-64bit. Overall I think it's a must play for any RPG fan. If you enjoyed games like Deus Ex then you will love this, pick it up on sale and you will definitely get your moneys worth - it seems good for multiple playthroughs as you can choose different races and abilities each time.

I won't give a complete history over why this game is buggy; I believe other reviews already did this. I had VTMB on my wishlist for a solid year and recently decided to finally purchase it. From a technical perspective, this game is far from perfect. The combat is flawed and rather unresponsive. Although the game is supported by a massive community, there are still a lot of bugs that need you to reload from time to time (save early, save often). Fortunately, GOG provides the community patches to counter this issue as good as possible. Nonetheless, this game is great. The story, the characters, the setting; everything just works in a way that keeps you in front of your monitor. If you brush aside the fact that VTMB is 16 years old and not all mechanics aged as perfectly as you'd think, you'll be able to experience one of the best RPGs ever made.

SPOILERS in text. I see that recently people often tell, that the fighting is clunky and painful. Yep it is, if you have zero skill points in guns, or melee weapons. the final boss fight was easy as hell, because I had the machine gun and maxxed out skill for it. I did defeat it in less than 3mins because I did do ton of damage per bullet. Same goes for the part before that (japanese vampire clan), where if you are not sneaky, it will get significantly harder to finish. The game does not really make it easy goin in gun-ho, no skill and expecting to do everything in rambo style. But that is todays expectation, that the game gives you anything, just put something here and there. I remeber there was 1 tough fight near the beginning fighting a zombie and one near end fighting the werewolf, I did have some points in persuation and stealth, to the end I put a lot into guns. Played as Toreador clan member. took 10hrs to complete I think. The game is great, unofficial patches reveal a lot of stuff in the making, that was not in the OG game, and is a must, as it contains a lot of fixes as well. For me it was a ton of fun, hated the cemetery and the haunted house.

Classic

Bought this game at a discount bin in a game store years ago. It was so easy to engulf yourself fully into the atmosphere it created. It was a little buggy back then but I'm hoping this new updated version has sorted that out. I already pre-purchased the new Bloodlines coming out maybe this year so playing this older game should help me get back in shape.