Vampire: Bloodlines Near Final Impressions

GameSpot is offering up a two-page preview of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, based on a “near final” build of the CRPG. Check it out:

Your first quest in the game is one that Troika demonstrated to us earlier this year. It involves your character recovering some explosives from a ghoul called Mercurio. Ghouls are humans who have been allowed to drink some vampire blood to become supernatural servants. When you find Mercurio, he has been beaten up and bleeding from a weapons deal gone bad, which means that you have to recover the explosives yourself.

When you reach the gang’s beachfront hideout, you’ll enter a combat zone in the game, meaning that you can kill to your heart’s content with no repercussions. Even though we were playing as a brawler-style vampire, we used stealth to sneak around the guard in front and flip the switch on the power box in the rear of the house. When one of the gang members came back to flick it on, we ambushed and killed him, then picked up his baseball bat and snuck around to the front. Unfortunately, the front guard heard us and raised the alarm; we bludgeoned him to death with the bat and then had to dodge the gunshots from the other gang members. Recovering a tire iron, we rushed one of the gunmen and pummeled him, then picked up his revolver and went after the other gang members.