Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines is a first or third person, adult vampire version of Morrowind or Oblivion using Half-Life 2’s Source Engine. It is immersive with good characters, a first person view, a lot of quests and tons of atmosphere. This is an overlooked fun for a while game. There’s no daylight, because you’re a vampire and so are most of the people you’ll interact with.
The game kicks off with you choosing which type of vampire that you want to be. You’ve got more humanoid vampires, but also types that are more creature than man. Gangrels and Nosfaratus need to hide in the shadows, because people freak out when they see them. Each breed of vampire has its own perks whether its weapons, skills, abilities or personality.
You go around doing quests for vampires and other people. You’ll even meet ghouls that work for vampires, basically their fanatics that are normal people, but who would do anything for their vampire masters. Its odd calling them ghouls, but whatever. Everyone has a beautiful sort of look, style and personality. A lot of elements are taken from popular movies like the Lost Boys and even the old Trilogy of Terror. The vampires force you to pick sides, take allegiances and others will respect you less for it. That results in a need to have multiple play throughs to experience everything.
These quests lead you to haunted hotels, abandon parking garages and vampire infested warehouses. The haunted places manage to have a spooky vibe with strange things happening. Outside of that, I can’t say its a scary game, so much as its all at night in darkened cities.
Between quests, you can hang out, explore the cities and towns. Visit the local nightlife, night clubs and if you need some health you can pay a woman to take a bite. Otherwise, you’ll have to feed off of a civilian and lose part of your humanity. Drink too much and you’ll go crazy.
I can’t call the game perfect, there are some extreme difficulty spikes. You can really paint yourself into a corner with the save system. If you don’t have any ammo or health, you might have to start over from a previous save, or in my case an entirely new game. Its not fun and it just makes me want to stop playing. The game also starts to go off the rails by the end. It feels rushed and less impressive the further you get. Like less attention to detail was put in.
For what its worth, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines is great for vampire fans that want an immersive experience, but if you’re here to play a game, you might not have fun with the difficulty spikes and combat.
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