Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines

THE BAD:
Bugs, bad execution of the final areas, audio problems during cutscenes

SUMMARY:
This game is, in my opinion, the last great first person RPG to come out in the last couple of years. The game is based in The World of Darkness Pen and Paper game done by white wolf and focuses on the Vampire side of un-life. Before starting the game you're given the choice of seven clans to start with, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. From the brawling Brujah to the stealthy Nosferatue. Each clan is truly unique in appearance and disciplines (each clan gets their own discipline like Protean, Blood Boil and Obfuscate to help them out).
The game starts off strong with your sir being killed for Embracing you(How vamps turn humans into vamps)without permission, you though are spared from a similar fate. From there you are sent loose into the games dark and sinister underworld of vampire politics and discover the actual hell that is California's Night life.
The game has awesome dialogue that isn’t bland and boring. Whether you're talking to a paranoid Nosferatue or the insane/disturbing Malkavien, the developers really put effort into making the lines and conversations with each person different and unique. My favorite has to be when you encounter the sir-less vampires who are scared as hell and lost as to what to do now, each one was different and you could influence them all in different ways. Quests are varied and interesting throughout the four hubs you go to. Most of them can be accomplished in various ways.(combat, talking, stealth) But for the last half of the game it seems like Troika got rushed and thus you get a tedious combat oriented ending that pretty much screws over that diplomatic character you had.
Now as far as combat goes, its pretty good. You have melee combat where, as you would expect, you will be swinging a fire axe and baseball bat into the sides of your opponents heads. Then there’s firearms which is used differently then those who play FPS are uses to. It depends entirely on your skill to calculate how accurate you will be(big cross-hair or small)and how much the average damage is, which makes more sense considering your character never picked up a flamethrower or assault rifle before. There’s also silent kills which are always a nice thing to watch but that’s only for melee. Again this is not your typical FPS, this is more relent on the characters skills instead of the players skills.
Now if you’re thinking about going through the game hacking and slashing anyone who gets in your way you’re going to die. In this game you must follow the Masquerade which states that you cant show your Vampire self to the public. Getting strikes causes Vampire hunters and cops to start coming after you, after five though you meet the sheriff which means game over. You're probably thinking that’s cool so no turning into a war form Gangrel and killing bums, I can still carve them up with my [insert weapon here]', well yeah you could but you lose humanity for killing bystanders who didn’t try to hurt you. With the loss of humanity means your slowly embracing the beast and thus you will frenzy more when you lose even the slightest blood. Yay for uncontrollable killing machine! But its not as bad as it sounds you can actually use it to your advantage if you know how.
Now for some of the bad things. The game is based off of a early version of the source engine and thus encounters some problems with physics and character AI certain times. Some people have really buggy games where they cant continue without activating the consol. Others, including my self, had problems with long load times, the reason for it was because the game in reality requires 750 or something like in memory to run properly. Blame public relations. Voice and sound effects are off during some cut scenes. Most of the bugs have been fixed by fan made patches.
As I mentioned earlier, the game just falls apart with the 'kill everyone in your path' end game. I would have loved to have the option to either sneak by using air ducts or just talking my way through like in fallout or arcanum. Then there’s the sewer section of the game which really turns you off despite how interesting the initial idea was.
But with multiple endings, nice story telling and easy to learn controls the game is defiantly a must own for any fans of Troika games and RPG’s in general.