Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption

Alright so let me preface this review by sayingmy backgrounds in the world of darkness extend to the PC game VtM: Bloodlines. I felt that bloodlines treated the soucre material with respect while not stealing whole heartedly and including terrible ideas from the pen and paper games. That game was a great rpg, and blah blah blah. Anyway onto this redemption. This game came out in 2000 so i'll cut it slack in some places. First off this looks like a playstation era game, with models using always clenched fists, passable voice-syncing, and CGI cut scenes and sorta look like in game but not really. But this is fine, this came out around Deus Ex which shares a few of the graphical short falls. While voice-syncing is passable the voice acting is painful. The game takes place in the crusades (which i don't really remember taking place in Prague but okay) and everyone talks in "Old English" (tm) with nuns going "thee and thy, milord" its incredibly bad combined with the terminology of the World of Darkness (Cainites, Zombu, etc). Bloodlines eased you into this instead of giving you text dumps on unimportant names of lesser creatures you never meet. I guess the game jumps forever to present day New York at some point but the Crusade section is taking forever. Alright gameplay and the like. The UI takes up a good 1/4th of the screen. You have 4 character screens and the least helpful map i've ever seen. Oh and inventory tetris is back, this is manageable if the inventory takes up the whole screen but apparently it takes up the same amount of space as the UI. At least you can switch between party members with your inventories. Okay the most glaring flaws I suppose. This game wastes its source material, you get to play as a Brujah...thats it. Remember that PnP game Vampire where the draw of it was 10 or so unique vampire clans? Welp your brujah one of the more boring clans. It's not even an RPG. Its got all the things there for an RPG (A boring mine, a bunch of giant rats, swords) but none of the RPG elements, well except inventory management. Branching dialogue? Well, heres an example: A bishop told me to patrol the town at night, here are my options "I Agree" or "I Agree but I'm going to watch the church too". What? This is awful, i'm 2 hours into the game and their are no side quests? What is role-playing about this? Lastly The gameplay, forget the keyboard, everything is done with the mouse. click on a place to move awkwardly and get stuck on geometry, click an enemy to hit them once (yeah you gotta click a whole bunch). Left click to use spells and potions. Oh and the camera is stuck at this weird angle where you can only see the boring ground and 2 ft of a building, even though from some of the cut scenes the architecture looks pretty good on the church roof and such. In short this game is pretty bad, if you must play a vampire game, go deal with bloodlines whose's only flaw is the worst sewer level ever designed by man. Don't buy this unless its less then $5, even $6 feels like a waste of a dollar.

This game is utterly ruined by an awful combat system, a horrible camera, terrible AI, and a bunch of game breaking bugs, that's right, better have a lot of save files handy. The combat system is the absolute worst. Aside from "fighting" the camera, one click equals "one swing" so have a new mouse on hand because, because you are liable to break yours from all the frantic clicking. In addition to horrible combat design, it is also buggy as they come; so many times you will be frantically clicking/swinging and you won't be hitting the guy even though you are right next to him, many times you have to move over a bit just so your hits will start to land. Don't try to feed during combat because I find more times than not you will wind up feeding on a companion who needs blood even more than you! Smiths occasionally sell neckguards which I purchased for everyone, but i think that is only to protect you and companions from enemies feeding on you/them. I don't know where to begin with the camera, but there are so many other games where I wished for camera freedom like this, but somehow this game even messes up total camera freedom! I really, really tried to get into this game, the story and the acting and a few other aspects are very well done, which is only reason this is 2 stars and not 1 star. People whom are giving 5 star ratings must be using cheat codes, because there is no way this is even close to a "perfect" game! I got as far as Vienna where I am now stuck in this area, with sunlight everywhere and apparently I don't have good enough armor (couldn't even afford "good" armor for main guy at this point) it's because the quests are so linear there is absolutely no side quests or any way to "grind" for exp or money that I've found. This is one of the few games that have really, really gotten me angry and frustrated. It's not a good look for a 33 year old to be screaming at PC and slamming PC desk with fists over a stupid game.

I can only save my game once per slot and cannot overwrite previous saves. This is terrible. Do not buy.

Heh, I didn't realize there were two of them. This is sort of an action RPG, more actually like the combat in something like Resident Evil than Diablo.

I've only played this game for about half an hour and I played Bloodlines first but I can tell you that I already like this game better.