John Gillooly is a sucker for a good Vampire game.
Bloodlines is the second attempt to computerise White Wolf's Vampire The Masquerade pen and paper RPG, the first being Nihilistic's flawed title, Redemption. The two titles are related in origin only, as Bloodlines is a new story in White Wolf's World of Darkness, focused upon the seedy side of Los Angeles.
You play as an orphaned Vampire fledgling, whose sire is executed for breaking the strict laws of the Masquerade, a term used to describe the hiding of Vampiric existence from the human population. The vampire prince of Los Angeles takes pity on you and so begins a roleplaying experience that is surprisingly flexible and very different to other titles out there.
Your character can be a member of any of seven different Vampire clans, each with its own abilities, strengths and weaknesses.
Your choice of clan will strongly influence your experience in Vampire, play as a hideously deformed Nosferatu and you will find yourself hiding from view and dwelling in the sewers munching on rats. But play as a Ventrue and you will live closer to humanity, sweet talking and seducing your way through the game. However for Ventrue, feeding on prostitutes or hobos will more often than not cause you to be ill. And a rat dinner is not an option.
Feeding plays an important part in the game, as blood is an important resource, used much like mana traditionally is in RPGs. Whenever you activate your special disciplines it costs a certain amount of blood. To replenish blood you need to feed.
Feeding can be from donated blood purchased from the blood bank, rats, or by luring unsuspecting characters into secluded spots and munching down on their neck. You need to feed out of sight to maintain the masquerade: suck on a neck in public and people will start suspecting Vampires exist. Similar rules apply when using your vampire powers in public. You also need to be careful when feeding off your humanity level. All Vampires struggle to contain the beast that lurks within them, and this is maintained by their humanity level. Acts like draining a human of all their blood drop your humanity level, and when it gets too low there is a chance that you will lose control of the beast and enter into a frenzy. When this happens you gain immense boosts to your stats but lose all control of your character. Which is a bad thing.
As you may gather, the Vampire universe imposes a number of interesting limits and restrictions on your behaviour, but there is still a lot of flexibility and variety in the way you play the game and interact with the world. The roleplaying experience is surprisingly deep, and the storyline of the game so rich and involving once you get beyond the first few hours of Bloodlines, which deliver an experience much less rewarding than what comes later.
While the roleplaying aspect of Bloodlines is compelling, it does have some near fatal flaws in its combat system. Vampire The Masquerade is one of the most combat focused pen and paper RPGs in existence, and when you take into account the fact that Troika has employed a first person shooter engine to drive the game the expectation of rich and rewarding combat is high.
Unfortunately in an attempt to support both melee and shooting combat Troika has ended up with a system that seems incredibly unbalanced. Because firearms usage is stat-based the game does not have the 'aim at head, pull trigger, enemy down' mechanic shooter that fans expect. Instead gunplay is slow and inaccurate, to the point where quite often it is just easier to wade in with fists or melee weapons. Even from the start of the game the melee weapons dwarf guns in terms of damage dealt, however melee combat switches you to a third person view where aiming is fiddly and this just makes the combat experience a little unsatisfying. It is workable, but we expected it to be a lot better.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010