Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

"You're a fresh fledging brought into the underworld of Los Angeles, will you sink or swim?"

After a night of poor judgement, you find yourself a bit better for the wear. After a crash course of impromptu training, you find out that the critters that bump in the night are real and you've just become one of them.

Set in a contemporary Los Angeles, this RPG allows you to choose from a variety of vampire clans some of which that vastly change how you play the game. The Nosferatu are deformed and monstrous in appearance, and because of this, you'll have to avoid being seen in public. The Malkavians are insane and have a higher sense of insight allowing for some crazy and memorable dialogue sequences. Vampirism isn't all fun and games, however, as you do have some rules to uphold. Public acts of vampiric abilities and tendencies are outlawed by the masquerade, you didn't know vampires didn't exist until you became one, the rest of mankind shouldn't either.

The game is very atmospheric, the gameplay and the way you develop your character are open-ended. You gain experience points not by killing enemies, but by completing quests, which are mostly very fun with a variety of ways to go through them. Solutions can range from stealthily walking past guards, or disabling cameras through a hacked computer terminal, or lockpicking a door, or even going berserk and killing everything in sight. The game offers several endings depending on the actions you take throughout the game and who you invariably choose to ally with.

One aspect the game excels in is level design. The game takes you through a number of locales, like the starting point Santa Monica, Downtown, Hollywood and Chinatown. On a number of quests, you'll find yourself in some areas which are genuinely disturbing. This is one of the only games to ever effectively give me a sense of fright and surprise, and for that, I give it a lot of credit.

On the combat side of things, you have the standard melee and firearms alongside the disciplines which use up your blood reserve that act like the game's magic attacks. Firearms never play a dominant role in combat, as for a majority of the game melee combat is vastly more effective. Disciplines vary depending on the clan you choose, and can allow for a number of different outcomes. Some are designated to buff your stats temporarily, some attack directly, some are used to confuse and distract your enemy. Unlike your standard magic system, this game requires that you keep a steady level of "mana", this case being blood. If you get too careless and let it get too low, your character may go on a crazed frenzy where you temporarily lose control and attack and feed on anything as your instincts and the beast within take over. The enemy AI itself is spotty at times, as on numerous occasions I've had opportunities to shoot the enemy dead as they stood oblivious to the hot lead being injected into their bodies.

The real meat of the game is in the character interaction. It's no understatement that the most memorable scenes in the game occur during the various dialogues with the characters in the game. The characters really come alive through the realistic facial expressions allowed by the power of the Source engine. In addition to normal dialogue selections, the game allows you to seduce, intimidate, persuade, or use a Jedi mindtrick-like dementia on characters depending on your stats in order to get your way. Dementia in particular produces the best and most amusing results in most cases.

The game is powered by Valve's Source engine, and the game debuted it alongside Half-Life 2. Characters look great with realistic facial expressions, textures are sharp, the water effects look nice, but the animations, especially combat animations vary from superb to mediocre. Due to some unfortunately poor optimization, the game tends to run sluggishly throughout most outdoor sequences, so your enjoyability of most of the game could be dependant on your threshold of tolerance on some lower framerates. The game itself can be unstable in parts, so don't be surprised when if the game crashes every once in a while.

Despite the typos, the poor optimization and the stability issues, the game itself is quality. The memorable characters, the gritty game world, the open-ended missions and gameplay, there's much to appreciate the game for. So if you can look past the game's shortcomings, get ready to get your vampire on, it's going to be a wild ride, fledgling.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/07/07