Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines
The first Vampire The Too Long Title game for the PC didn’t sit well with me. I’m sure it had something going for it, but it wasn’t anything going for me. So, this game went past me totally unnoticed. Lately I’ve seen some forum posts reminiscing about it, and thought, what the heck, let’s try it out.
The game is about 4 years old now, and is based on the Source Engine, the same engine behind Half Life 2. While HL2 looks amazing, this game… well… doesn’t. The models all look pretty good, and thanks to the engine the facial expressions are great, but the textures are all rather bad. The artists put a lot of work into the faces, probably because they had to, but generally every other texture in the game makes it feel more like Deus Ex or Half Life. This isn’t a deal breaker, but knowing what the engine can do, and knowing that White Wolf could afford more/better artists, it’s a little sad. I’m sure it’s a release time issue, especially considering the game is unstable as hell. Everyone has awful hair.
The voice acting is surprisingly good. You don’t get a voice, despite interacting with dialog, which is distracting but sort of par for the course. Options to seduce, intimidate, and… whatever… are denoted by a color and style scheme. It looks goofy, but it’s useful for knowing, at a glance, how that option is going to play. Still, if a player can’t tell the difference between seduction and intimidation, fire a writer.
You build your character very much as you do in the pen and paper game, though with a lot fewer points. Except for Disciplines, your powers, which you get an extra point for. It’s pretty flexible, and, to me at least, easy to grasp. So far the game gives you a lot of ways to solve problems, and plenty of opportunities to flex your array of skills. I’ve even intimidated passerby into giving me money, which was fun.
There’s two limiting factors to how brutal you can get. Humanity, and The Masquerade. You start with 7 points of Humanity. As that lowers, your character might freak out and randomly attack people on the street, leading us to The Masquerade. There are laws to vampire society to prevent you from causing human-kind to become too interested or knowledgeable about vampires, aka- The Masquerade. You start with 5 Masquerade points, and if you lose them all, it’s game over. Humanity can be gained by doing charitable things, such as saving a person, which is nice because you can then game the system to kill that bum, because you have some padding.
Combat isn’t super, but it’s not bad at all. All of my powers feel useful, even the stupid ones, and the combat pace is just right, so far, to let you manage them pretty easily. It could definitely benefit by lifting more ideas from Deus Ex, in that a paused screen for selecting active powers and equipment would be real handy, but so far it’s not an issue.
Anyway. I’m pleasantly surprised, and we’ll see if it keeps giving.