Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption

I just finished the game in a little over 20 hours, overall I really enjoyed it. Start in the dark ages of Prague and Vienna and end up in modern London and New York. Great atmosphere and interesting story progression, it's a shame it lacks so much polish much like it's successor Bloodlines. I'd recommend installing the latest 3rd party patch to fix the dialogue scenes and some other fixes (just google latest patch it should be an easy install). GOG might have even included the latest patch since this review? You will need to refer to an online guide from time to time as all the stat and skill information was inside the book that came with the game. It's a great game but i give 3/5 stars because the AI is barely functional.

It's a janky mess, but it served to introduce me to WoD and it was an enjoyable hack & slash with great music.

Get this, then grab the unofficial patch (6.7 at the time of this writing) to fix a slew of bugs and optionally add some extra content the devs hadn't finished before the game's original release. It's amazing how long the community has supported this game and modded it, but if you give it a try you'll get an idea of why they have. I docked a star for the bugs in the officially patched version of the game. In my eyes, the unofficial patch adds the fifth star. On the game itself, the pluses: - Player choices affect quest outcomes and ending - Several "clan" options - RPG elements and clan choices support decent range of play styles - Good replayability - Good story - Satisfying melee combat Minuses: - Buggy without unofficial patch - Ranged combat feels weak and clumsy - RPG elements not very balanced (some abilities are much more powerful than others) - While most quests can be completed with more than one approach, some story junctures require a character be at least moderately competent in combat (so a purely social character is difficult at best)

I like it's atmospere much. But the biggest pleasure of playing it was at medieval times.

I had to give it four stars rather than 3 for just a good rating, the extra star is for the storyline. It makes you forgive the GRAND departure from the PnP version. I used this to intro my wife to the whole World of Darkness genre. She played this before Bloodlines and it was a good setup for it. She still chuckles at "Pissed off Christoph". All in all a good game that could have been better, but still appreciable on it's own. Plus the toolbox to create your own chronicle is handy. For the price, it's worth it. Now if you have not played Bloodlines, do yourself a favor and get that too. It's too bad that this world is now defunct. There was so much potential left.