But, while the beginning of the game is all about plot and character development, you quickly realise these are just a way to carry you through between battles. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means it's a different type of game, beneath whose unbelievably lush exterior lies a sophisticated hack 'n' slasher.
And it isn't as if the story is superfluous. It's a grandiose yarn that keeps you wanting to know more to see what's going to happen next. It does seem strange that you could conceivably play most of the game with one of the other characters, leaving Christof behind, when they are just people who have tagged along to help the central figure.
This works in detriment of the role-playing in terms of depth, but it does add to the variety of gameplay and the tactics you can use in combat. To begin with, the battles can be quite frantic and frustrating, especially when the other members of your coterie start running around or using up valuable blood points in useless spells.
The key is knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each character. You can change the stance of each defensive, neutral and offensive , have them follow you or leave them behind, and decide which weapons, disciplines and items they use during combat.
There is never any doubt whatsoever that your characters are vampires, rather than some random collection of fancy fighters with a few magical spells thrown in. You have a frenzy meter that measures how much of a grip the beast within you has. Every time a character takes a hit from an enemy your frenzy levels go up, especially if you're low on blood, and you have less and less control over them, up to the point where they'll start kicking, hacking and biting the nearest thing to them, even if it happens to be one of their friends.
Your blood pool works much in the same way as mana does in other RPGs and you draw from it to use your disciplines or spells if you prefer. You can get blood supplies from vitae bottles you'll find scattered around or plasma bags in the modern age or from sucking it out of pedestrians and other vampires, you can also feed off other members of your coterie.
The game forces you to resort to this in many instances where vitae is hard to find. However, suck a human dry and you'll lose humanity points, making you much more likely to frenzy.
Can you imagine such a humanity system in Soldier Of Fortune You'd be a slavering rabid dog within minutes. As a result, there's always a delicate balance to be kept between blood, health and discipline casting. You also have to keep in mind that a low health level affects your stats, such as strength, dexterity and stamina. Disciplines have a definitive impact on the gameplay.
You use them to solve puzzles although these seem to be rather simple and infrequent, like the one that requires you to transform into mist to get by an otherwise lethal swinging pendulum to the switch that turns it off and to plan your attacks. Luring enemies towards you instead of rushing in like a fool, is often the best tactic. At other points, you need objects in rooms so heavily guarded the only way to reach them is by disciplines of deception and shadows.
There's an extensive background history to the world of Vampire, as you would expect from a table-top RPG that's been around since the late 70s. It's a complete alternate world, with an intricate mesh of clans, personalities, social structures and a real sense of past. Redemption does a great job of introducing you to it all throughout the game, if you haven't been bothered to read some of the heavy tomes chronicling this history or the watered-down version in the manual.
But there are still some instances where you'll wonder just what the hell the people around you are talking about. Some of you will probably be put off by the language in the Dark Ages, with its constant use of cod-Shakespeare, littered with "thous", "thys" and "thines".
As far as we know, people in the 12th century didn't speak like this. Especially in Prague and Vienna. And even more especially when they happened to be French Crusaders. But as an artificial means of creating a sense of being in a distant past it works. The Shakespearean tone isn't just linguistic though, it's embedded in some of the game's very themes. The forbidden love between Christof and Aneska echoes that of Romeo And Juliet, while Christof's inner struggle brings back memories of Hamlet.
If you fell asleep reading that last paragraph, though, you'll pleased to know Vampire doesn't explore any of this in great depth, moving quickly to exploring dungeons, caverns and castles with the sole motive of hitting things over the head with a large piece of metal. We can't emphasise enough just how incredible Vampire looks.
The screenshots give you a fair idea, but you really need to see it moving to appreciate its full beauty. We guarantee that during the first few days you'll spend as much time angling the camera and going into first-person view to admire the world around you as you will playing.
