First time playing through this after hearing so many rave reviews from people I respect and what I got was close to one of the worst experiences I've had playing a game. This game's writing is all over the place, ranging from horny dude-bros to great dialogue exchanges, and from well written lore dumps to racist caricatures and bad dialogue branch loops. Especially the first half in Santa Monica and once instance later on, the female NPCs are so clearly written by a dude that was actually off-putting to me - not to mention that the rewards for doing a sidequest for a Nosferatu are posters of these female characters in "sexy" poses that get put in your apartment. Would actually make sense for a Toreador NPC, of which there is 1, but everything is else is just needlessly horny, it's so f-cking dumb. Also one of the first dialogue choices you're given when talking to another female NPC later on is asking if she's 18 years old (???) Sound design is awful and all over the place as well, various games from around this time sound miles better, and while I know that the game had a troubled dev cycle, if you have a couple of dudes whose sole job is to do foley or do sound scripting for 3 years, it should sound better than this. I have a hight tolerance and like janky RPGs, but the level design is atrocious with long winded sewer levels with neverending enemies, confusing underground dungeon layouts and glitching enemies with awful forced combat or stealth throughout all of that. One of the things that made me want to play this is how a lot of people claim this is a lite immersive-sim or immersive-sim adjacent, I don't know what this even means after playing through the game. I have say this is the one thing that disappointed me the most. This game is an RPG through and through where your stats dictate your experience and nothing else. I tried killing a Vampire NPC and lure him out onto the street so the cops could kill him, and nothing happened - no reaction from any NPC. I tried so many times to find alternate routes in missions and even alternate choices to complete said missions but everything is tailored to be a strict RPG experience, you can't experiment if you don't have the proper stats. There is no 'sim' here, nothing about this game is close to being an immersive-sim experience. There is no room for any sort of experimentation if you do not have the stats for the thing you want to do. The atmosphere and music are great, the art team did a fantastic job! the lighting and colors used in the environment art as well as some outfits used by NPCs are all stellar. Visually I thought it had a well executed coherent vision. Those 2 things don't save the game for me unfortunately.
