Biting off More than You can Chew?

 There are few times you’d hear a hard core gamer like me say a game is “too long”. OK – so I won’t go that far with Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. I will say that the game’s storyline could have been tightened significantly, possibly allowing more time to polish the endless nuisances, bugs and gaps in the game play.

Troika Games, the same developers behind the expansive RPG Arcanum, bring out a solid interpretation of the White Wolf classic pen and paper Vampire: The Masquerade. For those unfamiliar with the game, the clever twist on vampire lore has the creatures of the night waging and endless power struggle between rival clans, while maintaining the Masquerade that keeps humans from finding out their true nature.

VTMB does great justice to this world, including nearly every facet of the World of Darkness: werewolves, ghouls (humans blood-bonded to a vampire), zombies, Kuei-Jin (vampires of the east) and Wraiths (ghosts). Many of the “normal” humans, meanwhile, are anything but – often becoming more beastly than the worst vampire as they amputate body parts for art, or shoot “snuff” films for a living.

You enter this world as an unwelcome childe in vampire society – siring vampires is strictly at the permission of the city’s prince, who slays your sire and lets you live in order to run his errands.

And, of course, in true RPG style, you can’t run one errand without getting sent on three more errands just to finish the first. (The game developers even throw in a bit of self-parodying humor over this, with a radio ad for a fake Frankenstein game: “Sure, I’ll give you directions to the bakery, stranger, but first you have to go pick up my daughter from the lake!”)

What makes the game really unique is the way most of the conversations are tailored to your specific clan and abilities. Many times you can use seduction, intimidation or persuasion (not to mention vampiric mind control powers) to get what you want out of humans. The Malkavian vampires, whose unique curse is insanity, have often bizarre speech choices and begin to hear voices. The Nosferatu, cursed by hideous appearance, must use the sewers to travel, and forget about interacting with most normal humans.

At first glance the game is a perfect blend of skill and puzzle solving, with enough side quests and variations to make it endlessly replayable.

Unfortunately, several of the primary quests in the game require somewhat tedious tasks. For example, about halfway through the game you are treated to a mind-numbing dungeon crawl with Doom 3-eque demons around every corner.

One of the earliest missions involves a haunted hotel. The mansion’s ambiance is perfect – paintings start rattling at odd moments, children’s toys inexplicably move when you’re not looking – and overall provides an enjoyably nerve-wracking fun-house ride. Unfortunately, it’s little more than a ride – your task ends up as little more than following the noises around while they lead you to the various clues that you need to solve the mission. When I started the game a second time, I literally stopped playing before starting that mission because I just didn’t want to deal with exact same thing over and over again.

Move on to the smaller nuisances – such as “hot spots” that you have to click on to open elevators, etc., that occasionally are difficult to pinpoint. The human AI sometimes makes the city feel overly cold and lifeless, as humans only react at the sight of violence, but not your character or each other (unless you’re a Nosferatu).

Even though the game claims to allow multiple solutions to missions, I found most of the main missions to be very straightforward, although you generally have an option of stealth vs. all-out attack.

Finally, the game displays numerous glitches from time to time, from humans using different sound files than they should, to characters reappearing after you’ve killed them, to other annoying oddities.

Anyone who is a fan of the White Wolf PNP will absolutely love this game, though it falls short of being a true classic in its imperfections.