Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

Aside from miscellaneous Source jank, it is a lot of fun. You get to feel sneaky snakey.

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Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines was the send off of Troika games. Set in the tabletop RPG Old World of Darkness setting of Vampire the Masquerade, this game takes the best of VtM's deep setting, pairs it with a great story, great voice acting, and a game that is that rarity among RPGs, very replayable. I've had the game on Steam for a few years and have logged about 300 hours into it. It's an engaging storyline that is a quite different game depending on both your clan choice, and many of your in-game decisions. Do yourself a favor and buy it. Just remember to download and install the Unofficial Patch, which fixes a lot of the out of the box bugs, adds a lot of new content, and makes things all the better.

Bloodlines is a vastly over-rated game. It is not terrible, but it is also not a masterpiece. It's just alright. Bloodlines does have a few exceptionally great missions, such as a haunted house, a mansion that its owner turned into an insane asylum, and a series of death traps in which a guy experiments on you in order to discover what it takes to kill a vampire. However, such unique & creative missions are few. What Bloodlines has a whole lot more of are mediocre & garbage missions. By the last third of the game, it seems like the developers had stopped trying. Instead of making interesting levels like the ones I've mentioned, the last third of the game mostly consists of the exact same hallways and rooms copy & pasted together over and over again hundreds of times. The worst & most hated example is the sewer levels called Nosferatu Warrens (even lovers of this game hate those levels and ask for a way to skip them). Endlessly copy & pasted in-game assets are also combined with really stupid & aggravating puzzles. For example, one puzzle requires you to pull a lever, then run and jump into a river and swim through it as quickly as possible. If your timing is off by more than half a second, you lose, and have to start again. Let's move onto the combat: it is abysmal. The previous Masquerade game - called Redemption- has vastly better combat gameplay than Bloodlines. If you know how to play, then the play control of Redemption is silky smooth. In contrast, Bloodlines has awkward & clunky controls that wreck all of the combat gameplay: your character responds sluggishly to every order you give him/her. Superficially, Bloodline's combat resembles the BloodRayne games. But BloodRayne is another vampire game that has silky smooth play control. Bloodlines' play control is simply horrendous. Story-wise, the player character in Bloodlines is terrible. He/she has zero personality, zero voice-acting, and receives zero character development.

Unfinished system painting, A diamond that has grit and dirt stuck to it, little rocks of annoyance, bottle rocket that starts and stops until it bursts into quick lightning that abruptly ends like nothing happened. "Let's add this level, and this level, hahah it's going to be so good." Just add stuff to the crimson tower...