Test System
Athlon XP 2500+ (actual clock speed 1.8 GHz)
NVidia GeForce4 Ti4800, 6.6.9.3 Drivers
ASUS A7N8X 2.0 Deluxe
512 MEG DDR RAM
WD HD ATA100 7200RPM 2Meg Cache
Win 2000 Pro
The game begins with you as a newly-embraced Vampire of one the seven clans of the Camarilla. Your sire is executed for embracing you, and your life is spared on a condition of service. From here, the story takes off into the environs of LA through four major hubs: Santa Monica, Downtown LA, Hollywood, and Chinatown. There are many smaller areas to be explored as well.
You can play as a male or female, but clan, gender, and armor determine your appearance. No other modification is possible. You begin play by assigning 2/1/0 to your attributes, 3/2/1 to skills and 1 to Disciplines (more on the adaptation later). The tutorial that introduces the interface and basics of gameplay is excellent, simple and clear. Characters are distinctive and interesting.
In some places the music is excellent. In others, the music is merely good or unremarkable. The music for this game may very well be the best ever for a PC game. The voice acting is also great. In the area of sound content, this is as good as it gets.
The use of the Source engine is good in presenting expressive faces (though rather simple) and complex environments.
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The game starts REALLY well. The first ten hours are exciting, varied, and completely consuming. This part by itself is almost worth the cover price (not that I paid for it, my copy was complimentary).
But then something happens. The first problem you will meet is the trigger hunt, forcing you to hunt for tiny buttons to advance. Hunting for elevator buttons specifically was an irritation I had several times.
Next, combat becomes a fingernail-tearing joy. Four long, dull, repetitive levels are layered on in the hunt for the Nosferatu Primogen. This portion is the worst of the game. When I finally finished it, I was so angry I stopped playing because I wanted to enjoy the game.
I actually found myself wondering if the designers did this to purposely anger their players. Its that bad. Though not so severe later, these things continue to be encountered for the rest of the game, especially in the Sabbat stronghold. There is a kind of unevenness to the game. Some areas are fantastic and fascinating. Others are punishing and frustrating. Some streamlining and judicious cuts in the combat-heavy portions would have made the game much more fun. Its unfortunate that it turned out as it did. Bad decision making here.
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Also, there is a really weird system of rewards. Upon eliminating the leader of the Sabbat in the city, I found...nothing...no arcane writings, no artifacts, no stores of blood, not even money in his lair. Meanwhile, unique artifacts are lying around in the open, in mundane areas.
The game comes with an M Rating, and works it out. There is plentiful profanity and explicit language and situations. Hollywood reflects its real world seediness, including a business named Asp Hole…as in Snake Pit…get it? It left me simultaneously wincing at the pun and disgusted with the name.
ADAPTATION
Combat outcomes are determined using the game action engine. Your skills as a player determine whether you hit or miss. As your character gains skill with firearms, you deal more damage, and the scatter radius decreases. As your melee skill increases, you gain access to a broader array of attack movements that can be chained to form longer combos. These fighting combos can be pretty cool. The decision was consciously made to remove dice from combat, and put the player directly in control. For combat, I think this is a good decision. It is based on YOUR real world skill. In appealing to action gamers and creating immersion, this was a good decision (though one dictated by the engine itself). So far, so good.
The worst gameplay design decision is the non-combat mechanics. Outcomes are determined using a threshold system. The system works like this: you auto-succeed or auto-fail based on your feat rank and what you are attempting. Pretty dull stuff. No progressive or partial successes. No mini-game. Most likely, this is just easier to implement on the PC. It felt lazy to me.
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Next was excluding Willpower. Anyone who has played the PnP game knows how critical WP is to the game. It is MIA here, as are the attributes it is based upon. It's hard to overstate how this eviscerates the soul of Vampire. If there were one company in the industry that could do this right, my money would have been on Troika.
What makes this such a bizarre decision is that a previous Troika game (Arcanum) features a system similar to WP, at least superficially, with fate points. I can understand its omission from combat (the action-oriented combat engine would make using it a pain). But why not one for use in lock-picking, dialogue, and the like? Bloodlines DOES retain two important systems: Humanity and Masquerade. Note the total absence of Roads, or to be more accurate, the presence of only the default Road. These omissions are truly embittering.
