Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption

This is truly one of the best games in my life.

Sadly on Win10 the game becomes too dark with the brightness slider not working. It is impossible to navigate the mines at the start of the game, even with a torch. There are compatibility workarounds and directx emulation things you can do, but you have to figure out how and put the work in to make the game playable.

I remember finishing this game back when it came out and the most I can remember is the disappointed feelings. I loved Diablo-style gameplay , loved the lore of this game, loved the settings spanning the centuries, loved vampires... this should have been amazing, but it really fell short for me and just kept getting worse the more I played it. It starts strong and at the beginning the game really grabs you. But it keeps repeating the formula way too much. The gameplay is just crawling through dungeons and killing enemies and it starts to get tiring in the end. I think the two biggest reasons for this for me were the story and the weapons and combat. After the beginning the story starts getting more and more sparse, as if they didn't really have the time to invest into it as much in the beginning when they were grabbing you with it. Alone this wouldn't be enough to sink the game, if the mechanics of the endless combat were good. But I remember how broken the weapon balance was. The best weapons I got in the game were actually the blades and medieval weapons that you receive in the first time period in the game. If you grab something good in there, you have no reason to ever upgrade after that, because what you receive later seemed to be completely inferior. Firearms? Assault rifles? Forget it. They miss all the time and your best bet is still the rusty blade you got at the start. So what you end up having later in the game is stale story that gets told more and more lazily; no need to upgrade your weapons, meaning no need to change/improve your character in any way, leaving only endlessly repeating combat with no rewards. I finished it, but it wasn't so good.

I love everything about old games like this - from the janky graphics to the awkward controls to the bad voice acting. None of it matters because the gameplay is just so much fun for my older gamer sensibilities, arguably more so than modern games. The lack of streamlined everything is incredibly refreshing. I've just finished the intro and am about to embark on adventures with a new party member, and I am SO looking forward to it.

Graphics suck, even for the time period it was released, combat is horrible, monsters are laughable. Just to briefly list a few things.