Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines

Game titles with colons have long been an industry cliche and are seldom an indicator of quality. What then shall we make of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, which for all intents and purposes has not one but two, right there in the title? And let's not quibble about using a dash instead. The effect is no less silly.

Well for once it's not entirely the publisher's fault. Bloodlines is an RPG based on White Wolf's 'World of Darkness' tabletop game. So the excess of colons were perhaps unavoidable. Still, one wonders if they could have done away with the "Vampire: The Masquerade" bit entirely. You don't see Bioware's licensed games getting titled "Dungeons and Dragons: Third Edition: Neverwinter Nights." They just call it "Neverwinter Nights" and make sure the D&D logo gets prominent placement on the cover.

It's just one of many things in this game that could have been thought through a little more, worked on a little longer or submitted to some sort of critical eye before releasing it into the wild. Alas, this atmospheric RPG from Troika Games was famously rushed out the door so fast that it had to be patched immediately due to a game-stopping bug that made it unfinishable. Troika was disbanded by the publisher shortly thereafter, but they must have done something right: a significant number of updates have been released in the many years since by a dedicated community of players.

If only Troika had been given more time to 'polish' their masterpiece by mercenary mega-corp Activision! Who knows what wonders we might have beheld?

After diving back into this beloved game for several weeks, this reviewer says, "meh." Bloodlines is, even many patches on, sloppily executed at best and horrendously buggy at worst. Even more telling are the parts where the game bogs down not in buggy code but in bad design: long sequences where all semblance of player choice collapses into endless hallways of tedious and frustrating 'action' play.

Here is the bitter truth about Bloodlines - it's a brilliantly written story married to a game that is fundamentally lousy.

There is a reason people are still playing - and patching! - this game six years on, but it's not the game play. In fact the game is best when you're not playing as such, but instead wandering around the four content-rich hub areas set in a gothic-themed Los Angeles which positively drips with atmosphere. Exploring a string of shadowy alleys, dimly-lit discotheques, sleazy apartments, crooked blood banks and abandoned movie theaters is great fun. So is hacking your way in or engaging in a little B&E to tease out a couple more plot threads. And the large cast of twisted, devious and sexy denizens that populate these places are brilliantly written and solidly voice-acted.

The narrative is surprisingly bold by the standards of the time. There's no actual nudity, but there's pretty much everything else, if you look hard enough. Your quest will take you through peep-shows and strip clubs, among other seedy locations, and its all rendered in vivid detail. This could easily be tawdry and titillating, but the story is, impressively, up to the challenge. This is an 'adult' game in the best sense of the word. It helps that the characters feel very real, rather than just like a series of pin-ups for you to kill or manipulate.

Players are given several types of vampires to play as up-front. Your choice of clan and even gender can have, at certain points, dramatic impacts on the gameplay narrative. You also get to choose from a wide variety of tools and powers that let you manipulate people and situations to your advantage.

This game owes a lot of its open-world feel to predecessors such as Ion Storm's Deus Ex, but sadly it lacks that games' commitment to keeping the players' options open at all times. In the hub areas you can, as you would expect, talk your way through things, sneak past enemies, or hack computers in addition to just shooting your way out of a situation. Alas, sooner or later you have to leave the rich content of these hubs and bite into the rancid meat of the actual game play, where bullets are often the only answer. The only choice you are ever truly offered in the combat sections is whether to shoot or smash your way through.

It's a classic trap of RPG games, and Bloodlines falls headlong into it: the player is given a selection of special powers to gain as they level up, only to find that they are all useless against any baddie high-level enough to actually be worth using powers against. Woe to the player who put all their experience points into stealth or high level magical options - these are going to be next to useless when push comes to shove.

This might be forgivable if shooting and punching things were interesting or well-balanced, but they are not. Combat works something like this: quick-save, attack, attack, attack, die. Reload. Attack, attack, attack, win. Quick-save. Repeat.

Thanks to the random amounts of damage you and your enemies' attacks apply, there's very little strategy to fighting. Avoiding enemy attacks is a matter of luck. So is hitting them. Occasionally bad pathfinding AI on the part of the enemies leads to tactics of a sort, but these are assuredly accidental.

In small doses this might be acceptable, but Bloodlines is very much of a more-is-better philosophy. This is a long game, and the designers were more than willing to pad their game with endless non-descript corridors for the player to fight baddies in. It's strange that in a game with so many gorgeous and wide open locales that these sequences force the player to spend so much time in sewers, hallways and warehouses. It's almost as though a different design team was in charge of the combat, the difference is that striking.

It's things like this that make me doubt that blame for the rushed release of the game and breakup of the studio can be wholly assigned to a greedy, impatient publisher. It seems clear that although someone at Troika had an excellent grasp on the fundamentals of story and character, their technical chops and understanding of gameplay were woefully lacking. Bloodlines wasn't their first "Masquerade" game - their previous outing in that universe was infamous for suffering from a very poorly conceived save-point system. This was not a studio with a stellar technical track-record.

That the visuals in the game hold up fairly well is a testament to Valve's Steam engine more than it is to Troika's programmers. Neither before or since has the expressive, emotional facial system that engine provides been put to such stellar use. This is a game that's quite literally ready for its close-up.

When you're not shooting the breeze with yet another devious vampire seductress, the game still looks pretty good. There aren't any bump-mapped bells and whistles and the polygon count isn't that high, but an effective use of lighting and solid art direction help to sell the environs of Vampire LA quite handily. Unfortunately, there are some pretty jarring clipping issues that at times will really take you out of the game.

Worth playing today?

For lovers of excellent narrative or open-world gameplay, yes. The top-notch writing and the four main city hubs are worth soldiering through a handful of tedious all-combat sections. But role-players, be sure to buff up those combat stats along with your 'seduction' feat. Trust me on this one.

Recommended Setup

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines should run on any modern computer that supports Valve's Steam engine. I recommend you grab the official 1.2 patch and then whatever the latest unofficial patch is (2.3 at the time of this writing).

This is a game that rewards system mastery, so this is a case where I would actually recommend looking at a walkthru if you want to see everything the game has to offer without investing a serious chunk of your life in it. I recommend vampyri_lestat's walkthru, which manages to be both comprehensive and surprisingly spoiler-free.

Certain clans are easier to play with than others, or at least will give more immediate access to all the game has to offer. I recommend starting off as a Toreador, Ventrue or Brujah. If you're hooked enough for a second play-thru, don't miss the Malkavians. I've also found that focusing on melee combat over ranged will generally give you an easier time of it, plus you'll save a lot of money by not having to buy new rifles and bullets all the time.

It's a tragedy that this is a game with a 'wrong way' to play it, but if you pay attention to the tips above and give the 'right way' a spin, it could be very rewarding.