AddMeForCoOp

The idea of a Vampire The Masquerade detective mystery RPG starring multiple different characters is great, the execution here is seriously flawed. The main things that will break the immersion are the terrible voice acting and dialogue animations for the majority of characters. They often change mood from one sentence to the next. The writing also isn't great. Only one of the three main characters (Leysha, a Malkavian vampire looking for her daughter) has character development and is actually likable. It seems the devs were too busy making 'diverse' characters (some side characters are also obese, how does that happen on a diet of blood?). Despite how it's marketed, your choices don't seem to have that much of an impact. The ending remains the same mostly regardless of your choices., and some of the most important choices are only shown in some text slides after the ending scene! The Victoria Ash DLC has no content whatsoever and is entirely inconsequential. There are serious audio bugs present in conversations (suddenly silent if the camera moves), and surround sound is not supported. In the plus side the environments look great. Go play Vampyr, it's much better.

It's a very short indie 'vignette'. It's a visual novel, which is entirely devoid of gameplay. Depending on the dialogue options you choose you get *slightly* different exposition. And there's a choice at the end. So you can replay it like 2 to 3 times. Totalling 15 minutes as it's a 5 minute 'game'. The ending remains unclear. There's also not much graphics to speak of. I had trouble keeping the character that is speaking apart. There's 3 music tracks in the game. The intro music is beautiful but one of the later tracks is too aggressive for the kind of conversation going on.

The setup (fighting infected + a visual novel / dating sim) could be fun, but the execution seems very flawed. The UI is complex and the effect of leveling up certain attributes is not explained. I gave up when I had to level up all team members without the game giving any idea what the team member's strengths and weaknesses are. The chacters are mostly stereotypes: the shy clumsy guy, the flirtatious girl, the tomboy or whatever. Go get another JRPG. This is not a hidden gem or anything. also, the presentation is lacking (the typical low res texture + lack of anisotropic filteting so it's a big blur).

2022 review: They don't make 'em like this anymore. A maturely written noir story. I struggle to think of better written games. Also the art style really holds up due to the realistic environments the game is set in. Incredible that this was released over two decades ago.

2022 review: This game didn't age well. If you're buying it for co-op, don't. You barely get 20fps in co op which makes it frustrating to play. The idea of the story may be interesting, but the execution is terrible, and the acting is cringe inducing. 'US military-industrial complex is incompetent and evil' games are unfortunately rare, but this isn't done well. Go play Spec Ops: The Line.

"8 hours of story" - not really. It's like 45 minutes of story, at most, but it's spread out between sections of clunky combat. Lots of asset reuse (sections of a map are straight up copied), enemies are dumb bullet sponges. Too few checkpoints, too much backtracking. I've only noticed 2 sidequests in the entire game. Lots of invisible walls. Asking 25 bucks for this is a total ripoff. I'd say this is a $5 game, at most. NB: Turn off all effects (bloom, depth of field, temporal anti aliasing, etc.), you eyes will thank me and the game actually looks better with these gimmicks turned off.

The environments shown in the game are very high in quality and fit the tone, and fine voice acting, the game still ends up feeling mediocre due to the stiff character animations, bad lip-sync, and most importantly: the story falling apart near the end and not having a satisfying conclusion, mainly as a result of the lack of consequences to your 'choices' earlier in the game.

2021 review: overrun with cheaters and Treyarch/Activision are not doing anything about it. No action is taken on reports of cheating. Even using the 'avoid player' feature of Xbox Live is ignored by the game and does not avoid these players. But they still charge exorbitant prices for the map packs.

Cool art style, but gameplay affected by microtransactions. It's a roguelike in name, but almost all consequences of dying can be avoided by microtransactions ('insurance'). You can also ship loot back to your saferoom with, you guessed it, microtransactions. At the start they don't make it obvious but they keep upping the difficulty until you die and are asked to pay for a respawn. Very generic looking levels after a while. Just go play The Surge or something if you like this kind of combat.

Underrated game. It's not short at all for a shooter. Nor is there a lack of action. Story is a major step up from competing franchises (Gears of War etc), visuals, audio, it's all good. The downsides are the film grain, depth of field and black bars at the top and bottom of the screen which cannot be turned off, unskip-able cutscenes and too many Quick Time Events. And there's little incentive for replaying it.

No cringy 'woke' political propaganda in this game, unlike some other recent DontNod games (Life is Strange 2 and Tell Me Why). It's a fine, underrated, detective game, and your choices actually affect the outcome. The graphics are great. Some bugs like audio cutting out or parts of characters disappearing (played on PS4 Pro).

2018 review: Don't be fooled by the high average critic and user scores. This game didn't stand the test of time at all. While I did manage to find a full multiplayer game on the XBOX 360, meaning this game is still playable, it just isn't very interesting. The controls are quite frustrating. The graphics look very dated, the low screen resolution, texture resolution and draw distance being detrimental to the player's awareness of the battlefield and ability to spot enemies. The sound mix is not affected by the environment, resulting in some faraway sounds sounding very loud and sounds close by being very silent. I guess the art style and setting are interesting, but going by the intro movie it takes itself way too seriously. Not recommended for any game mode.

2018 review: PSA: The multiplayer on XBOX 360 is dead (both ranked and unranked). The singleplayer story however, is one of the best I've ever played. Better than the sequel actually (which went for a more cartoony and less serious style. So this is still a highly recommended game.

2018 review: Don't buy it for the multiplayer! The singleplayer is the best of the series, absolutely a must-play. For details on that, I will refer you to other reviews for that. For multiplayer I would recommend that you play Battlefield: Bad Company 2 instead. On the one hand: there was no problem finding a multiplayer Gold Rush match in this game. But the game suffers from some shortcoming: low view distance (due to fog) on some maps makes the recon class unfavourable. When enemies are spotted the indicator is opaque, making it hard to shoot them at medium / long distance. And worst of all: the low FPS (seems sub-30) makes this game quite annoying to play.