Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

Back in the days, I loved the original tabletop game. And when Redemption came out? MAN, I was instantly in love with it. The dark streets of old Prague, “modern” London and, as the main dish, the ability to drink blood. Sure, it wasn't the first game to do that (everybody should remember at least Blood Omen), but with all that fancy 3D and atmosphere-oriented gameplay, it was just way too special. Obviously I've waited for Bloodlines. One of my biggest complains about the Redemption was the fact that player never actually had a choice. He was forced to join Brujah clan, while yours truly always had a soft place for Toreador guys. Anyway, Bloodlines came out and... I hated it. With passion. Sure, character creation was there and it wasn't that bad. The problem is – the game itself was unbearable. And not because it was REALLY buggy, but because the game felt lacking and level design was absolutely horrible. See, Bloodlines is a small game. Don't expect it to offer huge levels to you. But at the same time it can confuse the heck out of you so you can spend a lot of time just wandering between some annoying pipes, trying to figure out how they work. The game also doesn't have enough optional stuff. Sure, Redemption didn't have optional quests at all, but see, there's a big difference between the games with no proper character customization and the games with full character customization. Bloodlines feels like there's just not enough room to use your powers. And it sure isn't Planescape: Torment. Which means that nobody cares that you're a good talker. You'll still need to shoot. A LOT. And that's my biggest problem. The game doesn't really bring FPS element to RPG genre. It brings RPG element to FPS and ruins it. At the end, Bloodlines feels a lot like a bad FPS with many uncomfortable details that don't even feel at home here. Mix it with lack of optional quests, small maps and horrible level design, and you'll get it why I've never ever liked this game.

For new players such as me I got lost a lot, but then again a lot of areas that the quests listed were easy to get to so it wasn't all bad. Also, and I know people won't like my viewpoint, and that's ok. But this game got tedious and boring real fast, at least it did for me. However, I did like most of the story, music, npcs, and locations. But this comes at a cost of most of the quests consisting of fetch quests and somewhat passable gameplay, although, the compat in this game does show it's age. So since it's an older game I can give it some leeway for that. On top of all this I was often frustrated going through long sections of levels and backtracking, because the game does not help you one bit. I know someone is gonna say, "You need a game to hold your hand, haha, little baby." Yes I understand your viewpoint, but at the very least they could have added a hint on where certain things are (Yes I know they gave you hints, but not always when a quest updates), or they could have added a minimap system back in 2004. This was possible on Postal 2 (2003), so I would think it would be possible to add it. Besides all that there are enjoyable moments, but this is far from a perfect game in my opinion.

I played for about two hours and it was ok, I guess. aside from the jank extremely goofy animations. It only autosaves very sporadically, and I lost very close to an hour of progress because the elevator in the tutorial decided I wasn't moving fast enough to get out when it opened. So it closed. No ability to open back up the door on the panel. No ability to go back up and try again. It refused to open. Well, I refuse to replay that hour. Refund requested. I would think this much vaunted unofficial patch would get things like that. What a waste.

BORING

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