by 
What’s this? A review that’s almost topical? If this keeps up, I might play Sekiro before it goes on sale. Probably not. Well, remarkably, I started playing this game before I had even a clue they were going to announce a sequel, and happened to finish my playthrough the day they announced it. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (hereafter just Vampire, for the sake of my own sanity) is a very special game, to the point that I’m having difficulty putting my thoughts into words. All at once, it is almost perfect and completely terrible.
My first try at playing Vampire was a few years ago, before we started PleaseInsertCD. For almost half the time I played, I simply sat and listened to the only radio station: The Deb of Night. Since you’re a vampire (spoilers, I guess?) you’re only awake at night. Deb entertains calls of the sort you’d expect at these times, from conspiracy theories to people who actually have a clue to the plot of the game to people who just want someone to talk to. Deb handles it all with a fascinating aplomb, entrancing the listener until, finally, the randomized calls start repeating. It’s the details in this game which really make it, yet show the roughness of an unfinished game at the same time.
I returned to Vampire a week or so ago after finding some time to work on my backlog of Tier One games. I stayed at the character screen for 45 minutes. This isn’t a surprising thing in most games – Skryim, for example. In Vampire, however, there are precisely three choices on the character creation screen. One of them is gender (which affects your background). Each choice seems to speak volumes about your character. Sadly, your background seems to have no impact on your playthrough – just your stats. Even so, this complexity definitely helped sell the verisimilitude. Vampire has that in spades.
Vampire takes place in Los Angeles. You start out in Santa Monica, and move through Downtown, Hollywood, Chinatown, and a few mission-specific locations. It’s hard to describe the life-likeness of these areas – even if they aren’t really all that big.
The characters that inhabit these locations are just as life-like – well, as life-like as an undead character can be. The politics of the LA vampire community, their choices when interacting with humans, and the undertones of every conversation bring this alternate reality to life.
At the same time, Vampire has more problems than I can count. I highly recommend the unofficial patch. If the unofficial patch fixes things, I dread to imagine how completely broken this game is without it. This game is not one you would go to if you wanted polish, a bug-free experience, or more than 100 polygons to an object (okay, that last one is a little unfair). It seems Vampire was released unfinished in 2004 after being in development limbo for three years, which explains many of the problems.
Combat is a real problem. Toward the end, bosses become bullet sponges (unless you have a flamethrower) that don’t pose any real threat…unless you didn’t invest in combat skills. Except for the bosses (and a particularly annoying hallway/trap), it’s quite possible to talk and sneak your way through most of the game. The bosses are notable exceptions – game-stopping exceptions.
Many of the missions start feeling like busy work once you approach the end of the game and are forced to wait through half a dozen loading screens to complete them. NPCs run out of dialogue, the combat system really starts breaking down, the endgame is very linear, and you start to realize (if you’re playing a female character) that this was very definitely made with the intention of a male main character.
Yet with all of that, Vampire offers an experience you can’t quite get anywhere else (granted, I haven’t played Pathologic yet). I’ll remain cautiously optimistic for the sequel – at the very least, they brought back the composer, which is great news. So what about the original? A flawed masterpiece, a cult classic, and a Tier One game.