Time for a shameless cliche: this one sunk its teeth into me and didn’t let go until the end. It is utterly criminal that Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines didn’t get the development time or marketing it deserved. Even after applying the excellent community patches it still has some issues (mainly the punishingly hard final levels and some glitchy animations) but remains a diamond in the rough that’s seen much polishing since Troika sadly closed.

The story is engrosing, the countless characters fantastically written and voiced, and there’s genuine replayability there with five different endings, not to mention how different the play through can be depending on your clan. The insane Malkavians in particular have mostly totally different dialogue options.

You can be a sneaky Nosferatu, a manipulative Ventrue, seductive Toreador, a Brujah thug… and beyond that you get to customise your character during play by spending points in the familiar Masquerade character sheet. It’s damn long too and there’s some fantastic licensed music from Lacuna Coil, Ministry and others. Had this got the time it needed you’d easily be looking at another Deus Ex for sheer player choice and overall excellence, assuming they avoided more feature creep.

It seems many of the Troika guys are now at Obsidian, makers of the similarly promising but rushed KOTOR II. Hopefully they’ll get the time they deserve to properly finish their future games, I eagerly look forward to them if so. Here’s a spoiler laden interview with one of the Bloodlines developers, it’s a great read if you’ve finished the game or don’t intend to.