Disappointing playthrough. Spoilers unmarked. (edit: Wow, did this go downhill fast after the tutorial.)
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Friday
A'riiight, my first quest as a vampire is to sniff out the voice in my head. But this being me, screw that, let's run around aimlessly a bit. And I do mean aimlessly because the game lacks a compass or minimap.
My god... it's full of... hobos. Should I bite one? Wait, do I need blood? I don't see a health bar (unless it's marked with a crown for some inexplicable reason?) or blood pool. Avoid the po-po paddock and instead climb up an air duct. Nothing up here except a graffitid smokestack. Let's try this gliding thing. Can I make the jump?
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| (Seattle) gamers never look up, luckily |
Yup. Easily. Except there's still nothing to see or do on this block of rooftops either, except another graffito. Drop down to street level and I've already hit the northern edge of the map. Well that was a significantly duller exploration mission than my last hike north. Can I break into a car? No? Pick up a trash can and throw it? No? Can I at least kick the bucket? No bucket. Fine. Guess I'll do the stupid quest after all. Sniff-sniff, meet the sheriff, sniff-sniff, and I'm already across town. Wow. This can't be the entire overland map.
Can it? It's just about the same size or smaller than the combined zones from twenty years ago!
Destination's guarded, stealth-kill a couple of ghouls, sneak past the rest. I'll admit the parkour elements aren't too bad for providing alternate routes.
Except they just get called over by the door guard if I bypass them anyway aaaaand, I'm dead. Knocked back to the beginning of the sequence because of the stupid checkpoint system. Why the fuck is your combat copied from third-rate shovelware like ELEX, enemies bouncing around you instantly, randomly, inertia-less. On my fourth attempt I finally make it in. Hell with it though, I'm soured on this game for tonight.
Saturday
Fine, let's talk to some Anarchs. Except no, it's just more of this idiotic punch-drunk slapfest. The combat physics were admittedly terrible in the original Bloodlines, but at least they were merely primitive and underdeveloped, not purposely dumbed down and infuriating. I would assume TCR wanted to emphasize supernatural speed and power, with punches strong enough to knock enemies around. In effect it instead produces rubberized rag dolls bouncing back and forth like Tom and/or Jerry and every single mook instantly dashes behind you after attacks. Twitchy and boring at the same time. And what idiot thought it a good idea to remove the PC's inventory?
No weapons? What? My only option is to make improvised weapons out of what should become my own arsenal and throw them away? Okay, pro tip you cretins: THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN RPG!!! As in the genre most dependent on empowering the player to create a personal identity! To build up a multifaceted array of choices as he advances. That means class choice, skill choice, appearance choice, moral choice, combat/stealth/diplomacy quest solution choice and yes, included among all that, choice of weapon, my trusty gluon gun or fire axe or Mourning Frost or even a simple slingshot! Because it's mine and I-call-it-Vera!
Moving on. Find Fait-Bien's corpse in an unexpectedly flat scene. How? How do you manage to turn such drama as discovering you've murdered your now closest companion into a monotone snooze? Will every character in this game continue delivering nothing but the same vaguely bored, vaguely annoyed, unrehearsed line reading in every single dialogue? Where is the humour, the pathos, the tension which elevated A Machine for Pigs a dozen years ago past its simple walk-and-click mechanics? I try stopping by the pawn shop and am summarily placed back onto the plot rails without the mooks even introducing themselves.
Will this whole affair remain completely linear?
Yes I'm lonely because your supposed game offers no gameplay! By this point in the original I'd already eaten some rats, picked up some loot, slotted more than one skill point, met Smiling Jack, Deb, Trip, the scared guy I mugged for his watch, Heather, Mercurio and Lacroix each with vibrant, expressive personalities and divergent takes on your situation.
At least in Lou-Lou's case the voicing fits a bit better as restrained Ventrue aristocratic hauteur. Not that she has much to say:
Seattle: is a city.
Conflict: exists.
Player character: acknowledged.
Continue plot? <YES>
End perfunctory speed bump.
