Written By Chad Varn

     For those that didn’t play Vampire: The Masquerade-Redemption, you must have been under some serious rocks or just didn’t mind missing one of the best RPG’s in recent years. While very Diablo-esque in execution; Redemption featured a great tale with solid graphics and decent voice acting.

     Now some three years later Activision is set to release the sequel. Called Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines, this one will be using the Source engine that will power Half-Life 2 and is being developed by Troika games, who you may remember created the award winning Arcanum RPG.

     Bloodlines will take place in modern day Los Angeles and players can choose to be part of one of seven different clans and use 12 vampiric powers to achieve their goals. Playable from both a first and third person point of view, Bloodlines is best compared to Deus Ex, although a demonic, darker Deus Ex. It will be quite like Deus Ex or even Grand theft Auto, the world that you play in is almost living and is seamless. Like many RPG’s today how you accomplish your goals up to you. You can kill your enemies or sneak by them or negotiate with them.

     Through out the game you’ll move up the ranks of your clan doing task and by doing these you also level your character making you more powerful. Unlike games like Morrowind you have to complete quest to level not just use skills. This may seem limiting but considering the modern day setting it helps to keep the pacing.

     There will be a multi-player component that will not be like the previous game. In Bloodlines you can be either vampire or hunter and you will team goals to accomplish; Sounds like Rainbow Six but with vampires. Unfortunately that aspect of the game wasn’t being shown. But in the single player portion we saw I have to say that this will clearly out-do its predecessor. The graphics are astonishing and shows what the source engine can do. Interaction with NPC’s was done through dialog trees was fairly straight forward. Combat is in real-time and is extremely bloody. This is not a title for kids; Not only bloody but laden with sexual themes through and through. No doubting this here is a title for mature players.

     Bloodlines should be hitting store shelves later this year around the forth quarter, say October to December. From what we’ve seen this far, it will be worth the wait. The Masquerade is in good hands it seems from Troika, the guys who gave us wizards with shotguns.

Publisher   Activision   Developer   Troika games    Platform   PC   One Player   Online and Single   Player RPG   Release Date   Nov 14, 2004

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