One of the best -may be THE best- CRPG in 2000s. Play this if you like CRPGs, with the flavor of Interplay/Bioware RPGs.
VTM, is a pen&paper settings inside the World Of Darkness. WOD, is a world created by White Wolf, similar to Forgotten Realms or Middle Earth worlds. Contrarily to ME or FR, WOD's timeline is in modern age. Of course, there are also medieval age stories under the name of "Dark Age". WOD is also not a "high fantasy" world. Even there are many kind of monsters, monster encounter is not a daily business. Many monsters hide themselves from the human population. This creates a mystic world. It also gives a feeling like "this is your actual world, but you will enter the realm of monsters you never heard of". WOD is also a dark world, very dark world. Vampire The Masquerade, is a part of WOD. It tells the stories of Vampires who hides themselves under the name of "masquerade".
In fact, VTM Bloodlines explains everything in a way even the newest player would understand while hardcore players don't feel these like boring tutorials. Game perfectly balanced explaining the story. So you don't need to know VTM or WOD before playing.
Let's enter the game. It's not a continue of VTM Redemption, and a very different story.
We start the game as a sireless vampire and try to survive inside the web of deception. It is a quest based game similar to Interplay/Bioware RPGs. So if you love these kind of games, you will feel at home.
You kill, you earn xp, you increase your abilities and spend your money to items.
The "mana" is your blood. You need to drink blood in order to cast "magic" and to survive.
You also need to obey "masquerade", so that means you need to hide truths from the humans.
Combat is based on your character abilities and your player skills. Good character sheet don't make the game automatic, and Good aim skills don't make the game piece of cake. You need to combine both of them to pass the levels.
The best part is the story. Story-telling, character voices, quest design, dialog options, all of them is pretty awesome. You will feel like talking with real people in a real world. The story is very addictive. In fact the game is long - you will probably finish it in 24+ hours - but at the end of the game, you wish there was more thing to do.
Yes, one of the problems is lack of side quests. Of course current main and side quests are very fun. And they take long time to do. But different quest options each time you play, and alternative endings for quests would indeed a perfect feature for this game.
It is a bit open-ended, you will see different ends due to your choices, but prior side quests could have different ends also.
The worst part is the bugs. This game is very badly programmed. Even worse, the developers seperated very early after the game and the game's progress stopped. We have only 1.2 patch for the game. Fortunately, This has the most hardcore fans and game progress continued with unofficial patches. Don't expect big programming changes or DLCs, but there is lots of bug correction. So we heavily suggest you to download the latest unofficial patch before playing this game.
Go and play this game if you are not played yet. You will get one of the best story in the PC gaming.