Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines : Games : Web Wombat

There's something about a game that manages to license a hot, brilliant new engine (in this case, Source) and then brutally avoid its potential, at the same time slapping on a promising game that's as buggy as a week-old dead cow at noon.

But it's not all bad, despite that.

Based on the popular World of Darkness tabletop RPG by White Wolf and coming from Troika Games, the clever boys and girls behind Arcanum, a similarly promising steam punk RPG that also had its fair share of bugs, I was, as I said, looking forward to Bloodlines.

Vampire's previous outing on the PC was a formulaic if well-made RPG with an excellent script that just didn't have enough variety in the early stages of the game to keep it from being a dungeon romp.

I hoped Bloodlines would address these issues and, to a certain extent, it has, but it is definitely not without a few screw-ups along the way.

You are a newly created vampire on the streets of L.A, generated quickly before you start the game with your only real choices being sex, clan (race-type for vampires basically, with different clans: from the charismatic Ventrue to the ugly and highly supernatural Nosferatu, having different starting abilities and gameplay conditions) and opening stats, and you're finding your feet in this new world, feeling out the politics, the players and the Big Issues.

An RPG in the Deus Ex style, Bloodlines features all the stats, skills and dialogue trees you could want, but presented in a manner than even the most unaware RPG-nonce can pick the game up and play. The game runs in either a first or third person view, with melee combat handled in the third person and ranged in the first, the latter playing much like your average shooter, but with transparent stats.

Starting off in the coastal area of L.A., Santa Monica, the player is presented with a hub, which is linked to various buildings and businesses. Here, missions and equipment can be respectively found, along with various unruly, clever and downright sinister characters.

"Hand over the twinkies. DO IT NOW! And throw
in a roll of toilet paper and some dental floss."

Not everyone you meet is a vampire but, conversely, not everyone you meet is human, either, and you'll mix with werewolves, ghosts and general-issue Things.

By the same token, that's not to say the humans you meet aren't crazy, smacked out of their brains or just strange.

From the hub, when all missions and story arcs are completed, you move onto Greater L.A. and new hubs, where more is accessible and the risk/reward ratio is greater, and the story gets ramped up a notch.

There's a greater overlying plot arc regarding the end of the world, the coming of the Apocalypse, a crazed superhuman serial killer and a ship that's come in bearing a sarcophagus containing an ancient bloodthirsty vampire, but there are plenty of mission threads with multiple layers of solution that can be approached in several different ways.

Much like Deus Ex, the things you do in this world affect how you're viewed and how things turn out. You can even read up on the results of your missions in your Mission Journal, a nice feature that allows you to keep track of how things are going and what's left to do.

One of the things that separates Bloodlines from a lot of other RPGs is the Masquerade/Humanity system. Basically, established vampire law dictates that if humans were made aware of vampires as a whole, the vamps would last about as long as a chain-smoker in a fireworks factory. So they must hide, and generally try not to practice their arcane voodoo in plain sight of law and order.

If you run around killing people and making yourself all visible, your Masquerade points go down, and eventually you'll attract the attention of bounty hunters, and then you are truly in a world of trouble.

Humanity comes in as far as your attitude goes. If you are, to put it bluntly, a prick, your Humanity rating goes down. The further it drops, the more you become a blood-thirsty animal, prone to Frenzies (the player loses control randomly of the character, who then attacks the nearest character, draining them), and lacking in real dialogue options.

"This cadaver ain't built like they were in
my day. Look, his head comes clean off!"

Your charisma drops, and if you lose all your Humanity, it's game over; you've surrendered to the Beast. Humanity points can be redeemed by being a good guy or by completing certain tasks.

Graphically, the Source engine is capable of brilliant things. Unfortunately, it's really not put to its best use here in Vampire. Character models tend to look chalky and fake, lip-sync is unconvincing and animations could be considered stilted in several cases.

By the same token, Source under HL2 was designed to optimise itself to run smoothly on basically any PC and look good doing so.

Vampire, on the other hand, runs like a cripple encased in concrete. Though the environments do look rather flash, they aren't particularly special in and of themselves. It's a very mixed bag.

What isn't a mixed bag is the audio and the story. Every character in the game has fully voiced-over lines, all sounding at the very least competent, but mostly quite professional. The script is excellent, though extremely adult in nature. Every curse word under the sun is made use of, and there are some crazy situations here bordering on the extreme.

A lot of twisted ground is covered, but every moment is enjoyable, every character captivating, every dialogue choice clever in its own right. Also, this game may feature the computer world's only fat African-American gun smuggler in Fat "Yes That's Fat Eff-Ay-Tee- Fat 'Cos I Gotta Weight Problem An' I Just Don't Give a F*ck" Larry.

I mentioned bugs. We're talking crashes of various strange natures, animation problems, some odd AI, and the laggish performance, even on high-end machines. The above was recently addressed by a patch, but still, this is pretty shoddy for a game that has gone gold.

If you like a good RPG, you should check Vampire out. However, I'd go with a rental first, because it eats system resources like popcorn, and you might not have the digital muscle to run it.

It's not a truly great game, but it's engrossing, highly adult and even darkly comic. Just don't expect a modern Baldur's Gate with Bauhaus topping and you should be fine.

Game: Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
Players: 1
Online: Yes
Developer: Troika Games
Distributor: Activision

Rating: 75%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is on the shelves now.

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