Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

VTMB has the best atmosphere in games like it, the city streets are all unique and a breath of fresh air (I really liked Hollywood), it's almost hard to believe this is running on the same engine that Half-Life 2 is on, the dialogue is also really well written, which is always a plus. Only thing that kind of bugged me was the janky combat and the balancing for it, especially in the late game, which gets you killed if you forget to bring lots of supplies, the skill tree is a deciding factor if you live or die and you have to choose a class to use most of the time and stick with it (Guns, Melee or your special abilities) otherwise you'll be weak in the late game. It's also still quite buggy but most bugs can be fixed easily using the console or in the case of the AI pathing bug, you just have to remove all .ain files from /maps/graphs to fix this.

Kinda, undeniably unique game, theres nothing like this out there afaik. Has lots replayability.

Playing in 20 years after release I was surprised how much this held up. Atmosphere, music and some of the social aspects are extremely great, you even have solid dialogue animations for most NPCs. The first third of playing this game I was floored and surprised that there have been very limited spiritual successors... Then you get into level 3/5 of the Hollywood Sewers and its still going. Combat is bad and most of the boss battles are as well. Starts to show issues at around the half-way point and the last few hours are just dungeon after dungeon with little to no respect for the levels you put into social skills or your decisions that were so rewarding in the first parts of the game. Some characters are great, others just jiggle at you in a pandering way that shows its age slightly. Overall I still liked this game with its warts and I am starting to think that the upcoming sequel cant tarnish this game as much as it did itself. Even just ending slides would have improved quite a bit on this. Its on sale often enough that if you have a fairly quiet week you can beat the game in about 25 hours and have fun during most of it. If nothing else it will make you look for a World of Darkness tabletop group to join as the setting is extremely rich.

For a game in the early 2000's, this one is pretty good. I have to admit there would be no way I would've played this as a kid--much too young at the time, so glad I can come back and play this now. Especially since GOG's version comes with the patch that literally makes it playable, I recommend getting it from GOG for that exact reason. Still has some audio clipping and issues here and there, but still very worth your time if you're a fan of VtM at all!

Everytime you mention it someone re-installs it