So recently, I’ve been playing a game called “Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines”. It’s a Western CRPG based off of the pen-and-paper RPG game “Vampire: The Masquerade” from the World of Darkness created by White Wolf Games (which btw, I would love to play… either that or the updated “Vampire: Requiem”). I’ve had the game since the latter half of high school, but I just never got around to playing it because of the ridiculous number of bugs that plagued that game and slowed it to a standstill. Last week, I found an updated version of it online with fan patches and whatnot that fixed most of the problems, so although I have to push down the effects to the minimum, it runs on my computer at around 20-30 fps, which is good enough.
So anyway, as you might’ve guessed from the title, you play a Vampire, or as the game characters say, one of the “Kindred”. There are several different vampire clans you can play as: Brujah, Gangrel, Malkavian, Nosferatu, Toreador, Tremere, and Ventrue. Vampires from each clan act differently and have different powers and stuff. For example, Gangrel have a power called Protean which allows them to shapeshift various parts of their until they reach an ultimate “War Form”. Malkavian are insane, and their dialog options reflect their insanity, as well as a number of hallucinations that only a player playing as Malkavian would see. The Nosferatu are terribly disfigured by their transformation (called “Embrace” in the game) and cannot be seen in public, lest they break the Masquerade, which is a basically a set of rules meant to conceal vampire society from the human world.
So… I’ve been this game for quite a while, and I’ve gotta admit, it’s pretty damn fun. It’s a bit different from most JPRGs. For one, you don’t gain experience from killing people, so sometimes it’s more advantageous to sneak around or use dialog or diplomacy to get your way. I feel that it’s a far more intelligent game than most others that I’ve seen. Most of the voice acting is pretty good, with a few exceptions, and the witty dialog makes the cut scenes entertaining. Roleplaying a Vampire is pretty badass too. There are a couple games that make me feelings of badassery; Splinter Cell is one, and this game is another one. It’s… quite nice. I like it.
However, I do have a couple gripes. Even though the game is almost 5 years old now, I still can’t quite run it perfectly on my computer. I’d like it to be running at 30 fps all the time, but that only happens when I’m inside buildings where the draw distance is significantly cut down. More often than not, there is a bit of stutter, and although I’m pretty sure I can eliminate it by doing some fancy shit to the game files, I don’t feel like I should have to do work to make the game run properly. Secondly, the combat feels incredibly stilted. There are guns in the game, but most of them are practically useless against Vampires. So far, I’ve only got a .38 revolver, and it does jack shit against Vampires. It’s decent enough against humans though, but I could just as easily pummel the puny humans down with my gigantic Vampire fists. I hear shotguns are more useful though, so I’m looking forward to getting a decent one and shooting some enemy Vamps in the face. Because that’s always awesome. So far in the early parts of the game, the melee combat is definitely more effective, but the only thing that you can do is execute the same 3-move combo or a sneak attack if you can get to them. I would’ve liked the option of opening up more combos when you get more skilled at melee combat… but oh well. Nothing I can really do there. The dialog system is also a bit annoying because sometimes you’ll come to a point of repeated dialog and you can’t skip through it.
But other than that. the game is pretty kickass. You can’t really go wrong with Vampires. Unless you’re “Twilight”. In which case you can go very, very wrong.
