Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

Bloodlines has its roots in a pen and paper RPG system called World of Darkness. The basic premise of WoD is that it's a world much like ours, but something went wrong. The streets are a little bigger, the angles are a little more crooked, life holds a little less value, and terrible once-human beasts beyond Salvation lurk in the shadows of the fringes of society. World of Darkness has the issue where the RPG books are written in a way of goth/punk ubercoolness, but the RPG in play with a group unfortunately usually turns into horror super heroes or struggle sessions (Wraith, I am looking at you.) Bloodlines thankfully strives to remain faithful to the coolness of the core texts, but ends up leaning hard into the vampire super heroes. Troika had the issue of their reach exceeding their grasp, so much so that it's taken like 15 years? of unofficial patching to get it into a realized state. There are 7 clans. Two social clans, two combat clans, a mage clan, a stealth clan, and a comedy gimmick clan that's best for a 2nd playthrough, however, you can build your characters any way you want to. The game's plot largely plays out a certain way, but for most of the game you're given a lot of freedom to solve quests as you see fit, with a fairly decent degree of reactivity. What this game has in spades is atmosphere. The environments are fun to explore and the moody music really makes you feel a part of the urban decay dolor. The character graphics haven't aged too well, but they're done in a rather cartoony stylized way that doesn't make it as bad had they tried for full realism. The voice acting is absolutely superb. Combat stinks, which wouldn't honestly be so bad, but the last 20% of the game is just pure mindnumbing wave combat. The game has issues that can't easily be solved even with the mighty efforts of Wesp5. Troika was like a shooting star, leaving three brilliant but supremely flawed games in their wake. No game did vampire politics better than VTMB. 5/5

I don't care about Vampires and anything related to Vampires. What I care about is atmosphere, charisma, good writing and a good story. This game got it. You absolutely don't need to be into occult to love this game. The music is great. The characters are very varied, charismatic, smart, sexy and outstanding voice acted and written. You will see the life and death of the cities where beauty and horror collide (sounds cheesy but I think that fits pretty well). The less you know about the game the better. Anything you know before playing through it the first time would ruin a lot of the many side stories. Just keep in mind that the game is not for kids. It contains snuff. The game has a perfect ending, even thought there are multiple endings. But the main ending shows the big reveal, which is a nice end for the story, without taking away from anything else in the game. As said before the game is best played without ANY spoilers, and only the original story fix patch. There are some patches which add additional content, I prefer the original game. Because the added content doesn't fit that well to the rest of the world. This games world is so fantastic that I would love it to replace the real world. Play the game undisturbed in a good athmosphere alone.

This game is simply a must have for anyone who likes Action/RPG. The only thing i didn´t like is the way characters moves. This game has a dark atmosphere, is comic sometimes, depressive, scary, violent, sexy, crazy, among other things. Music in this is problably the best ever!!! There´s a multitude of interesting characters. Gameplay is assorted, so you don´t get tired. Many pathcs from the community. Nice times playing.

This my be my favorite RPG that is single-player of all time. Make sure to look for the patch that adds in cut content, but the GOG version includes the one patch that fixed all the at-release bugs, and even though I played the game originally with all those bugs, it has stuck in my mind since early 2005 as my favorite RPG of all time, and perhaps my favorite video game. It is worth multiple playthroughs as different clans, since so much can be different, as well as the usual RPG ability to make different choices that change the future of your game that run. I only wish the studio had held together so that I could buy a dozen copies to fund their next title.

I love this game, this is one of the games that stuck with me when I was younger, I always thought about it, I always think deeper about the lore. Its just so good and there is nothing I want more then to shove it into others peoples faces screaming 'play it!! play it noooow' Please for all that is holy and unholy, play this game, if it is buggy get the patch from online it is worth it.