Vampire: the masquerade - we eat blood torrent download

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 ot 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.

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 sate 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.

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. 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. 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. If Fallout is anything to go by, Troika is pretty much the best in the business when it comes to NPC chitchat.

Armed with this technology we could be in for encounters and characters that are so immersive you won't be able to tell the difference between playing the game and going down the shops for a pint of milk or a quart of type A-positive.

By their own admission, the strong team behind Bloodlines found that "using somebody else's engine is like jumping into a cold pool. In most previous role-players, original designs and visions have had to be compressed into characters with pixels for faces, with even main characters being scrunched up into 2in-high models.

These days every fold, wrinkle and zit in the artwork can find their way to someone's face, and the team is clearly enjoying the freedom that this affords. The visuals may not match those we've seen in Half-Life 2, but they're still out of this world.

We added our own lighting system too, because a game that takes place at night has very different demands from a game that plays out during daylight. We had to incorporate a lot more shadows and moody lighting. So there is almost a film quality to it.

Those of you with above-average memory will be aware that it wasn't always like this. V:tM - Redemption was an isometric party-based affair that started its story back in the dark ages: it was old school that's old school with a beard rather than a tub of drugs and a whistle.

So why the sudden shift in gears? The stats affect the gameplay, but the player is the one who is actually responsible. This is clearly a far cry from the games in which you click on a beasty and back while your character cleaves mea from its ribcage. They'll search you out. They'll throw things at you. We used a lot of the Half-Life 2 combat Al, and a lot of their scripted stuff, but we had to add a lot of the RPG-specific stuff ourselves.

There are multiple ways to get through our game, so we have to accommodate the fact that the player can have different experiences getting to a certain area. If you've seen the E3 Bloodlines video you'll have noticed that it has a number of similarities with what we've seen of its ginger, radioactive step-brother, Half-Life 2.

One notable scene has a monster picking up corpses and lobbing them at you, while elsewhere the physics engine shows off with an enthusiastic jiggle of an NPC's over-sized breasts. Bloodlines will also have extensive Modding capabilities and epic vampire vs vampire hunter multiplayer battles. For us, Bloodlines carries with it big expectations. The right people are making the right game with the right source material.

They are also using the most incredible game engine ever made. The colour of next season is undoubtedly going to be black. No Game has ever come close to recreating the feeling of playing Deus Ex - no game has even come within a bio-modded sniff. The first time we saw Bloodlines though, well we wondered if it was possible Some among our number have expressed doubts on exactly how free-form the final game will be, while others have wondered whether the stat-spliced combat is going to be fulfilling enough.

However, we still have faith that this is going to be special. Plus, there are powers that let you boil an enemy's blood until they explode, or conjure up a giant spectral wolf to disembowel your fellow vampires. All of which means there's still a hell of a lot to hope for, even if it must have been a task and a half for isometric-roleplayer stalwarts Troika to stretch themselves into shooter territory.

What is certain though, is that there's going to be more swearing, blood-letting and mammoth breasts on show than we've seen in many a month. And for that, at least, we're very glad And what a sense of humour too The amputation-fetishist attacking you with a severed mannequin limb; the Evil Dead mini-game in the graveyard; the werewolf, golem and Chinese-monster scenes where you realise you're not the nastiest thing this world has to offer; the four-way split-ending; the crazy combat and the multiple paths through every level; the enormously varied character classes; the endless moral and political content expressed through the exposition of the world.

This is Deus Ex with vampires, and each time you play it rewards you. It was rushed out on the same day as Half-Life 2 was released! Duh, Activision! Also, developers Troika were shut down on the same day, so patches were left to the fans. Which was a problem because you couldn't finish the released version, due to a bug halfway through the game. The old hotel in Santa Monica.

This turns out to be a near-perfect in-game version of The Shining, full of poltergeists, kids' toys and a flashback that ends with you running through flames and plummeting through the vanishing ghostly floor of the hotel. Steve: "It's got that one with the big tits who looks like Britney Spears in it! The reason that Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines is picking up a lot of steam despite being 15 years old is quite simple.

First of all, this is a real classic of an RPG, but also there is a sequel due out rather soon and that has got many people wondering what all the fuss is about. When Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines was first released in part of what really made this stand out was the setting. They went for a modern-day Los Angeles for the game and I think that is really cool. I got very invested in the story and I am sure you will do. Basically, you create your vampire who is given eternal life, but you have to serve Prince Lacroix.

The story is full of all kinds of excitement. You will end up on a quest where you learn about yourself, deal with betrayal, discovery if you are really a hero and much more. The story goes in many different directions and one of the things I found interesting was the different vampire factions.

You will have to talk to a ton of different characters and it is up to you to decide what side of the war you want to stand on. I really cannot say enough positive things about the story. The reason for this is that you do have a lot of choice at your fingertips. The dialogue options are quite vast and I love this! It gets you right into the character and makes you more invested. However, on the flip side of this, I think some may find it a little bit too much.

Your vampire can specialize in different skills. I love the seduction one which is where you can use your vampire powers of persuasion to get people to side with you and do what you want. There are plenty of other skills for you to master as well, hacking and lock picking are two other ones that I found very useful. Ultimately the way that you will play dictate what kind of skills you decide to level up.

I found Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines had excellent combat. It is up to you how you view the action, but I really liked the 3rd person POV.

There are tons of weapons for you to use ranging from melee to firearms. Do not worry though there are plenty of vampire powers for you to use and snacking on people is something you will have to do! It is pretty cool how action packed the combat is, you do level up quite quickly which is something I really liked. There are on occasion a ton of monsters coming at you and it can feel more like an action game than an RPG, but that is just another aspect of the game I really like.

The game should come with a warning label because you will have dreams about it! The game is easy to understand and adapt to but a high-performance computer set-up is preferred. Speaking of which, the options are numerous, starting with the ability to customize your video and audio configuration and other features. All of these details really control how well your system will perform and the type of visuals you achieve depends on the quality of your video card.

Although the game can be entirely mouse-driven, the use of shortcut keys comes in handy because there is plenty of onscreen action in real-time. In addition to a unique interface that displays high-polygon moving heads of your characters, indicating the status of your health via emotions, the actual camera view is large enough for gameplay although it is limited.

This can lead to a slight hindrance during a fight; however, you have the option of viewing from a first-person perspective that allows you to take in the awe of the beautiful environment. Unfortunately, this mode is only limited to viewing, not fighting. On that note, the graphics are some of the best seen in a computer RPG to date.

Almost every possible effect available in RPG gaming through the time frame is contained in this game! Unlike Deus Ex, the bit color depth is truly utilized. Most of the cut-scenes use in-game graphics, oozing with Hollywood-like imagery.