Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption Review

9.0

Format PC

Developer Nihilistic

Publisher Activision

Genre Unknown

2 Comments

This year's most anticipated RPG is finally here. Mark Hill rises from his coffin to tell you all about it

It is a world of darkness. Beneath a bright exterior of harmless entertainment, large boxes with over-excited quotes plastered on them and pleasant magazines reaching out with a friendly hand from sunny newsagents, the computer games industry is populated by vampires. Clans of bloodsucking developers congregate in dark catacombs, leeching ideas from other clans and releasing their creations upon innocent peasants who carry on with their lives, safe in the knowledge that they've seen something similar before, that it all fits in their tiny frame of reference. But the clans are only pawns in a larger war, which dark publishing princes conduct from their impenetrable castles before descending on the customers who pace up and down games shops like cattle. And if the developers are the foot-soldiers of this vampiric empire, then the journalists are the ghouls: parasites who live off the dregs of their more creative prey and who explain away the pallor of their skin with tales of drugs, alcohol and cigarettes.

Which is another way of saying that reviewing a game nearly always boils down to telling you what other games it's like and whether it's any better or worse than them. When I tell you that Vampire is a RPG you immediately place it next to other RPGs and start drawing conclusions. Well, stop right now.

BLOOD SIMPLE

We should start by saying what Vampire isn't. It isn't a free-roaming exploration game, like Baldur's Gate, although you can wander around without getting into battles if you want to. It isn't a claustrophobic game of stealth and fear from a first-person perspective, like System Shock 2, although it can be wonderfully atmospheric at times and you can go into first-person mode to get a better look at the amazing graphics. It isn't an entirely plot- and character-driven game, like Planescape: Torment, although both are absolutely central to the experience. In many ways it belongs to the Diablo school of role-playing, in that it has a linear, mission-based structure, which involves a lot of hacking and slashing. But at the same time it is much more than all that because you care about what's happening. You continue because you want to know where the story is going and because you want to see what the next environment and next monster will look like.

The main character is Christof, a 12th century crusader who is injured in the field of battle by infidels and nursed back to health by the beautiful nun Aneska. Christof falls in love with her and brings the wrath of the church upon himself. At the same time he pisses off a clan of vampires by slaying one of their number. A rival clan decides he would make a good addition to their ranks and embraces him (the technical term for turning someone into a vampire). The rest of the game sees the fallen crusader's relentless pursuit of Aneska and a way to regain his own humanity, becoming a pawn in a great war between clans along the way in a story that twists and turns like an animal in its death throes.

A MEAN SERVANT OF GOD

But another thing that Redemption is not, is a horror game. Despite the electric atmosphere, the dark dungeons and the disfigured monsters, you never really feel scared. There is a very good reason for this: you are one of the monsters. You are the one to be feared. Would Resident Evil 2 be scary if you played a brain-gnawing zombie instead of a weak human? Of course not. The point is, Vampire never tries to be scary. Instead, it allows us to act out a fantasy most people have: to be the monstrous killer rather than the helpless victim. It's a fantasy of power, of dark and forbidden power. With power comes responsibility, but not when you're a monster. You can throw off the shackles of civilisation and become an anarchic wave of violent rebellion.

Vampire tempers this chaotic drive for the sake of characterisation and plot. You have to keep control of the beast within by hanging on to the little humanity you have left. Unlike the character played by Harvey Keitel in From Dusk Till Dawn, an ex-priest who regains his faith in God only to become an unthinking killing machine when transformed into a vampire, Christof is aghast at his loss of humanity and how his new condition clashes with his beliefs.

The theme of redemption leads us nicely to that of salvation, or I should say, saving. To make the game harder you can only save in your Haven, the safe place where you can keep items and turn experience points into abilities and disciplines. If you're in the middle of a dungeon, the only way to get there is by casting the Walk The Abyss discipline. Luckily, the game automatically saves itself every time you load up a new area, but only by overwriting the last automatic save. Somehow, this system never becomes frustrating, all it does is makes you more careful.

FIENDS WILL BE FRIENDS

Your party (or coterie, as it's called in the game) grows to up to four characters in some parts of the game, which means you can develop the stats for each one in different ways by exploring different disciplines.

At first, the fact that you can control other characters in your party takes away from the initial identification and empathy with Christof. But, while the beginning of the game is all about plot and character development, you quickly realise these are just a way to carry you through between battles. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means it's a different type of game, beneath whose unbelievably lush exterior lies a sophisticated hack 'n' slasher. And it isn't as if the story is superfluous. It's a grandiose yarn that keeps you wanting to know more to see what's going to happen next. It does seem strange that you could conceivably play most of the game with one of the other characters, leaving Christof behind, when they are just people who have tagged along to help the central figure. This works in detriment of the role-playing in terms of depth, but it does add to the variety of gameplay and the tactics you can use in combat.

To begin with, the battles can be quite frantic and frustrating, especially when the other members of your coterie start running around or using up valuable blood points in useless spells. The key is knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each character. You can change the stance of each (defensive, neutral and offensive), have them follow you or leave them behind, and decide which weapons, disciplines and items they use during combat.

