I don't think anyone shut them down, they just ran out of cash for payroll. I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone owned them.

Playing as anything other than a Malk is just not acceptable if you ask me ;)

It really wasn't their fault. :)

Activision wanted the game out as soon as possible, kept rushing the dev team, and didn't really support them financially as they expected.

Valve kept updating their Source engine, and nearly each week were sending them a new updated version. This was constantly messing up something with the game, in a sense that the devs would make something work, then Valve would change how that works, and then the devs would need to again make that thing work with these new changes.

Wrong decisions were made on all sides. I remember reading that Troika were working on a multiplayer part of the game, but with the constant updates to the Source engine and the nonexistent financial support, they had to cut that out.

They even made the 1.2 patch after they got shut down.

I'm a bit weird and prefer new, but thanks.

Bloodlines was the first Troika game I played and oddly enough I never experienced a bug and got through 80-90% of the game. I was very disappointed when I found out it got terrible reviews due to bugs. The only other game I know that I loved but got horrible reviews lthat comes to mind was Shadowrun on the genesis and that was probably because the reviewers didn't understand what kind of game it was. I looked at the game developer and told myself that one day I would play their other games and was delighted when I found out about gog, and have since bought them here.

Bloodlines gameplay is quite a bit different from Redemption (I mean one is 1st/3rd-person view while the other is isometric) but if you like Redemption chances are you'll love Bloodlines, so yeah I recommend you to get Bloodlines and play it with fan patch as mentioned above: http://www.patches-scrolls.de/vampire_bloodlines.php