I finished Vampire: Bloodlines a week ago, and I’m so conflicted about the game that I still don’t know what to write about it. On one hand, the game frequently made me want to put my fist through my monitor. On the other hand, I’m already trying to figure out what character I’ll play next. I haven’t played an RPG twice since I was, like, in high school. Let’s take a quick look at the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good is the immersion. I honestly can’t say the last time that I’ve ever felt an RPG truly draw me in with it’s audo-visual immersion as this game did. The art’s good, the music great, the character design snappy, the lighting well-done, many of the themes very dark and the dialogue overall is pretty excellent — capturing the black lipstick vibe and skewering it at the same time. It probably helped that I played a mad Malkavian, which meant all the responses I had to offer were batshit insane. Tragically, the voices in my head never struck up conversation with a stop sign, though I did have a chat with my television set.

I also greatly enjoyed the overall level of sexuality in the game. It ain’t exactly high brow, and like all interactive entertainment, it’s level of sleaziness is affected a great deal by how you play it. I’ve long advocated more ‘adult’ games — it’s definitely a step up from games like the Guy Game and Leisure Suit Larry, the Porky’s analog of the games industry. Hey, I loved Porky’s — back when I had to sneak past my parents bedroom to watch it on Skinemax at 3 AM.

The bad: there were some unfortunate game design decisions. The entire last third of the game was all combat, including one boss mob that deserves its own writeup for design incompetence. The game also lost all of its freeform feel and became purely linear. And even though the design of most of the game tried to allow you to attack problems from multiple directions (stealth, persuasion or force), all boss monsters require combat, which leaves your stealth-persuader at a disadvantage. Also, halfway through training your guns up to max, you’ll notice that guns utterly suck.

The ugly: the AI. I know, I know. I don’t want realistic AI. But I also don’t want AI that’s obviously retarded. Playing as a stealther, AI is much more observable, so you see things like guards constantly getting stuck on doors you’ve opened, guards not noticing when you do so, massage parlor attendants not even blinking when you slaughter guards in front of them. If this were the good ol’ 2D Castle Wolfenstein, I wouldn’t have noticed, but the more immersed I am by ‘realistic’ sound and graphics, the more these things glare when they aren’t right.

Probably uglier for me is the in-game cut scenes. Many are well-done, but many are just clumsy. When my ghoul sucked blood from my wrist, there was a foot of visible air between the two models. Characters constantly skated up hills or to doors without moving their legs. Once, while following a guard majestically pushing through double doors, the doors closed before I got there, and my character had to open them again. Embarrassing.

To me, these are less forgiveable. Most bugs in games are caused by unexpected interactions, where it’s hard to see all of the possible things that can go wrong – pathfinding and doors causing some of those AI issues, for example. Trying to guess all of the ways a player will play a game is difficult, and sometimes the flaws in these system interactions require such deep surgery that quick fixes can’t get in for ship. But if you’re in a cutscene, the game has total control. The designer has total control. The player can’t input anything, he can’t screw up the experience, he can only sit and watch, which makes these errors glare even more. Especially in a game that so prizes immersion, there’s no good excuse for that kind of sloppiness.

All in all, I’d still recommend it. The immersion is just too good, and it’s a nice RPG that has neither elves nor space marines. I’m going to play again. This time, though, I think I’ll play a talker. But I’ll train up melee for those bossfights.