You guys gushing over this game and giving it 10's clearly have some serious nostalgia issues. There are things to like about this game, sure. The writing is pretty good and the graphics were pretty good for their time and are still enjoyable if you like seeing that classic late 90's 3D PC game design. Gameplay is extremely messy though.
Imagine trying to play Baldur's Gate or any otherYou guys gushing over this game and giving it 10's clearly have some serious nostalgia issues. There are things to like about this game, sure. The writing is pretty good and the graphics were pretty good for their time and are still enjoyable if you like seeing that classic late 90's 3D PC game design. Gameplay is extremely messy though.
Imagine trying to play Baldur's Gate or any other similar CRPG, except there's no pause button to give your party orders, your team's AI is completely braindead, and you've also got to be micromanaging your whole team's blood levels during all of this in realtime. Your characters all have so many abilities and spells and will barely ever get to use any of them because there's no time and none of your teammates can be trusted to do anything properly when left alone. I see a lot of people here comparing this to Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Dragon Age, which is really weird because this is missing SO many basic features that made those games work (and this even came out a few years after the original Baldur's Gate so you'd think they'd have incorporated them since they were clearly going for that type of feel).
Sure, they can help out with basic attacks, but they can often even mess that up as even in "neutral" mode they'll rush after a single fleeing enemy and pull down a whole room full of enemies on you while you're still not finished with the previous group, and you're almost certainly dead when this happens. You can try setting them on "defensive", but then they'll just stand there doing absolutely nothing unless they're directly attacked. They'll just stand there and watch you die without any orders. There's also "aggressive", which is so aggressive that they'll start mindlessly slaughtering innocent villagers and not even drinking them. This mode doesn't seem to have any use at all unless you're planning on doing a full evil run, and even then you still wouldn't want it turned on in any actual combat area. (Oh and there are also some areas with sunlight hazard zones that they'll just plow right through until they die if you don't walk everyone through individually)
Your idiot comrades also like to stop doing anything you've ordered them to the second you switch characters, including drinking much needed blood from an enemy, and seem to go out of their way to pointlessly waste as much blood as possible if you give them any halfway decent abilities/spells of their own. The spellcaster characters especially will just spam their most powerful spells in any given situation and waste their whole blood supply just to help take down a single weak enemy, so you'll have to leave them low on blood and weak on purpose just to get them to stop because otherwise you'll have to use up the whole team's blood supply to keep them full. It's just annoying.
Then there's that camera and the godawful movement controls. You can basically choose between a 3rd person view that's too close and too tilted to ever see as well as you'd like (especially with how massive the UI overlay is) or a top down view that's also too close and tilted to be any use at all. This gets worse as you get into later areas where you're fighting in a lot of tight quarters and encountering some small enemy types. The view is so bad that you'll often find yourself frantically spinning around trying to even be able to find the tiny spot to click on the little guys so you can attack (and did I mention you have to manually click attack for every single strike?). 3rd person view still gives you the best view and yet there are no manual controls so you still have to use mouse clicks to make your character move (did I mention the mouse click movement is unresponsive and has awful pathfinding??).
Look, if you have some nostalgic attachment to this game that's fine. It does have it's good points and it can still be appreciated by us people who were around playing games back then, but gtfo of here with these ridiculous 10/10 reviews. This is a VERY flawed game and it deserves all of its average or lower scores. I'm more of a fan of Bloodnet myself, but I would never give that game a 10/10 either because like this it's almost all style and not much substance. It's great that they clearly had a lot of ambitious ideas for the time, but that doesn't mean much when most of the ambitious gameplay mechanics don't actually function properly (and yes I "know how to play the game" and yes I finished it, but brute forcing my way through a bunch of broken stuff was a struggle that constantly bounced back and forth between fun and frustrating). You kids need some Planescape: Torment in your life if you want to see how a game like this is supposed to be done.… Expand
Vampire: The Masquerade - RedemptionYour Score0 out of 10User Score
