Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

Forget Twilight. Vampires are abominations and theirs is a World of Darkness. No kiddy stuff here. "Feeding" on prostitutes and the homeless. Flesh sculpting warlocks shooting snuff films. Hospital orderlies selling blood from captive living "cans". Vampiric psychiatrists experimenting on mental patients. Sending ghost reality show crews to cannibalistic succubi. Making innocent damsels into thralls. Haunted houses (!). And dark humor. VTM:B elevates "sleaze" into an art form. You will forgive and forget that the combat is a bit rough around the edges.

Important notice: FFS patch BEFORE playing! Bought my original copy back in 2004. Wasn't able to find it after moving a few times, bought again on GOG. Do yourself a favour and patch BEFORE playing! I still love this game and I don't even like vampire stuff. Yes, it's flawed. It has massive, without updates even game-breaking, bugs. Yes, it is lacking lots of features that should have been implemented. Do I care? No, since the patches make it playable and the biggest missing feature is the multiplayer which I don't care about at all. Did I mention to patch BEFORE playing? So what is the game like? It's basically an FPS masquerading as an RPG but with quite a nice story about a dysfunctional society of vampires which ends in a flurry of backstabbing. It's based upon White Wolf's RPG of the same name. The graphics are outdated of course, the mechanics can be aggravatingly clunky during close combat but the overall atmosphere of the game is great. The patch! Install it BEFORE playing! You've got many different vampire bloodlines to choose from and I would recommend playing all of them at least once. The story doesn't change dramatically but NPCs' reactions differ based upon to which vampire clan your character belongs. Also, every clan has its own range of vampiric powers in addition to the ones available to all vampires. Seriously, patch BEFORE playing! Overall, I have to say that while it may very well be that I'm speaking out of nostalgia, no other game has ever managed to keep me coming back timt and time again over the course of... wow, it's been 18 years by now! Long story short, if it's on sale and an FPS/RPG with a good story and multiple endings sounds appealing to you, you should give it a try. And do patch BEFORE playing.

Absolutely amazing game, part of the Immersive Sim type of games (think Deus Ex, System Shock, Dishonored, BioShock, etc.). Yes, when Vampire Bloodlines released it was a mess with bugs and missing content, but that is all sorted now. It is a masterpiece of game design and mood setting with awesome gameplay and deep RPG mechanics making full use of the awesome Vampire - The Masquerade licence. Troika (a legendary developer) was under such pressure with Vampire Bloodlines, but they still managed to create a timeless masterpiece that has stood the test of time.

This game was very ambitious, trying to capture the essence of the world of darkness at its peak. Unfortunately it was published in a semi-finished state, with some bugs and some of the content left out. Thanks to the amazing work of WESP5, the game was not only finished and polished up to the state it deserves to be in, but it was significantly improved. I recommend always getting the latest unofficial patch when playing this game, it makes a huge difference. There are some mods. It's not as straightforward as some newer games, but it's surprisingly easy. Essentially you have the big mods that are the game versions - for example you might play the Vanilla (patched) version or the Extended Version or the Clan Quest Mod version or one of the CompMod version, the list goes on. These are essentially total conversions, they generally keep the structure of the game, and the main quests, but they add new locations, content, clans, and so forth. You can have as many versions of the game installed as you like, they have their own individual override folders and when you launch the game, you can pick which version to play each time. Then there are the small cumulative mods like aesthetics, new models, lighting, textures, music, voices, essentially anything that is not the structural part of the game, these you can easily mix&match. You fancy playing a character based on a famous vampire from a TV show ? There's probably a mod for that, just drop the model and texture files into the right game versions's folder and voilà. 10/10 for immersion, the game balance is not perfect (some attributes & skills are more impactful than others, for example in the base game Persuasion is 100% more impactful than Haggle, some game versions change this for example TFN shifts this focus a bit), the story is surprisingly engaging even on replays. A lot of players replay this game every year like on Halloween. Maybe as a tribute to how good games used to be, maybe just to have some fun...

The review is 4 stars with a caveat. I definitely recommend playing Bloodlines however since it was pushed out and released with errors and bugs and issues and still had some issues even after it's first official patch I highly recommend downloading the unofficial patch by Wesp5 which as of March 22, 2016 is on version 9.5 I will give a list of what I feel are the pros and cons of the game without the unofficial patch because I have not played it with the unofficial patch by Wesp5. Pros: 1. Excellent story with quests having multiple solutions. 2. Multiple Endings 3. Different Vampire Clans give you different abilities and other characters will react differently based on which clan you chose and so you can choose the clan that fits your play style. 4. Decent character creator not very in depth but does give you the options to choose your gender. 5. Different outfits for the different clans and also the outfits for the clans change depending if you are male or female. 6. Level up system for every quest you will get skill points which you can spend on abilities and attributes. 7. The Masquerade system makes you feel like being a vampire because you can not use some skills in public. 8. The musical score and the licensed soundtrack give a both a listen on youtube. 9. Multiple hub areas each with a different feel. 10. Conversation system pretty in depth and gives you options to seduce, intimidate, and persuade also depending on humanity level dialogue will change to either be more evil or friendly. 11. Great voice acting. 12. Jeanette 13. Playing as a Malkavian which I highly recommend for a second play through. Cons 1. Combat can be a bit frustrating at times and using guns and aiming in first person does not work well. 2. Hub areas are not as lively as they could be. 3. Graphical glitches. 4. Rather linear story despite having multiple hubs. 5. Sometimes hard to heal in the middle of combat. I am sure there are some more cons.