Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

This game surely had more potential in the design process than it demonstrated. For starters, it's a major improvement over its predecessor, "Vampire: The Masquerade--Redemption" (except that it still has a ridiculously cumbersome name), while using similar interesting RPG elements borrowed from the book-based RPG game series. The biggest improvement is the 1st and 3rd person views. Unfortunately, this is undermined by the fact that combat with melee weapons or fists can't occur in 1st person, and gun combat doesn't seem to be possible in 3rd person. Speaking of gun combat, ALL enemies, even humans, take a tremendous amount of ammo to kill, even when using a shotgun; this is utterly ridiculous, and was the ultimate dealbreaker for me. Prior to that, I was putting up with fairly small game areas and a fairly linear way of playing. The graphics were adequate enough to immerse me, and of course I kept its year or release in mind; but I've seen open world games from the same time period done better. It is NOT an open world game. Spells sucked; most of the time, they weren't worth using at all, if I could. Feeding sucked (pun intended). Stealth sucked; I was supposed to be able to sneak up on people, but it failed too often with no clear explanation as to why. Dialogue was great, and the addition of goth music with people dancing hard to it at the Asylum club was also quite cool to see. But pumping five shotgun blasts at close range into non-vampire enemies before they died (not sure if I ever chose a difficulty level) was just too stupid and killed my suspension of disbelief to the point at which I'd had enough. Don't pay more than $3 for this title.

I played this for almost 30 hours and I'm giving up on it. I was expecting a game that would at least let me somehow avoid the most difficult encounters, so I poured points into my persuasion skill, only to find it mostly useless, as the game frequently railroaded me into situations where I was forced to deal with its abysmal combat system. And to call this game's combat "clunky" would be a compliment. If it were merely "clunky", I'd still like the game overall. But unfortunately, it's pretty confusing and scales terribly as the game progresses, eventually becoming impossibly hard. Enemies get stuck in geometry, sometimes becoming invincible, sometimes bugging out so they don't even attack. At its best, the combat is merely uninspired--as far as I can tell, there's not really any strategy or tactics one can use to get "better" other than pouring points into various stats to actually hurt enemies. Even some puzzles are inscrutable; at one point I just started pressing my "use" key on every object in the area and somehow made it through, but I have no idea what my actions were supposed to mean in the game's world. The stealth in this game is also weird. The game's tutorial makes stealth impossibly hard, but once you've put some points into it, it's ridiculously easy to the point that you can be standing in front of an enemy in a well-lit room and they still won't see you. All that said, the story and voice acting is pretty good, so I guess one can play it for that--but at that point you might as well just watch a video of the whole thing.

The bugs and combat soured me on Bloodlines, and I don't think the writing is very good, either. I know that vampires are intrinsically corny, and you can't ever completely escape that, but still, it felt like I was playing a game written and designed by the goth kids from South Park. I can appreciate how Bloodlines anticipated lots of later, and now mainstream, design ideas. For that, it deserves credit, and with more development time, funding, and polish, who knows what could've been. Lots of squandered potential here.

I've had this game on my wishlist for a while and have read some good reviews for it. Apparently, it's one of the best rpgs of all time. Well, after playing it, it's one of the worst I've ever played. The story is mediocre at best, the combat is awful with some stupid boss fight mechanics, the world is very small and doesn't offer much to explore, and some of the final levels are literally mazes that you have to traverse through, with a bunch of enemies to get in your way. I honestly don't see where all the hype for this game is coming from. Even though I bought this game on sale, the 14 hours I spent on it felt like wasted time.

As with Sim City 3000, as soon as I launch the game, it minimises itself and keeps doing so whenever I try to restore it.