Compare to "You will go to Santa Monica" where the emphasis told you more about the big cheese's personality in five phrases than these idiots struggled to squeeze out of five paragraphs. Here's the thing: Nines Rodriguez? His very first line "Yo, this is bullshit!" was as generic a stock phrase as they come, but properly contextualized it actually did some narrative work, pushed characterization and faction politics along, before you even officially meet him. Here I've repeated the same "I am old, anarchs are attacking" set-up three? four times over?
No choice but to follow the exactly one objective and do the next quest. At least a few more dialogues open up. Mrs. Thorn and Patience have a smidge more personality. Fight twice more on the way, against the same generic rubberized melee fodder. Okay, fuck it, I've had it with this idiotic combat system, drop it down
to normal difficulty. And we have our first megamook, fatso over here.
Except he does nothing different. Dashes into you like the others, hitting harder. At least I got to win a fight by using my shadow cloak passive, running
out of his sight after eating his last buddy to set up a sneak attack. Of course the checkpoint system makes you trudge through the vents toward the fight every time as a timesink. And the subsequent climbing sequence makes me wonder if the developers didn't deliberately make every possible stupidest design choice.
This is not a physics challenge. No matter how many ledges or handholds you see, there is only one path upwards. If you try to grab or stand on something the developers don't want you to, you're simply knocked back down to the bottom, no matter how feasible your chosen course. Obey.
Characters are also getting more and more ridiculous. A fangirl scientist, a mincing Nos, don't get me started on the anarch cannon fodder very pointedly calling The Sheriff "they" or Niko's talk of good guys and bad guys. Great, at least they're not glittering, but is any of this in the least bit vampiric? Anyway, since the one single quest is sending me to bed, I might as well take that advice literally.
Sunday
Alright, let's give this dumpster fire another chance. I'm thrown into Fabien's dream adventure, because... I'd been spending too much time developing my own character? Was the point to emphasize the fact I can't actually play a Malkavian? And again we get walked through feeding, running across the city, and some painfully telegraphed dialogues introducing Malk mind control. Fabien's gratuitous narration of the obvious is getting on my nerves. Bounce from one NPC to the next as I'm told. Oooh, a flashback within a flashback. How thrilling. If only they'd put the same effort into combat mechanics as they did into whole separate sets and costumes for the prohibition era vamps. And I repeat, what the fuck is this 9th-grade passing grade degradation of the art of dialogue you fonts of soporific pablum?
Again we repeat the same exposition about the mark and weakness. Still nothing to do about town so schlep across it again to exchange five superfluous lines of dialogue setting up the tediously foreshadowed next quest step of tracking down the wayward sheriff. More fights against the same generic mooks. "Your generation ain't your fault" says the pissant with the trendy face piercings. Again, *this* vacillating, pronoun policing, mini-microaggressing self-esteem wonderland is supposed to be the World of Darkness?
Fuck this.
Monday
More of the same rubberbanding fights against the same basic enemies. At least I amuse myself by stockpiling some melancholic and choleric blood on the way, not that anyone's explained what that does yet. Oops, masquerade violation. Dodged it by running?
More of the same mooks. Even more of the same mooks. Then even more more of the same mooks. They're made to be easy to run/hide from, so the highrise fights turn into a lot of hit-and-run ambushes. Drop attacks at least spice things up a bit. Boss fight against Benny: pop a couple of potions, make use of third-party bait, he goes down eventually, but no matter if you extend the slapfight to three phases, it's still a slapfight.
My first RP choice. Give him to Katsumi. At least I can stomach her gruffer dialogue.
The map opens up a bit after this, finally offering multiple quests.
Well, as introductions go, Bloodlines 2's is sort of incredible, and not in a good way. Everything from environments to the skills, mobs, combat, save system, character design, tedious writing, simplistic mission structure, every design choice prompts "what the hell were they thinking?"
And, glancing at the rapid double-digit attrition in achievement numbers between the tutorial and the first couple of missions, I'm hardly the only one disappointed.
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