THE DEVIL INSIDE

There is never any doubt whatsoever that your characters are vampires, rather than some random collection of fancy fighters with a few magical spells thrown in. You have a frenzy meter that measures how much of a grip the beast within you has. Every time a character takes a hit from an enemy your frenzy levels go up, especially if you're low on blood, and you have less and less control over them, up to the point where they'll start kicking, hacking and biting the nearest thing to them, even if it happens to be one of their friends. Your blood pool works much in the same way as mana does in other RPGs and you draw from it to use your disciplines (or spells if you prefer). You can get blood supplies from vitae bottles you'll find scattered around (or plasma bags in the modern age) or from sucking it out of pedestrians and other vampires, you can also feed off other members of your coterie. The game forces you to resort to this in many instances where vitae is hard to find. However, suck a human dry and you'll lose humanity points, making you much more likely to frenzy. Can you imagine such a humanity system in Soldier Of Fortune? You'd be a slavering rabid dog within minutes.

As a result, there's always a delicate balance to be kept between blood, health and discipline casting. You also have to keep in mind that a low health level affects your stats, such as strength, dexterity and stamina.

Disciplines have a definitive impact on the gameplay. You use them to solve puzzles (although these seem to be rather simple and infrequent, like the one that requires you to transform into mist to get by an otherwise lethal swinging pendulum to the switch that turns it off) and to plan your attacks. Luring enemies towards you instead of rushing in like a fool, is often the best tactic. At other points, you need objects in rooms so heavily guarded the only way to reach them is by disciplines of deception and shadows.

TONGUE-TIED

There's an extensive background history to the world of Vampire, as you would expect from a table-top RPG that's been around since the late '70s. It's a complete alternate world, with an intricate mesh of clans, personalities, social structures and a real sense of past. Redemption does a great job of introducing you to it all throughout the game, if you haven't been bothered to read some of the heavy tomes chronicling this history or the watered-down version in the manual. But there are still some instances where you'll wonder just what the hell the people around you are talking about.

Some of you will probably be put off by the language in the Dark Ages, with its constant use of cod-Shakespeare, littered with 'thous', 'thys' and 'thines'. As far as we know, people in the 12th century didn't speak like this. Especially in Prague and Vienna. And even more especially when they happened to be French Crusaders. But as an artificial means of creating a sense of being in a distant past it works. The Shakespearean tone isn't just linguistic though, it's embedded in some of the game's very themes. The forbidden love between Christof and Aneska echoes that of Romeo And Juliet, while Christof's inner struggle brings back memories of Hamlet.

If you fell asleep reading that last paragraph, though, you'll pleased to know Vampire doesn't explore any of this in great depth, moving quickly to exploring dungeons, caverns and castles with the sole motive of hitting things over the head with a large piece of metal. small city lights

We can't emphasise enough just how incredible Vampire looks. The screenshots give you a fair idea, but you really need to see it moving to appreciate its full beauty. We guarantee that during the first few days you'll spend as much time angling the camera and going into first-person view to admire the world around you as you will playing. We'd go as far as saying that it's the best looking game we've ever seen, and we can't imagine anything beating it for a while. You could stare at the architecture, the player models and some of the monsters for hours without getting tired.

It's not just visually stunning either, the music is superb throughout and the excellent sound effects create an atmospheric environment.

There is a certain trade-off to this. The cities are necessarily small and sparsely populated, and the interaction with the environment is strictly limited. You can roam the streets as much as you like, but you have no freedom to go into all of the houses. Most of the doors are just part of the scenery and serve no function, so no matter how much you want to play out your vampiric role, slipping into the bedrooms of beautiful maidens to suck their blood before drawing your cape across your red-stained face before disappearing in a puff of smoke, it's just not possible. For the game to feature true free-roaming in a realistically modelled city would have taken Nihilistic a decade to program and you'd need a computer the size of your front room to run it. So for the most part, this isn't a problem. Until you come to London.

The modern age levels are mostly disappointing. They're not as bad as the Xen ones in Half-Life (although they are much bigger), but they have the same effect of not quite satisfying in the same way as the rest of the game. There are some excellent parts (the temple of the followers of Set In London, for example), and they are by no means boring to play through, they just don't meet the high standards of the first part and have you feeling almost immediate nostalgia for a land of broadswords and plague-ridden streets. Not least because modern day weapons don't seem quite as effective.

London is such an awful American pastiche of cliches (bobbies, red phone boxes, red double-deckers) that it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief in the same way you can with the medieval era. The cobblestone streets, the gas streetlights, the fog, the rain and the architecture itself resemble the '30s Hollywood set for a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film. In New York, things improve considerably and you suddenly remember how fantastic the game really is. You're now an Elder vampire and your powers are greater than ever. As a consequence you spend more time exploring your disciplines.

VAMPIRE UNMASQUERADED

As long as you don't come to Vampire with the wrong expectations, you are unlikely to find a more challenging, rewarding or gorgeous RPG. The Masquerade world is so engrossing that you don't want to leave it, its shapes and contours so exquisite you can't keep your eyes off it, its battles so demanding you can't stop rising to the challenge, its dark vampiric powers so alluring you are hypnotised and vulnerable, lost in a trance as it drains your life away. Soon, you too will look like us. Pale, bleary-eyed, afraid of the sunlight, your teeth aching with an insatiable hunger for more.