My friend Pooch bought me this game for Christmas, and it took me a couple of weeks before I really spent some time getting into it. But now I’m hooked, and totally wasting unchecked hours playing it. Basically Bloodlines is an RPG with some elements of a first-person shooter thrown in, in fact if I had to pick one game to compare it to mechanically, it would be Deus Ex. You play the role of a newly sired vampire in southern California, and the game surrounds your exploits in your new life as a member of the damned.

The game is built on Valve’s Source engine, the same used for Half-Life 2, although it may not immediately look like it. The graphics here aren’t as top notch as HL2, but more importantly, the story and dialog are rich and the environments are very thorough and well-done. Just like the aforementioned Deus Ex, in fact. Although I installed the latest patch, there are still a good number of little glitches, graphic weirdness, and other buggy stuff that you wouldn’t see in a AAA title like HL2, but so far it’s all been minor; nothing game-killing.

And it’s really quite fun, this vampire stuff. Okay, you get to feed on random blokes walking down the street. That’s fun. You also have superhuman strength and healing capabilities, and when you start throwing your fists around, people go flying. Pure entertainment. The RPG elements of experience points and character attributes are here in full force, and are just as much fun as always. A new skill that I haven’t seen before in similar games is “Seduction,” which, if built up, allows you to seduce NPCs into doing…things…for you, or tricks them into letting their guard down so you can suck their…uh, hemoglobin.

I love the conversation system. Much like Deus Ex, there are a ton of NPCs you can talk to, plenty of dialog options (including special options if you have built up your Persuade, Intimidate or Seduce skills), and great voice acting. (I haven’t gotten to Chinatown yet, but I hope the Chinese accents are better than Deus Ex’s horrible ones…) The game world is full of macabre and disturbing people, places and incidents, like a schizoid businesswoman with dual personalities at war with each other, an abandoned hospital where the resident vampiress, Pisha, lures humans and eats them (right in front of you no less), an androgynous nurse who has a weird fascination with knives and grisly murders, and lots of other stuff.

The sound effects are generally good although the quality of the compressed audio is quite poor in some places. I recognized almost all of the atmospheric noises from my old Bainbridge and Holzman sound effects albums, which cheapened the impact for me, but that’s my fault for being a sound geek—most people have probably never heard them before. The graphics are very good, not quite to the level of HL2 especially where the characters are concerned, but nothing that’s conspicuously behind the times. There are some bugs from time to time; occasionally NPCs will be seen walking with really choppy animations that remind me of Wolfenstein; other times I will see them gliding or even flying across the map as the AI repositions them into the area I’m entering.

The only thing that disturbs me—based on what I’ve heard—about this game is that later on the focus shifts from social interaction to all-out fighting, and you need to shift your experience point spending almost entirely into the combat realm. I fear that’s going to be a let-down after all the awesome, story-driven quests I’ve been doing so far. Especially because firearm combat is not so fun in this game—but then again, I have spent absolutely no skill towards it and thus when I shoot at people I usually end up missing them by miles. I did try the pump shotgun on a mafia henchman at point-blank, and the dude went flying. Pretty sweet.

Speaking of which, I liked the Russian mafia mission—I was able to sneak up behind a lot of the morons and just feed on them until they died. The best part was the bouncer-looking mean guy outside the boss’ office. He was standing there in front of the door, obviously ready to impede my progress if I tried to get past. So I walked up to his smirking face and Embraced his ass to death. Ha! Love it! When you feed, it also puts your wound-healing ability into overdrive, so there’s a double bonus there.

I fear I’ll be wasting far too much time on this game in the near future, especially given the work I need to be doing, so I’ll have to keep an eye on my schedule. But this is a definite winner. Thanks again to Pooch for the great gift.