Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

This is a flawed, oftentimes clunky experience that can really pull you into its setting and characters. Though the patch that comes with the GOG edition fixes most of the quest bugs, many of the game's rough edges show during combat. Enemies can be hard to hit and frustrating to fight because of jerky animations and strange pathfinding. The combat, I feel, is at its best when you're facing off against other vampires who can use the same abilities you can, and who have decent pathfinding and AI. Unfortunately, vampire combat encounters are few and far between; most of the game will have you fighting human schlubs with unavoidable bullets (essentially a damage mitigating skillcheck rather than something that requires interesting gameplay to overcome) or super-glitchy booger men (I won't say more than that about them because it's a bit of a spoiler). Many of the maps are somewhat tricky to navigate, especially if you're easily lost like I am. Probably 2/3rds of the time playing this game I was lost, running around similar-looking maze-like corridors, They're not bland corridors, though, as there's a good amount of variety in the environments, which are very moody and often pretty, if a little one-note in tone (for the most part, there are two types of setpiece: spooky manor and spooky dungeon). Overall, though, it's some legendary devs doing what they do best. The tension between the characters and their factions is palpable, and the gameplay, in general, fits the story really well. The RPG mechanic of starting at Level 1 and without any equipment works well with the world here, as you play as a newly-turned vampire whose attributes and abilities develop as part of becoming familiar with your new supernatural life. Also, for anyone interested in the history and development of VALVe's game engines, as I am, it's an absolute must, as it uses the Source engine to create a game with a very different feel from something like Half Life 2.

Bloodlines is great provided that you use the Unofficial Patch. Excellent sound, great graphics, true RPG systems, replayability through the roof... hundreds of hours of fun.

With a lot of the bugs ironed out, this game really surprised me. The atmosphere is outstanding and the story is quite decent, even the little side missions add something. While the combat is a little ropey it can still be fun at times. I've replayed it several times and it's always captured me again.

While the graphics haven't aged amazingly well, the facial expressions are still good (better than some RPGs that "just work"), the art direction is quite good and the writing is absolutely on-top. What absolutely drags the game down is the combat, but most of the time there are ways to avoid it and when there are not, there are cheats to deal with the cheese. Even despite that, I will absolutely replay the game a couple more times, because the RPG elements are just that good.

Absolute favorite! Plot, writing, style, atmosphere - everything is marvelous!