I’m going to break this down by category:

Story
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The story for this game, and your interactions with that story, is this game’s big selling point. This game comes from the age of linear RPGs, when you followed a story and you liked it. The game features a number of side missions which do an amazing job of fleshing out the world and can change how NPCs view you. This game takes place in four hubs, where you can find side quests and generally romp around, and a number of smaller areas you go to for main quests where you have more specific goals. The story is very well-grounded, especially for a game about vampires, and never tries to reach above its means. It’s pretty close to perfect.

Graphics
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The graphics of this game aren’t terribly impressive, since the game is eleven years old. However, they follow a consistent and interesting aesthetic which gives flavor the the world and really brings the game to life.

There are a couple of graphical glitches I’ve noticed:
– The first is that, while in the sewers, the water reflections will often forget to update, meaning the water reflects the world from one point of view and you see the world from an entirely different point of view. It looks pretty weird and annoyed me a lot.
– The second glitch is that objects near the top and bottom of the screen will often disappear. This includes things like parts of buildings and the ground. I suspect the developers implemented a visibility culling algorithm, so they didn’t render objects that were outside of the player’s field of view, but they’re culling too many things. This issue amused me.
– The third is more of a performance issue than a graphics issue, but it’s related to graphics so I’ll put it here. Whenever particles appear on screen, the game experiences massive frame drops. Normally, I can run this game at 60+ frames per second. Throw in some particles, and I get like 10. No joke. This isn’t too much of an issue, since there aren’t many particle systems in the game, but if you use some of your vampire powers in first-person mode you get this massive slowdown, and whenever supernatural enemies die they explode into particles which looks cool but, again, causes massive framerate drops. V:TM:B was built with the Source engine, which didn’t have any sort of particle system until Half-Life 2: Episode 2, so I suspect whoever at Troika programmed the particle systems for this game did a pretty bad job of it.

Audio
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This game is from 2004, so the audio isn’t super amazing high-quality noiseless recordings, but that’s okay. I rather liked the way the dialogue sounded. I’m not enough of an audio engineer to describe it very well, but it fits very well into this game.

The audio does have an issue that holds my rating back. When you wear headphones, it sounds a lot like the game plays the dialogue tracks separately in each ear, with one ear’s audio delayed slightly from the other ear’s. This sounds bad and hurts the overall audio quality.

Controls
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This is the game’s weakest point. Although movement feels pretty alright, combat is awful. When you click to attack, if the attack animation, enemy getting hit animation, sound of the enemy getting hit, and the number that tells you how much damage you did all occur within one second of each other, you’re pretty lucky. What’s interesting is that, when enemies attack you, those things pretty much happen at the same time. What’s also interesting is that pretty much every time an enemy hits you, you stagger back, so if you’re fighting a group of enemies who would be no trouble individually, they’ll attack you in sequence so you stay staggered and can’t do anything. It’s really annoying, especially since you only sometimes stagger enemies.

I played a melee character, so I can’t comment on the gun play.

Fun
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This game is definitely fun. The storyline is incredibly compelling, and the world makes sense in a way that few other games have accomplished. The character customization allows you to play a wide variety of character types, and leveling up certain skills unlocks dialogue options that also really help define your character. You can seduce people, then suck their blood in the middle of the street and no one cares, which amuses me to no end.

Conclusion: Although it has a number of graphical glitches and a rather frustrating combat system, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines is an phenomenal role-playing game that would be at home in any gamer’s library.

The bad:
This was a very buggy game, I hear it has been fixed by the online community, although considering everything I had to go trough to play trough it back in the days, I have a bit of mixed feelings about how much you can actually fix.

Melee fighting system is clunky and clumsy, aiming with ranged is just clumsy, which in it’s way pushes you to play the role-playing part of the game much more, rather than just strong-arming trough it.

The good:
That aside, the game is unique, in that it is one of the rare games that takes vampires a bit more seriously (I guess it’s like Twilight made by Goths). This can be attributed to its source material, the Not-C-Rpg vampire franchise of the same name, so I can’t credit the developers for it, although their execution is good.

The story is fabulous and dark and very mature, the soundtrack is great, the characters inhabiting the world are well built, well voiced, well written and all in all a better experience than most TV shows. The golden word here is IMMERSION!

Conclusion: A mature and fun vampire game which is an unique experience, from it’s quirky NPC right down to its clunky character control.