Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

Firstly, I don’t think I’ve ever had so much trouble getting a game to work. Messing with your registry keys sucks. At least not many people have the problem I did.

That aside, I’m really anjoying this game. I haven’t come close to finishing it yet, so I can’t actually review it, but I have a lot of initial impressions.

An RPG using Half-Life 2’s Source engine. It’s an interesting idea and seems to work pretty well. It isn’t as polished as HL2 and it has a few bugs, but nothing unforgivable. The only thing that really bothers me is the lack of lighting. Certain places are ridiculously dark and I guess vampires don’t believe in using flashlights.

The design of the city the game takes place in, aside from the lack of lighting, is really nice. There’s a lot of diversity in the environments. Sadly, there’s not enough ability to interact with your environment. You can manipulate a lot of smaller objects, but most larger ones are firmly rooted. There’s also no way to break open a door or even a gate in a chain link fence, no matter how high your strength.

The game really starts to shine in your interactions with other characters. They respond to you differently depending on your clan (of which there are 7) and certain skills used in dialogue. I cracked up when a guy said, "You’re a Malkavian? You’re really fucked!"

The combat system is pretty nice, I think. You use guns from a first-person perspective and it feels a lot like Half-Life 2. Melee weapons shift you to third-person, which works well. But it’s far more fun to use vampiric abilities to take out enemies than knock their block off with a baseball bat.

And I have to give this game special merit for being the only game to ever actually frighten me. I mean it. There was a quest early on that was so creepy, I constantly had chills running down my spine. If Doom 3 had achieved that kind of ambience, I never would have slept again.

Overall, it has much the same open-ended feel that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic did. I can easily see myself playing through it 3 or 4 times.

Took the game back because it was so buggy, has a suitable patch 4 it come out yet?
Its a fun game but didn’t grab me.