Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines Retrospective
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If you've been thinking about replaying Troika's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, you might want to check out this recent PC Gamer retrospective first, as it pays some extra attention to all the new content added by the "plus" version of Wesp5's Unofficial Patch for the game. You know, in case it makes you want to use this version of the patch for your next playthrough.
A quick excerpt:
The quest, QoL fixes, and roleplaying options added in by the plus patch are certainly appreciated, but the most critical addition is one, single door. Bloodlines' weakest moments are a handful of completely linear, combat-mandatory dungeon slogs, the favoured self-sabotage of moody, cerebral RPGs everywhere.
The worst of the lot is a positively inexcusable sewer sequence at the halfway point. It's about twenty to forty-five minutes of no story, no dialogue, just long corridors with high-hitpoint flesh monsters jumping out at you and an apocalyptically fiddly water-pump puzzle that I bypassed with the noclip cheat on my first playthrough. The plus patch adds in a shortcut to the very end a little less than a quarter of the way through the sewers, and Bloodlines is infinitely richer for it.
