Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption

Let me start with the things I liked, or at least that I thought were okay. The music was pretty okay. I actually still have some themes in mind after finishing the game. For example, I find Anezka’s theme to be pretty beautiful. I kinda enjoyed Christoff as a protagonist. The story, while not particularly groundbreaking was okay. I enjoyed the themes of damnation, Christof’s ruminations on the fate of his soul. There were also interesting themes of sacrificing innocence to save something else, or of commiting sin to stop someone else from commiting a sin. But the biggest problem I had with Redemption is that it was, easily, like 80% combat. Non-stop combat, through multiple level „dungeons”. With nothing to do in them, no books to read, no magical experiments to inspect, no puzzles. Just dozens upon dozens of enemies. I would say that if you’re making a crpg and create multiple-level dungeons with nothing but dozens of enemies in them, you’re doing something wrong. There’s zero exploration in the game – each location must be visited during the main plot, and in precise order to boot. There are also no additional sidequests or activities. Overall, though, the game was just dreadfully boring to me on account of being filled with endless combat. It is in my opinion exemplified by the Tremere Chantry. Here you have this headquarters of a magical clan of vampires, descendent from human mages. There’s so much potential for lore, for magic puzzles, for blood-curdling experiments, for tomes of lore and amazement. And there is nothing. Literally, you just go through 4 levels of the „dungeon” fighting all the time. I was majorly disappointed by Redemption, but if you want to see how I came to that conclusion, you can see me playing it blind on my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaYseRpjAjA&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWXFDI46P0Jr0C34g1qhXDma&index=1

I'm writing this review shortly after completing the game. Overall, I feel that I enjoyed the playthrough, but it I would have trouble recommending the game to someone else without any preexisting emotional attachment to the title. From a technical standpoint the game runs perfectly fine except for the lack of proper widescreen support. 50% of the in-game dialogs were performed with the camera centered of the speaker's torso, with head located completely offscreen. When it comes to story, I've seen some huge fans out there but for me it just "screamed" cheesy all over. "Better love story than Twilight", hmmm, not on this one. By far the most interesting idea was the dark ages to modern ages transition. My kudos for that one. Then there are some game design aspects. I tried playing for the first time some years after its original release and just failed massively at it. Fast forward 15 years and now I understand why things went so badly the first time. The game is not consistent with its difficulty: there are certain dungeons later on in the game in which the difficulty just ramps up exponentially. If by then you're not strong enough due to bad early choices, there's nothing you can do, because there's no enemies to farm XP. Even though the game might give you the idea that there are many character builds you can go for, in reality there are certain things you can't avoid due to the very aged AI of your party members. The hit/miss mechanics can be very punishing if the player takes its time to realize the importance of the dexterity attribute when playing a physically oriented character. The way your party members spam disciplines randomly attached to the frenzy mechanics will force you to limit their discipline options to low blood spells at the beginning. Since there are some discipline paths with a single discipline, those will be rendered useless early game because of blood costs. Nevertheless, if you have the emotional connections, do buy it and play it.

ONLY buy it if you can multitask. Great game, a bit slow at times, has a wonderful story and the visuals still hold up. Thing is though, there is one flaw - if you miss a book near the end of the first half of the game, as in the old ages, the game becomes incredibly harder further on. There's a set of skills in a book that help A LOT with the harder bosses. Other than that good upgrade system, good story, a bit of the points put in character are unexplained but you figure them out later on.

The biggest issue is your companion, they are useless and dying all the time. To enjoy the game you have to buy 15x blood pack for each one in your group, than you can play it without worry that any of them die in 10 seconds. Levels are repetetive and boring. Once you learn the frozen spell you are quite immortal.

The gameplay felt awful, the writing was bad, the graphics are dated, the navigation confusing (back when you needed IQ above cheese seeking rats). Seriously this is not a good game. It is amazing. It's one of the worst WoD games I ever played, the other game being VTMB which was straight amazing. I played this game--and beat it mind you, not a common thing for me or many others with backlogs these days--back in about 2017 so I have no nostalgia goggles. The AI is ATROCIOUS here, like hilariously so to the point it feels like one giant meme with half your party eating the other half and immediately panicking because your whole coterie just dumped their entire blood pools on...a single rat. The 5hp rat proceeds to eat the survivor. The level progression is the usual bad late 90s 1-2-3/boss fight stages and there is no map so you have to a complete map inside your head of each location to not get lost. Sadly, the most difficult to navigate is the very first one in Prague. OH. And the writing. Oh God the writing. Somehow whoever did the script decided that the best way to convey 14th century Prague would be to...write everyone with pseudo Shakespearrean dialogue. Because a turn of the 17th century English author is basically the same thing apparently. As for the story itself it is a pretty sappy love story minus the depth of Romeo and Juliet. I mean, it's bad enough that they even went so far as writing a fishmalk. All that being stated I actually enjoyed the game for some perverse reason. It has been pretty wellish received on here for a reason and it's not just because of nostalgia or something, or some misplaced love of VTMB--This Is Not VTMB. What you will find is an absolutely amazing soundtrack whose OST I listen to out of game sometimes, spoopy atmosphere, and just an otherwise really well crafted game in spite of its numerous glaring shortcomings, part of which I think is attributable to their faithfulness to the source material. Flawed but worth a play.