This game has flaws, many in fact. Gameplay wise it's aging poorly, it can be janky at times, the base version has many questionable parts in terms of level design and some humor or stereotypes age even worse than all that.
Yet I can comfortably say it's one of if not my favorite game I ever played. Having done multiple playthroughs both with and without the unofficial fan patch (that fixes a lot of the jank) it's a new and special experience each time. While it's not a perfect product in its mechanics, it's a perfect story with wonderfully diverse and memorable characters with amazing writing and voice acting. I recommend it to anyone remotely interested in rpgs, vampires and urban fantasy.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is a weird game, that I enjoyed a lot in the first half of the game, but didn't as much in the second half. I think the biggest strengths it has are the (ironically) colorful cast of characters, the RPG elements, and the side quests. The main story is engaging at first, but kind of goes nowhere as the game goes on. I think my enjoyment also went down in the later parts because the game all of a sudden focused too much on combat, while I just wanted to soak in the strong world, atmosphere and characters. At the end of the day, it was still a good experience overall, and I definitely get why this games is viewed so highly.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is an interesting game. It is praised universally for its character writing, acting, interesting setting, lore and story. However, I did not think these points were enough to make up for other issues the game has, like horrible combat, subpar stealth mechanics and overall jank, lack of polish and amount of bugs.

The characters and dialogue are indeed the best part about this game. There are tons of NPCs, all voice acted, and they are all at least interesting. The interactions you have with them also changes depending on your “class”, which can make for unique and funny interactions. The Original Soundtrack slaps.

The story I thought was fine, for the most part. It starts interesting enough, and then gets kinda lame, and finishes very abruptly. The pay-off for the biggest mystery was also kinda of a let-down, at least for me. I never really became invested in the story.

Combat is super rough. It is very clunky and janky, your movement and attacks don’t feel good at all, melee weapons have very bad animations, that cause your attacks to whiff constantly while guns are very underpowered and your accuracy sucks, even with high levels of skill investment. Most enemies do little to no damage and others can kill you like you’re not even a vampire, but all of them are damage sponges. Bosses are particularly horrible to fight, as they have massive HP bars and, contrary to most enemies, can’t be stunlocked by your melee attacks.

Stealth is also super unreliable if you don’t have at least 4 points or more in it. Half the times, enemies can hear you easily when you get within 5 meters or less of them, even if they’re facing another way or through walls and floors, and the other half, enemies are literally blind. The prompt for stealth killing someone is also finicky, easily making you break your stealth because your characters simply attacked the enemy instead of assassinating them.

The “humanity” counter is really arbitrary. What defines humanity? I would guess the game treats it as being empathic, but that question could have a ton of answers. And it has basically no impact on the actual gameplay or story. Noncombat skills are useless for most of the main quest. Persuasion and seduction, specially, are pretty much useless.

Overall, this game doesn’t make me feel like I’m a vampire. While there are some positive aspects, the combat ruined the experience for me, and I think the game has aged very poorly. I have read that playing as the Malkavian class is the way to go, so I might actually revisit the game by doing that and also using the Plus version of the Unofficial Patch, which adds a little more content and supposedly balances some things.

I've played this game at least 3 times over and continue to do so every time I get an itch to revisit the vtm universe

Definitely deserving of its cult classic status and the jank is excusable for allowing me to live out my wildest vampire dreams

I really, really love the clan politics at play here and this game definitely drove me to seek out more in the ttrpg books so that's also a plus

Esse jogo é um clássico cult não é atoa,mesmo que o desenvolvimento tenha sido tão conturbado e problemático, com o time sendo forçado a parar de trabalhar pela Activision meses antes do jogo sair, o amor da comunidade mantém esse jogo vivo até hoje. Eu conheço o RPG de mesa e é lindo ver como a Troika traduziu quase que 1 pra 1 o sistema pra VTM Bloodlines. É um jogo que mesmo sendo quebrado, tem que ser jogado por todos os fãs de RPG, é só uma pena que sua sequencia tenha entrado num 'development hell', acho que a grande maldição desse jogo é ter um desenvolvimento caótico.

I've only played this with the mod that polishes up a lot of things--I'm aware that the release version was kind of a mess. Modded, though, this is an excellent game. Even with dated, 2004 graphics, it's fun as hell to play. Being able to pick from a wide variety of vampire types offers many different gameplay options, and even some of the dialogue is a bit different if you pick certain ones. I thought the story was interesting and paced pretty well, and the voice acting is great, with many veterans of the industry lending their talents to the eclectic cast of characters. Combat is maybe one of the weakest parts of the experience, but given that there are often options to avoid it, I wasn't that bothered by it. If you like 2000s era Western RPGs, this is a must-play.