Bite me! Vampire: Bloodlines uncloaked

Sorry we couldn't resist that one. Anyway, the shadowy world of the vampire has always held a strange fascination for us mere mortals, but failing any last minute 'awakening' courtesy of Brad Pitt or better still Kirsten Dunst, the closest any of us are likely to get is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, the epic new first-person RPG under development at Troika Games.

On show last week at Activision's Activate 2004 event in Barcelona, Spain, Vampire couldn't fail to impress visually, as it's one of the first games to use Half-Life 2's awesome Source engine. However from the first bite of a virgin's neck, it's not just the great visuals, but rather White Wolf's pen and paper role-playing system which impresses, as it completely underpins Bloodlines and makes it a genuinely different and highly authentic first-person bloodsucking romp.

Your first decision as a newly created member of Nightwalkers United is choosing which of the main vampire clans you'll join. Like most RPGs, each clan has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, with the Brujah, for example, specialising in combat, the Toreador emphasising Influence and the rather unhealthy looking Nosferatu preferring stealth (they don't get invited to too many dinner parties looking that, you suspect).

After you've chosen your particular bloodline, you get to assign extra skill points in all sorts of unholy areas. There's probably too many to mention without it sounding like a list, but suffice to say, you can pretty much specialise in anything you want, from shooting to computer hacking, although it's fairly wise to play towards your clan's natural strengths. Selecting a combat-ready male Brujah, with a few additional social and charm skills, it was time to plunge straight into the game itself.

Bloodlines is set in the dark and gritty vampiric underworld of modern day LA and from the moment you're plunged onto its mean streets, Source brings it to un-life in all its bright, garish neon glory. The game environment looks simply marvellous with convincing architecture, great character models and a real brooding feel. You spend most of your time in first-person, but occasionally its nice to step out and check your bad vampire self in third-person mode too (mirrors don't work, remember).

Bloodlines will apparently offer fully open, free-form gameplay with you able to choose various side missions and quests away from the main plot, allowing you to pursue your path to vampiric domination in whatever way you see fit. However, we didn't really get a chance to check out this aspect, as our mission was already laid out for us - to contact a certain Venus at a local vampire hang out, known as Club Confession.

Plunging through the doors of the club, we were confronted with various vamps cavorting on the dance floor (they sure got rhythm those undead types), but we soon tracked down Venus, who was tending bar (apparently she does a great Bloody Mary [hey look, there's some tumbleweed - Ed]). Here, you could see Source's facial animation and lip-synching techniques really come to the fore, as we traded complements and occasionally, threats, with the vampy looking Venus as we pumped her for information.

Bloodlines uses the classic adventure conversation system, with you choosing from a list of responses and questions, as you try to wheedle information and have your wicked undead way. Venus was initially reluctant to betray her master, but a quick hack buffed up our charm quotient and soon she was singing like a canary to reveal the whereabouts of a pack of Sabbat, who were holed up in a nearby Chinese theatre.

The bad news? They'd hired a gargoyle - a monstrous heavy duty guardian - to protect them. His one vulnerability? A susceptibility to blunt weapons, so armed with this welcome info, we hit the streets once again and sought additional firepower.

Fortunately Fat Larry, a jive-talking, afro-sporting arms dealer was just a block away and he was more than happy to serve creatures of the night. One quick cash deal later and armed with a sledgehammer and a Magnum, we were ready to plunge into the sewers and stalk our prey, pausing only for a light snack on a local hooker, to bring our blood level up to the max.

Blood is your currency in Bloodlines and you can use it to power a wide selection of vampiric spells and skills. After dealing with a few low-level, though extremely weird perimeter creatures, we broke through into the hall of the Sabbat and here things started to get really interesting.

Loosing off a few shots at the Sabbat proved remarkably ineffective, as their vampire power of Celerity allowed them to dodge our bullets in motion blurs of ease. However, countering with our own Celerity spell slowed them down sufficiently so that our bullets started to hit home and we then used further spells to hold them in place before deploying Blood Boil, which made individual Sabbats explode in a welter of crimson gore.

One's things for sure, if you're in any way squeamish and go weak-kneed at the sight of claret, we'd humbly suggest Bloodlines is not really the game for you.

And so disposing of the Sabbat, we finally came to our confrontation with the Gargoyle itself. Once again Bloodlines' facial animation and lip-sync techniques made it a compelling conversational encounter, as we tried to charm and talk our way out of a fight.

However, the Gargoyle wouldn't be sweet-talked, and so with the aid of a few more Troika-assisted buffs, we had to ...Ahem hammer out a suitable compromise, which resulted in the Gargoyle being reduced to brick dust. A great shame really, as it actually seemed like quite a rather sad, forlorn kind of creature which just wanted to be left alone.

Anyway, with time having passed all too quickly, we had to fold up our capes, put away our pointy teeth and reflect on what we'd seen.

Bloodlines certainly seems like the real deal. Powered by the Source engine, the graphics are nothing short of amazing, with the lip-synch and facial animation techniques really adding a great deal of character and feeling to each close-up conversational encounter.

The role-playing system, as you'd expect given its tried and tested pen and paper ancestry, seems absolutely rock solid; and again, the only slight shadow of doubt we'd like to investigate further are those claims of free-form gameplay. Not that we don't believe them of course, it's just that we'd like to see them, in the undead flesh, for ourselves.

We're going to retire now to the cold, lifeless embrace of our Dennis-issued coffin, but with Bloodlines set to release as early as October it won't be long before we get to terrorise the night all over again.

It can't come soon enough.

John Houlihan