It continues. "Health" and wounds work on the tired Hit Point system. If you want the Fortitude Discipline to have an effect, you have to spend 1 blood to keep it active for 30 seconds. Nifty. Not. The Intimidate feat is based on Intelligence. Yeah, you read that right. Don't ask me, man. There is no loss of one blood per day, which is the basis for the need to hunt. There are no daytimes. When I had the chance to get a ghoul, I jumped on it because thought I would be important to survive. Instead I was a jerk for keeping one.
These are the more glaring problems (there are many more, especially the Disciplines). Summary: it is a better adaptation than Redemption, but that's not saying much.
One worthwhile note: a review I read elsewhere criticized the game on the ineffectiveness of firearms. Since bullets aren't supposed to be very effective against Vampires, the statement is an indication of that reviewer's ignorance of the game world, and of the preservation of some verisimilitude.
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TECHNOLOGY
V:tM - B employs the much heralded Source engine, developed by Valve. Its best use, easily, is for the facial expressions in conversation. The employment of the physics engine is unremarkable, when not grating and irritating. The single best use was the ability to throw objects to create distractions when sneaking.
The purpose of creating and using an engine like this is to generate emergent gameplay. Little emerged from these physics except irritation. Physics are applied to the pieces of wooden crate after it is broken...Yeah? So? How is this different from breaking a crate in the many other PC games? You can't break chairs, you can't break walls, etc.
Then it goes downhill. At one point, the game to a screeching halt because I couldn't slide a bar blocking a door. Multiple reloads didn't fix it. I had to exit the game, restart, and re-initialize the entire game. Then it worked. Not good.
In the Sabbat lair people shot at me through walls. It sounds cool until you realize the walls were intact and the gun barrel was poking through the walls. When jumping over a rubble pile, my character would sometimes get stuck sliding down the side of an invisible object. While people are slamming lead into me.
Frustrating right? They are nothing next to the big whammy. Look at my technical specs. This game brought my system to its knees. At first I thought it was my system. I though maybe I needed to upgrade. No. I soon realized the awful slowdown was fixed by exiting out of the game (which I always followed with a system re-set to be sure). The game would run smoothly...then after an hour or two, its back to a slideshow. Some kinf of memeory problem here. Bad. Bad. Bad.
Aside from core design issues, this was my biggest problem with the game.
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CONCLUSION
In the end, my greatest disappointments were two-fold: the total lack of surprises in gameplay, and the quality of the adaptation. Outside of the unremarkable combat and the stealth functionality, mechanics are dull. Add Troika dialogue to Deus Ex, adapt to the WoD, and you have V:tM - Bloodlines.
I had hoped for something more. It ends up being merely a good game, when it could have been a great game. The multiple hubs and the ability to move between them generate the greatest sense of non-linearity.
Lately I have begun to really wonder about Troika's design skills. Note that this is distinct from writing and character design. These two have never been problems for Troika. Their best combat systems (seen in Fallout and ToEE) were based on RPG rulesets. The combat system in this game is taken from Deus Ex, with some modification for melee derived from fighting games. Their one original combat system (in Arcanum) was a disaster. The non-combat systems are uninspiring as well. I don't know what to say to this. The best original feature of Troika games remains their writing.
Aside from technical issues, the game succeeds in what it attempts. The problem is that it doesn't attempt anything of note, other than making a fun game. I remember when I first started playing Splinter Cell. As a veteran of the Thief series I had low expectations but was pleasantly surprised. First was the ability to control speed of movement as an additional factor in sneaking. Next was the lock-picking mini-game, sometimes under time pressure. Despite its daunting technical requirements, Bloodlines basically incorporates many systems from other PC games, while making poor use of a possible source of truly original gameplay: Valve's Source engine.
In the end though, making a fun game is what really matters, and at this it succeeds. If not for the memory problems and the combat grinds, success here would have been total.
One of the problems of being a reviewer is that you are obligated to rip on games you like. You are obligated to do so because one job of a reviewer is to provide fair warning. Fail to do so, and a reader who purchased the game on your recommendation may end up rightfully pissed. I didn't start this review intending to cut loose on the game. I look at my review and can see why someone would think it deserves a 1. It really doesn't.
Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines alternates between awesome fun and irritation. It's a great game with a long list of "buts". Troika has become the Creators of the Flawed Gem (tm)...games that would have been great if only...
