Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

"Had great potential but falls short. Doesn't come to par with expectations."

A game with great potential, unfortunately it's written by a bunch of people who just can't seem to make it interesting. That, coupled with the ridiculous amount of bugs and graphic problems, this game is mediocre at best. I'd wait until the price drops before, or if, you buy it.

GRAPHICS
Fair. Bloodlines supposedly used the Half Life 2 engine. If so the graphics really don't reflect this. They are merely average compared to how they are utilized in HL2. Some textures and such are good, but others just aren't detailed enough and are rather plain. Probably the best thing about the graphics are the close up of the character models. Those are fairly detailed. Again, however, they don't use the full capabilities of the HL2 engine. The characters facial expressions are limited and not very mobile. There could have been better environmental effects like rain or water reflections, debris from explosions etc.

SOUND & MUSIC
Fair. Most of the melee weapons use the same "swoosh" noise when you swing them, and when you hit a surface or even strike an enemy it's mostly the same. A little variety would have been nice. The gun sounds are alright, nothing notable about them.

PLAYABILITY & CONTENT
Fair. The game would have been much more enjoyable if it wasn't for the bugs and flaws, which I will get to in a moment. For the most part, the game is quite linear. You must do certain quests to progress the storyline and you're forced into doing many of them. The maps also aren't very big the "cities" you go to are nothing more than a small section with a few buildings. It's not as if you can free roam very far or even do much in the cities. The load times are a little too long for such small areas.

During conversations you can pick a variety of responses based on the conversation and your characters status. Unfortunately though, many of the choices all lead down the same road. So if you're presented with three or four choices, two will lead one way and the other two another way, so you really only get two choices and not four. Also, the dialog is flawed, it's mostly geared toward the gamer playing a male character as the NPCs will often use terms like "man" and "him" or "he". So if you're playing a female character it ruins the dialog a little bit. They could have easily written the dialog to exclude genders so it would work either way. Also as a side note, some of the grammar doesn't make sense, it's like a poor translation.

Probably the best feature about the game is the character creation. You get to pick from a few different vampire races like the Nosferatu or Treime or Toreador or a few others. The Nosferatu are so ugly that you can't use the streets to get around you have to use the sewer system (or so it says I didn't play the Nosferatu). You upgrade your characters stats like strength, dexterity, charisma, disciplines, and many others. When you do quests you get experience which you spend to upgrade the skills and abilities. You can also find books that raise your abilities but you need a certain level of the Research skill to make any use of the books otherwise they're useless.

You get a decent amount of weapons as well. Several different hand weapons like a severed arm, knife, sword, and axe just to name a few. Several guns are also available like the magnum, different machine guns, shotguns, etc. Of course, you need a certain skill level to use these weapons effectively.

Each vampire has various supernatural abilities called Disciplines. These vary based on the vampire you created. You can cause your enemies to vomit blood, or put them in a trance, kill them outright and many other ways to kill your foes. These use up your blood meter, which if gets too low causes your character to go berserk attacking and killing anything in sight.

As a vampire, you're supposed to uphold certain laws to protect the secret society of vampires. It's called the Masquerade. If you do things like feed where mortals can see you, you get a strike against you. Too many and vampire hunters come to kill you. You can feed on any mortal, this replenishes your blood meter as well as your health. Some mortals have stronger blood than others, so if you feed on a bum he'll drain faster than a soldier or cop. You can't just kill anyone you see either which I thought was stupid. If you kill a non hostile NPC you lose humanity, if it gets too low you lose control of your character if they take too much damage or lose too much blood.

Now for the bugs. The game seriously needs a patch, and the Activision support site just tells you to update your drivers blah blah blah. What this means is they don't feel like fixing the problems with their buggy game. First off, the game doesn't support Dolby 5.1 which makes no sense since all modern games should. The dialog sometimes cuts out skipping the first word or words of the conversation. Also the sounds sometimes stutter. There are a multitude of graphic problems. Things will just vanish for no reason, or you will clip through the walls. I remember one part where an NPC was on the phone and every time he put the phone to his ear it vanished. I also got stuck on stupid things like a dead rat, or a door or plate that was laying on the floor. A few times I actually got stuck in the ground and couldn't move. The collision matrix of the game is terrible. You can't get past people in tight areas even if you have enough room. There were times where I'd trance or feed on someone and they were stuck in a door and I couldn't get past. You can't push people out of the way and if you kill them you'd lose humanity. Also the NPCs follow a set path or patrol route when they walk. Also, the game crashed to the desktop a multitude of times. The game lagged terrible too even though my system and video card is well beyond what they recommend. It got really bad if there were too many NPCs on the screen, even still it lagged terribly.

The game was of decent length, but I think this is just because all the bugs made it more difficult to play. The ending was horrible it's as if they just didn't care about an ending and just threw something together.

CONTROLS
Keys can be remapped.

SAVING FEATURES
Anytime, anywhere.

THE GOOD
Being a vampire.
Good amount of weapons.
Character creation.

THE BAD
Forced quests.
Very little NPC interaction, mostly main NPCs.
Graphics could be much better.
Bad lag.
Long load times.

THE UGLY
Crashes to desktop too much.

OVERALL RATING 5

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/03/04