Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York

In spite of the bad user reviews I had high hopes for this one. Even if it's just a VN: a VN set in the World of Darkness should still be a pretty great experience, right? Especially with all those nice illustrations that you can see on the screenshots, right? So, I'm not very experienced with VNs but by the standards of the ones I've played this is not a good one. It does not have voice overs, it has no illustrations for action scenes, it has no facial expressions, characters are only on screen while they are "talking" (nobody on-screen while you're choosing actions), there are even very few sounds. That's a disappointingly low level of quality. What's worse, though, is that I don't think that the writing is great either. The style of the writing is fine, I guess, but all in all the game is just so very emo and mundane - the world is neither as morbid nor as colourfully weird as what we know from Bloodlines or even Redemption. In fact, the game puts an active effort into making the vampire world seem mundane and boring. The main plot isn't particularly interesting either - you start as a pawn and end as a pawn in a plot that doesn't feel like it has any gravity nor is it very clever. The optional subplots are a bit interesting, I guess, but small and simple. Finally it's one of those VNs that have hints of systemic gameplay. There's time progression which limits the number of actions you can perform per night, there's a blood level that determines your available choices and you're seemingly building up one of the titular coteries. "Seemingly" because that whole thing goes nowhere. The blood level had potential but those contextual choices don't matter that much and there's no actual management involved in staying fed. The time progression doesn't really matter - it means that you won't be able to do everything in a single playthrough but those optional things appear to have no real connection to the main plot anyway. All in all it's sadly very disappointing.

Don't buy this game, even if you're a fan of visual novels. The game doesn't have any skipping, saving or reloading. You know, those things that are included in even the most low budget shovelware anime VNs. The game also has a boatload of bugs. I've experienced cases where I could use abilities that my clan did not possess, as well as the game flat out skipping sections for no logical reason. The story has some nice ideas and a fair share of dramatic moments, it's just borderline unplayable due to the lack of features and the abundance of bugs. How did this game release in this state? TL;DR: Don't buy this. It lacks the basic features of a VN and it's riddled with gamebreaking bugs.

If you like spending $20 on a melodramatic picture book about edgy vampires, boy do I have the game for you.

What I want to say first: I really enjoyed the game – the atmosphere, music, interesting characters, text component, and most of all - the artwork, this was awesome indeed. But it was so entertaining until I saw the ending, and not because the game was over but HOW it ended. All joy from walkthrough faded when I realize there is no way I can affect the storyline or character’s fate. I was looking forward to interesting finale and subsequent walkthroughs by other clans with different choices and variations in dialogs. And I didn’t get it. The ending remains the same no matter of your actions. There is only one variety – every walkthrough you choose which stories of few secondary characters you want to experience (you can’t choose them all during one game). It’s a pity, I expected something more than just a reading of an interesting text, especially since the genre declared as RPG, I think they should indicate another, the game is really good as visual novel.

The title sums up this game. What content is present is pretty good and does the job of getting you into the World of Darkness. Sadly, that is where it ends. Your choice of clan changes little, your choice in action changes little, nothing you do really changes anything. At it's most basic, you only have 2 choices in the game: Final Death or Get Railroaded