Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines Review

IVampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is based on the popular pen and paper RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. It takes place in a world where vampires and other creatures of the night walk the Earth, but unbeknownst to humanity. It is this that is The Masquerade, a vast vampire conspiracy to keep their very existence hidden from humans. The vampires take The Masquerade very seriously and will even slay one of their own should it be violated too often – the vampires would much rather spend their time and attention on wars with rival clans than on keeping the food supply in check. In Bloodlines, maintaining The Masquerade has become a little difficult of late as it is a time of great upheaval in the vampire world. Vampires find themselves on the eve of Gehenna, the undead version of the end of the world, and the clans are jockeying for power before the real bloodletting begins. This is where you come in. You are a new vampire brought into undead life by your sire without your knowledge or consent. For this crime you sire is put to death, but that doesn’t do anything to change your situation. Your undead life is spared, though, and you are freed onto the streets of Santa Monica to begin your new life. Without a sire you lack the kind of tutelage offered to most newly sired vampires, but a mentor does help you out by covering the basics of vampire life in what serves as the game’s tutorial. The tutorial is well-designed and gives you a chance to learn the ropes of vampire life while in what amounts to a protected and forgiving mission. Once you’re through that you’re on your own and ready to begin serving your vampire prince.

Like almost all RPGs, in Bloodlines you begin by creating your character. Your first decision is probably the most important of all – the selection of a vampire clan. This choice will have a large effect on your game experience. Select Nosferatu and you will be a hideous creature who will break The Masquerade just by being seen, and your game will be one of slinking around in the shadows and staying out of sight. Become Malkavian and you will be mentally unstable, but also privy to hearing voices in your head giving you guidance as you play. As a Ventrue you will be charming and manipulative, and your silver tongue will give you more dialog options when conversing with NPCs. There are seven clans to select from in all and each will give you a different experience with the game. If this initial choice feels too overwhelming, the game will help you out by presenting you with a number of questions pertaining to hypothetical situations and then pick a clan for you based on your responses.

Once your race is selected you will need to spend points in various skill areas to further customize your vampire. There are a number of skill areas that include soft skills such as persuasion and presence, intellectual skills such as research and computer hacking, and more physical skills such as brawling and firearms. Your choices here will have a further effect on your game experience as situations will unfold differently based on your skills. Do you hack into a computer directly or try to charm the password out of somebody? Do you intimidate a foe to the point where he is too frightened to fight effectively or do you overpower him with brute strength? These types of differing approaches to situations occur throughout the game and are greatly driven by your skill mix. While selecting a good skill set may seem like an overwhelming job to some people, most gamers will appreciate how it lets them mold the game to their play style and how this affords the game a good degree of replayability.

The game itself can be played from the first or third person view, and the first thing that you’ll notice about this is that it makes the game appear more like a shooter than an RPG. This is not too surprising when you learn that Bloodlines is built on the same engine as Half-Life 2. Make no mistake about it, though, this game is pretty much an RPG through and through, with battles won by hidden die rolls as much as by a quick mouse hand. The success of everything that you do, from picking locks to hacking computers, depends on your skills in the various corresponding areas and not on timing or some other action game mechanism. The fights take place in real-time and you maneuver yourself into position to strike your enemy with your equipped weapon and then use the mouse button to unleash the attack. However, if you do everything right from a fighting perspective you still may not score a hit on your opponent. This is because behind the scenes the game is checking your level, skills, your opponent’s defense, and everything else you’d expect an RPG to do when resolving combat. If the numbers go your way you’ll see a number appear signifying the number of hit points of damage you’ve done. This works fine for the melee weapons, but the system does not work all that well when guns are involved. When using a gun you must aim the weapon, wait for the crosshairs to stabilize, and then you can pull the trigger. The amount of time it takes for the crosshairs to stabilize and the final accuracy of the shot are dependent on your skill with firearms. You can perfectly align a shot on a stationary target and then watch as the bullet misses its mark and hits the wall beyond. This makes firearms just about useless in a fight until you build your skills, and even then the effort this takes is questionable. Firearms just aren’t that powerful in the game and in most cases you’ll do much better with a melee weapon, making it wiser to spend your skill points in other areas that will have more of an impact on your game.

Since it is built on the same engine as Half-Life 2, Bloodlines also has access to the same amazing physics engine used in that game. Unfortunately it is underutilized in the game. There are instances when you can move things around to find something hidden beneath, and sometimes you can find things to toss to make a noise and distract guards, but overall most of the environments run a bit on the sparse side so there’s not much to push, roll, or bounce as it is.

So what about blood drinking? Well it’s not the primary focus of the game, but you’ll still need to feed to keep your health up and to provide energy for your special vampire powers (vampire magic, if you will). Since you must keep within the confines of The Masquerade, you must be careful to isolate your victims and to avoid draining them of life completely. Selecting your victims is also important as the blood of a quality upstanding citizen will provide you with far more energy than that of a homeless drunk or a (*gack*) rat. Feeding is a simple matter of picking the right moment to bite by pressing the [f] key and then being careful to press it again before your victim dies. If you kill your victim or are seen feeding by another human, you’ll break The Masquerade. Do it too many times and your game will end.

The RPG side of the game is really very good. The story is deep and filled with the sort of twists, intrigue, and dialog usually found only in quality movies. You may even find yourself believing in The Masquerade when you’re through playing. The game also leaves you with a lot of leeway as you progress through the story – playing as a different type of vampire will result in a different gameplay experience even though the story will play out along the same lines. If you’re an RPG fan you’ll really appreciate the way that you can really play the game as appropriate for your chosen clan. You can play the game over again taking a stealthy, heavy-handed, or charismatic approach, completely getting into character and enjoying the game in a new way with each successive replay.

The game’s dark and gritty vision of Santa Monica and Los Angeles is very atmospheric and just the kind of place that you’d expect to find vampires lurking about – although dark also means at times “difficult to see” if you play the game in a well-lit room. The character animations are excellent, and the lip-synching during the character conversations is virtually dead-on which when coupled with the quality voice work really helps to bring the characters to life.

If the combat were handled a little better, then Bloodlines would be a real RPG benchmark. As it stands, the battles will prove a bit frustrating to both RPG and action gamers. However, the overall quality of the game is so high that if you are an RPG fan then you really should give the game a try. It’s certainly never been so much fun to be dead before…

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 86%.  With apologies to L7, let’s pretend that we’re undead.

System Requirements: Pentium III 1.2 GHz; 384 MB RAM;  64 MB Video RAM; 4x CD-ROM;  3.3 GB Hard Drive Space;  Mouse.