All Reviews:. Popular user-defined tags for this product:. Is this game relevant to you? Sign In or Open in Steam. View EULA. Languages :. English and 2 more. Publisher: Activision. Share Embed. Read Critic Reviews. Low Violence: Low Violence Version. Add to Cart. Bundle info. Add to Account. View Community Hub. Players will develop their character's powers, interact with other characters and embark on story-driven quests as they battle mortals and other vampires with an incredible array of vampire powers and weapons.
See all. Customer reviews. Overall Reviews:. Review Type. The original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines game released in , developed by the now defunct Troika Games and published by Activision. Despite mixed reviews, poor sales, and technically releasing unfinished, the game garnered a cult classic status.
The sequel will once again be an action RPG and offers a similar premise, with the player taking control of a newly transformed vampire. Fans of the series have had other games to keep themselves occupied. Last year saw the release of two Vampire: The Masquerade visual novels, Coteries of New York and Shadows of New York, as well as a battle royale spin-off Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodhunt is available in early access, with the full release scheduled for After falling in love with videogames during the days of the GameCube, Michael Beckwith has been writing about them since We can't wait.
Purring sweetly in the background of Bloodlines lies the Source engine, purveyor of graphical genius to Half-Life 2. With its remarkable facial animation, DirectX 9 effects and a new lighting system devised by Troika, Bloodlines looks set to be one of the most graphically stunning RPGs ever. Above and beyond this, however, is a modified Havok 2 physics engine that looks to be so good it'll make your head bleed. If your vampire is strong enough, you'll be able to interact with the environment like never before - shifting crates, lifting small cars and generally making your presence felt.
Meanwhile we shouldn't forget, as Leonard Boyarsky, joint CEO of Troica, himself points out, that physics objects blow apart real neat. They sure do. For years mortal propaganda has been chipping away at us, hoodwinking us into balieving that it's not much fun being a empire. Damned lies! Well, maybe not, but you can be ur dead and still be hip, and Vampire: The Masquerade -Bloodlines is going to show you how. Put simply, if this til manages to pull off what it promises than the RPG world will be set on fire.
It's still early days, but Bloodlines looks set tc intricately meld the traits of the traditic nal RPG with the intense shootery of the FPS. Stuff like experience points, character groups, quests and NPC inters ction are still here, but so is an arse lai of weapons that covers knives, submachine guns, flamethrowers and 'stakeguns'. If you add to the mix your 12 different vampire powers supernatural speed, invisibility, mind control, superhuman strength and the like , then it becomes clear that we are looking at what might be described as a Deus Ex with pointy teeth.
And it uses Half-Life's Source Engine. Excited yet? So how does it work? We caught up with Troika bigwig Leonard Boyarsky and producer Thaine Lyman, and they told us all about it. For example, a Toreador clan member is suave and seductive - an Anne Rice style vampire - while the Nosferatu is a hideous beast stalking in the shadows. Each of these has multiple conflict areas associated with it.
The player interacts with NPCs, receives quests and buys equipment in the safe areas of each hub before moving out to the action. From what Zone has seen, the environments that you'll be battling through are vast and wide-ranging, covering all the grubby aspects of the seedy American underground: nightclubs, dodgy hotels, Hollywood Mansions and the more traditional gothic caverns and graveyards. What's more, these environments and the myriad characters that you meet in them will react to you according to the choices you make, your clan, your abilities and the reputation that you've developed through your mis deeds.
So if you've recently sucked the plasma out of someone's virgin younger sister, they are unlikely to welcome you with open arms let alone open veins. And of course, throbbing beautifully in the background, lies the Source Engine. When a character gets angry at you, you know it. When they're happy with you, you know it. When they want to make you dinner, you know it.
If Fallout is anything to go by, Troika is pretty much the best in the business when it comes to NPC chitchat. Armed with this technology we could be in for encounters and characters that are so immersive you won't be able to tell the difference between playing the game and going down the shops for a pint of milk or a quart of type A-positive.
By their own admission, the strong team behind Bloodlines found that "using somebody else's engine is like jumping into a cold pool. In most previous role-players, original designs and visions have had to be compressed into characters with pixels for faces, with even main characters being scrunched up into 2in-high models. These days every fold, wrinkle and zit in the artwork can find their way to someone's face, and the team is clearly enjoying the freedom that this affords.
The visuals may not match those we've seen in Half-Life 2, but they're still out of this world. We added our own lighting system too, because a game that takes place at night has very different demands from a game that plays out during daylight.
We had to incorporate a lot more shadows and moody lighting. So there is almost a film quality to it. Those of you with above-average memory will be aware that it wasn't always like this. V:tM - Redemption was an isometric party-based affair that started its story back in the dark ages: it was old school that's old school with a beard rather than a tub of drugs and a whistle.
So why the sudden shift in gears? The stats affect the gameplay, but the player is the one who is actually responsible. This is clearly a far cry from the games in which you click on a beasty and back while your character cleaves mea from its ribcage. They'll search you out. They'll throw things at you. We used a lot of the Half-Life 2 combat Al, and a lot of their scripted stuff, but we had to add a lot of the RPG-specific stuff ourselves. There are multiple ways to get through our game, so we have to accommodate the fact that the player can have different experiences getting to a certain area.
If you've seen the E3 Bloodlines video you'll have noticed that it has a number of similarities with what we've seen of its ginger, radioactive step-brother, Half-Life 2.
One notable scene has a monster picking up corpses and lobbing them at you, while elsewhere the physics engine shows off with an enthusiastic jiggle of an NPC's over-sized breasts. Bloodlines will also have extensive Modding capabilities and epic vampire vs vampire hunter multiplayer battles. For us, Bloodlines carries with it big expectations.
The right people are making the right game with the right source material. They are also using the most incredible game engine ever made. The colour of next season is undoubtedly going to be black. No Game has ever come close to recreating the feeling of playing Deus Ex - no game has even come within a bio-modded sniff. The first time we saw Bloodlines though, well we wondered if it was possible Some among our number have expressed doubts on exactly how free-form the final game will be, while others have wondered whether the stat-spliced combat is going to be fulfilling enough.
However, we still have faith that this is going to be special. Plus, there are powers that let you boil an enemy's blood until they explode, or conjure up a giant spectral wolf to disembowel your fellow vampires. All of which means there's still a hell of a lot to hope for, even if it must have been a task and a half for isometric-roleplayer stalwarts Troika to stretch themselves into shooter territory.
What is certain though, is that there's going to be more swearing, blood-letting and mammoth breasts on show than we've seen in many a month. And for that, at least, we're very glad And what a sense of humour too The amputation-fetishist attacking you with a severed mannequin limb; the Evil Dead mini-game in the graveyard; the werewolf, golem and Chinese-monster scenes where you realise you're not the nastiest thing this world has to offer; the four-way split-ending; the crazy combat and the multiple paths through every level; the enormously varied character classes; the endless moral and political content expressed through the exposition of the world.
This is Deus Ex with vampires, and each time you play it rewards you. It was rushed out on the same day as Half-Life 2 was released! Duh, Activision! Also, developers Troika were shut down on the same day, so patches were left to the fans. Which was a problem because you couldn't finish the released version, due to a bug halfway through the game.
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