Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines Review

Almost nothing here works properly and it is still among the best written role-playing games ever shipped. Troika built seven playable clans that alter the game at the level of dialogue rather than statistics, so a Malkavian hears different lines from a stop sign and a Nosferatu cannot walk down a public street without using the sewers. The Ocean House Hotel is a haunted house that never fires a shot at you and remains the most frightening level of its decade.

Los Angeles is split into hubs full of characters who talk like people, and the Masquerade rules put a real constraint on every conversation. The problems are structural rather than cosmetic. Gunplay is limp, the engine work was unfinished at launch, quests break outright, and the last third collapses into a Sabbat warehouse and a sewer crawl that feel like a worse game grafted on. It needed another year, and the community eventually supplied it.