If I go will you follow (Only if it's at night)

Today I would like to talk about my favourite game of all time. I spent well over two weeks obsessively playing this game.
If you know me you wont need three guesses to know what game I will spend the next few hours foaming at the mouth over.

I will start off by saying that this game was released in a completely unfinished state as so very unfortunately the studio working on it closed down before they could complete it. However they decided that they had spent so much time on it and it was such a unique universe that they would release it "as is" and let everyone play it, the community did what they could to fix it, releasing several patches that fixed a lot of the crashes, visual bugs, added a few features that couldn't be implemented and basically just helped polish an already amazing game.

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines is set in a somewhat fictional America, at night. I say "somewhat" because all of the locations and buildings do actually exist in real life but the characters and main setting (and a couple of plot specific buildings) do not. The game starts with a cutscene of you and another character "getting busy". This all leads into a convoluted storyline involving a lot of running around, fighting toughs, collecting needed objects and other tasks, that fit together nicely, and once you start to figure out all the different sides from each of the faction leaders you begin to understand the entire story (even though there are still a few hidden surprises that no one will see coming). (Bear in mind I am trying not to give any spoilers.)

The gameplay provides you with many different options in how you want to deal with a situation. You can go all out brawler and talk with your fists, seduce everyone to your way of thinking, sneak past any obstacles you may encounter, or several other ways. It provides you with a lot of scope to play the way you want.

There are a couple of issues with the combat system. One being that the entire game is in a third person perspective but as soon as you pull out a gun you are sent to first person, which is rather jarring and even if you set it back to third person it doesn't provide a crosshair to make it more intuitive.
There is also a bit of a problem with blocking attacks. The block button does not "hold" block but rather you have to block at the exact instance you are about to be hit. While I can understand what they were trying to do with this (make it more realistic) it takes away from the combat system quite a bit as it is nearly impossible to gauge when exactly an enemy will strike.
Aside from this though the combat combines RPG, FPS and Hack and Slash elements amazingly well. The RPG elements being that you can "level up" your skill in particular weapons causing you to deal more damage, FPS being where you aim you hit, as well as having kickback and scatter, and the Hack and Slash being the melee side.

Now my favourite part of this game has got to be the character development and voice acting. You meet a whole host of characters while playing through, some you will love straight away (Jeanette i think is top of everyones list) and some you will most likely hate (Mr LaCroix would probably be the one, though i didn't mind him too much). The voice acting for each character (including background characters) is perfect, each voice suits the character absolutely perfectly (although again you sometimes have some glitches that play incorrect lines or incorrect voices) and every line is fully voice acted, there are no silences while text scrolls by, as a lot of newer, more expensive games tend to do nowadays.
Each character is unique and interesting and provides yet another reason for you to be sucked into the game and forget that it is JUST a game.

The music in VTMB also is perfectly suited to the atmosphere and provides a great blend of dark solitary silent nighttime atmosphere with the activity of the nightlife and clubs. Setting the scene brilliantly in each area. There are several songs from actual Metal and Goth bands within the game that were licensed and they also fit in as if they were tailored for it.

All in all Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines is an amazing game that sadly did not get as much attention or coverage as many other lesser games. It is so unfortunate that it was not fully completed as the company had a lot of great ideas that got cut short. I really hope that some developer in the future will take up the mantle of Troika Games and will attempt to finish what they started so long ago.