We'd go as far as saying that it's the best looking game we've ever seen, and we can't imagine anything beating it for a while. You could stare at the architecture, the player models and some of the monsters for hours without getting tired. It's not just visually stunning either, the music is superb throughout and the excellent sound effects create an atmospheric environment. There is a certain trade-off to this. The cities are necessarily small and sparsely populated, and the interaction with the environment is strictly limited.
You can roam the streets as much as you like, but you have no freedom to go into all of the houses. Most of the doors are just part of the scenery and serve no function, so no matter how much you want to play out your vampiric role, slipping into the bedrooms of beautiful maidens to suck their blood before drawing your cape across your red-stained face before disappearing in a puff of smoke, it's just not possible. For the game to feature true free-roaming in a realistically modelled city would have taken Nihilistic a decade to program and you'd need a computer the size of your front room to run it.
So for the most part, this isn't a problem. Until you come to London. The modern age levels are mostly disappointing. They're not as bad as the Xen ones in Half-Life although they are much bigger , but they have the same effect of not quite satisfying in the same way as the rest of the game. There are some excellent parts the temple of the followers of Set In London, for example , and they are by no means boring to play through, they just don't meet the high standards of the first part and have you feeling almost immediate nostalgia for a land of broadswords and plague-ridden streets.
Not least because modern day weapons don't seem quite as effective. London is such an awful American pastiche of cliches bobbies, red phone boxes, red double-deckers that it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief in the same way you can with the medieval era. The cobblestone streets, the gas streetlights, the fog, the rain and the architecture itself resemble the '30s Hollywood set for a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film.
In New York, things improve considerably and you suddenly remember how fantastic the game really is. You're now an Elder vampire and your powers are greater than ever. As a consequence you spend more time exploring your disciplines.
As long as you don't come to Vampire with the wrong expectations, you are unlikely to find a more challenging, rewarding or gorgeous RPG. The Masquerade world is so engrossing that you don't want to leave it, its shapes and contours so exquisite you can't keep your eyes off it, its battles so demanding you can't stop rising to the challenge, its dark vampiric powers so alluring you are hypnotised and vulnerable, lost in a trance as it drains your life away.
Soon, you too will look like us. Pale, bleary-eyed, afraid of the sunlight, your teeth aching with an insatiable hunger for more. Your unholy showdown begins in medieval Europe and rages on into the modern day, as you track a soulless enemy in an eternal struggle to destroy him.
For this is the only hope of vengeance for your tortured immortality. Recommended: Processor: 1. See all. Customer reviews. Overall Reviews:. Review Type. All Positive Negative All Steam Purchasers Other All Languages Your Languages Customize.
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When enabled, off-topic review activity will be filtered out. This defaults to your Review Score Setting. Read more about it in the blog post. Excluding Off-topic Review Activity. Too bad there isn't more replay value in the single-player mode. However, despite these benefits, the game does have issues, much like any game shipped before its time. The collision detection system is way off as is your party's AI path-finding whenever you regroup -- the characters tend to bump into things and get stuck!
Other problems are minor but noticeable, such as graphic glitches walking through solid objects and barriers and a flaw that allows you to occasionally bypass a task and go on to the next, yet still end up achieving your goal! Generally, the game is fairly linear in most regards.
In that respect, it's most noticeable during the multiple-choice dialogue sequences, not too unlike Ultima IX: Ascension and perhaps even Revenant. Although you're given a choice of answers from which to choose, for the most part, you end up with the same results. The game follows a good plot but takes you there in almost direct sequence. There's no comparison to the non-linear types such as seen in Eidos's Deus Ex. Coupled with well-written dialogue, a great cast of characters and a multi-player system rivaling Diablo and EverQuest, what more could one ask for -- other than blood itself?
Graphics: With almost every effect available for its time, the game sets the stage for forthcoming RPGs with its new interface and awesome 3D engine. Sound: Game companies should take notice of the use of really good voice actors of the type heard in this game.
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