Twice Bitten, None the Shier

I was a big fan of the Activision's sleeper hit Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption when it arrived a few years ago, so you can imagine my excitement when I heard a new version was in the works in the form of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. The new game would be powered by Valve's cutting-edge Half Life 2 engine and had role-play fanatics around the globe licking their lips in eager anticipation.

In a rather surprising coup, Bloodlines managed to sneak in ahead of the release of Half Life 2, and since I have always been more of a fan of a thinking game than a mindless shooter, I blew my hard earned cash on a copy and was soon knee deep in sinister creatures of the night once again.

This time around, rather than being limited to being a male from a single clan from White Wolf's pen and paper RPG, the player is given the option of playing a vampire of either gender from any of the Camarilla associated clans - The Venture, Gangrel, Nostferatu, Tremere, Brujah, Malkavian and Toreodor. Your character has a set of basic vampire abilities and also clan-based abilities which he or she may develop through the gaining of experience points throughout the game. I picked the Ventrue clan, sort of a ruling elite of Vampires made up from a bloodline who embrace (turn into a vampire) only those of high or noble birth and possess great power of mental influence over others. Each clan also has a weakness - in my case, we Ventrue do not feed on any old trash from the street. Rat blood gives us no sustenance whatsoever and the blood from lowly people such as prostitutes and the homeless can cause us to throw up! The Nostferatu appear so obviously monstrous that they are limited to skulking in the shadows and travelling via sewer for fear of violating The Masquerade : The Camarilla rule that vampires hide their true nature from mortals. This variety means the gaming experience differs considerably from clan to clan, offering some replay value.

Once you get past the character creation, scene-setting intro and slightly long-winded tutorial section, you begin the game in the first of several "parts of town", where you are more or less free to wander and uncover "missions" to complete for the gaining of experience and equipment. Not all of them advance the main plot and you aren't compelled to play them in any specific order, which does a bit to hide the linear nature of the game with it's rather small areas. Each mission once obtained is added to your journal, which is updated to reflect your current status in the given mission, so if you forget exactly where you were in each task, especially if you have several missions going at once, a quick glance can set you straight. Missions may be obtained in a variety of ways, from hacking computers (just one of the many skills available), to interacting with NPC's or even checking your private email.

Statistics and skills play a part in how the game progresses, with different options and actions being available, depending on each particular vamp's abilities and vitals, and of course on the current "humanity" level of the player character. Becoming too animalistic and losing hold of what made the player's character once human can have some serious gaming repercussions! Im not going to go into detail about the plot of the game, but suffice is to say there are a number of groups your vamp may associate with and form allegiance with throughout the game.

The action, as you would suspect from a game running the HL2 engine, takes place through a combination of first person and (as you might not expect) third person perspectives. The level design is nice enough, but each area is far, far too small. The initial Santa Monica area consists of a few streets, numerous businesses and services, a parking garage, a pier and a small section of beach. It's rather limiting. Unlike in the previous game, it is always night time and there is never any need to shelter from the crisping rays of the sun.

Graphically the game looks beautiful. I experienced only minor slowdown when there were a lot of characters walking around in large outside areas, otherwise it all looked great and ran sensationally. The Half Life 2 engine really has set new standards in the portrayal of the human face, with the eyes looking wet and real and expressions varied and convincing.

Sound is excellent, from the pulsating title track, to the hypnotic gothic ... I don't know how to describe it ... stuff that plays in the Asylum nightclub. Voice acting is top drawer and I also enjoyed the little embellishments such as working radios and televisions, with constantly running (if a little too often repeating) shows, rather reminiscent of the Grand Theft Auto games.

The brilliant sound and graphics culminate to provide a couple of the most excellent gaming experiences I have ever witnessed on the PC. The most notable is that of the mission to the Ocean Beach Hotel, which the average player should be able to receive a couple of hours in. I won't spoil things here, but what initially seems to be the biggest haunted house cliché turns into such a spine chilling gaming experience (especially if you have sane gamma levels and darkness levels are as they are intended) I have ever witnessed. Without a word of a lie, I actually had to quit out and resume my game in the morning when it was light. Even then I had to take the headset off!

As you have probably guessed from what I have written above, I found VTM: Bloodlines to be a highly enjoyable game, but in addition to the slightly claustrophobic levels, there are a number of other annoyances. There are also a couple of game-killing bugs, which have thankfully been addressed in a patch.

Unfortunately, patches don't fix everything. The load times when transitioning between areas or entering buildings are utterly unacceptable and the last third of the game really becomes more of a shoot n hack em up spree rather than a RPG/Adventure. The very best parts of the game hardly required a shot to be fired, so the massive shoot-outs, requiring serious FPS skills which crop up are quite confusing to this hardened RPG gamer. I eventually entered god mode for the final quarter of the game, because I simply wasn't having fun combating the flood of enemies or taking part in twenty minute battles against "big bosses". This was a really sour point for me.

Another gripe involves the skills, which as I mentioned above are many and varied, but I quickly found myself relying on only one or two of them for the entire game. "Trance" is just too powerful a skill for a level one ability. I used it to incapacitate and kill at least 50% of the enemies I encountered.

Finally, Bloodlines suffers somewhat from dumbing down, probably in an attempt to attract FPS fans. On one mission to a museum I was told to "not leave any evidence that I was there and not to harm anybody", or something along those lines, but I ended up completing the mission by killing everyone in the building, smashing windows, destroying alarm systems and getting out of the place.

Overall, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is an excellent RPG, which provided me with many hours of entertainment. I enjoyed the way you could choose the way you played your game and how your ending could be different depending on the eventual route you followed. It is unfortunate that first person shooting became so important late in the game and that a few things were just not polished quite as highly as they could have been. Slightly larger and more detailed levels, about 20% more role-play and about 20% less shooter and this one would have been an all, time classic - not to be forgotten. As it is, Bloodlines is a very solid Role-play entry, sure to delight Vampire fans and the current best game using the very pretty Half Life 2 engine.