Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

I cannot say enough how much I love this game. Right off the bat though, let me say YOU HAVE TO PATCH THIS GAME. Don't let the fact that you need to go to Wesp5's Unofficial Patch (or the other one I don't use, I hear it works fine though, make your own choice) to make the game playable dissuade you though. Seriously, this game is immersive. The sounds of the city, of the wind, of the TV and radios that play different things depending on how you play the game, the unforgettable characters. What's your relationship with Heather like? How hard do you laugh at Fat Larry, how do you feel about Nines and Tung and those Sisters in the club? Do you want to demolish puny mortals with your spells? Do you want a game where the number of people you kill doesn't effect your experience points so you can actually just Obfuscate (magical stealth) past a dozen guards before killing their leader from behind with a fire ax while laughing like a lunatic? Do you just want to rage through moving ten times as fast as any mortal, his bullets whizzing through the space you were what seems like minutes before? My God, I've played through this game a dozen times and it never really gets old. Yes, the end is a bit of a grind with a bunch of combat, but by then you are invested as hell at seeing the ending. Play each clan... a couple times. Just play and immerse yourself (preferably at night with the lights off). Once you've beaten it a couple times you'll put it down... until someone mentions it on reddit or something and you'll play again. Even writing this review means that I'm going to play this again. Tonight! Maybe a Malkavian playthrough again (maybe not a good first time playthrough, FYI, but do what you want). This game is worth $20. Hell, it's worth $50, IMO. I'm buying it from GOG even though I originally bought it on Steam. Because DRM free might not normally be worth it to me. But for this game? Hell to the yes.

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines is, was, and shall be an amazing game (so long as it is/was/will be used with the unofficial patch). It defined some of the best gaming experiences in my teenage years, and is definitely worth purchasing. There is however a potential problem in the gog.com release. The unofficial patches "Basic" version is included from the moment of the game being installed, according to gog.com. This may render it incompatible with some of the best community content that this game has (And believe me, it has a lot... on top of this, the majority of the full-game mods add amazing things to the game, acting almost like an expansion pack to the Unofficial Patch Plus). If there isn't already a way to install the game with only the final Troika-Created Official Patch installed on top of it (not the unofficial patch) a lot of those mods (Such as Clan Quest Mod, The Final Nights, and Camerilla Edition) may be subject to extremely severe and possibly crash-inducing or game-breaking bugs due to leftover files from the Basic Patch included in this release- If they install at all. Furthermore, this may prevent you from installing the newer releases of the unofficial patch until gog.com updates the files on their end- Instructions on it say that you have to apply each version to a clean install of VTMB, making updates require a reinstall for the core game in the steam version. Hopefully I am writing this in vain and there's already a version downloadable on gog.com that does not include the unofficial patch in any capacity, since access to the best content on planet vampire (which kept operating thanks to a very dedicated moderator nabbing the IGN version before it disappeared and hosting the files on a server at his expense) depends on having a clean copy patched only to the last official, dev-created patch. I don't think this is the case, though, and the "Final Nights" Author has been warning people to avoid this release if they plan on using his mod.

I finished my 55 h, full playthrough of the game. It is a great content-wise, only the plot and some minor lore implications suck, especially if you know about Jewish mythology and make the connection Pisha=Pizna aka Lilith. Besides that lore black hole, the gameplay consists of most fun I have ever had with a video game besides The Saboteur. Bloodlines gives a much more pleasant and broader introduction to the VTM formula than Redemption did, though Redemption was more comprehensive in demonstrating the lore, e.g. different vampire types and their creations. In comparison, Redemption has multiple communities of Tzimisce for players to rampage through whereas Bloodlines had one Tzimisce mage named Andrei. Nevertheless, I would play Bloodlines 9 times out of 10 over Redemption as its gameplay is light years ahead. You aren't shackled to being a nice guy. Well, the game practically forced me to dump a ton of exp points into hacking, security aka lockpicking and persuasion and some other utility feats just to progress in the game, which is silly considering that the player is supposed to be a powerful 8th generation vampire. Only at the very end did I have spare points to dump into the stuff I actually wanted to have. I played UP 10.0 and there was only one gamebreaker bug: trying to melee an unkillable teleporter vamp (Hallowbrook Hotel) with a katana always made my game hang if that enemy scored a glitchy counter-hit right before teleporting. The voice acting is nothing special despite the big name casts, especially when compared to the situational hilarity of the character dialogue in messed up situations. For example, a totally-not-a-demon flesh-eater moralizing the player about the necessity of death. You see, that broad never wipes the blood juices off her face when he says that stuff. I digged the hammed-up acting e.g. the bum. The side quests are fun and at times the game rewards you for being a total d--k e.g. the cover girl quest. Act failed to kill the game.

Perfect game about the vampires. One of the best RPGs I played. Even after so many years still very fresh. And bloody :). Thank you GOG for this wonderful title!

This game surprised me. It's semi-open world, first/third person adventure game, with an occassional fourth wall breaking dialog line and a lot of player choice. If you've played the first Deus Ex, it's a lot like that, but instead of being about nanites, it is about vampirism. Not the cheesy kind of vampirism either; instead it focuses on the concept of what would the modern world be like if there were vampires about. The Masquerade is fundamentally about preventing humanity from declaring all out war on vampires. It makes sense and I like it. Wish I played this game a decade ago.