Nearly every problem with Bloodlines traces back to the fact that Troika went broke while making it. It was originally designed as a straight-up FPS; the designers responsible were fired and replaced with the folks responsible for the final game, but they weren’t able to redesign as much of the game as they should have been, and so the endgame is more or less a series of fights. Had the developers had more time, the game would not have the slow slide over the last 25% from FPS/RPG to full-on FPS. The game also wouldn’t have shipped in a tremendously buggy state; the fan patch is mandatory for a good experience. You can choose to either fix the bugs in the release patch or fix the bugs and get all the unfinished (but not extracted from the code!) content completed and made available within the game; if you go with the first option, there’s a few quest lines and odds and ends that simply dead end.

Ultimately, if you’re a World of Darkness enthusiast, you need this game; it’s set in the Final Nights and captures the OWoD perfectly. If you’re indifferent to vampires and things that go bump in the night, it’s still a very strong entry in the FPS/RPG genre and has a tremendous amount of content to explore. I cannot recommend it enough, and had to restrain myself, based on the disappointing, combat-focused endgame, from giving it a 10.

There’s issues, of course; just as Zoey was essentially a blank in the first game, Rochelle has very little personality, which means that Valve’s two-for-two in having its female protagonists being underdeveloped. The new special infected are kind of fiddly, and I’ve gone entire rounds without getting a successful attack with a Charger or Spitter and been utterly baffled as to why.

The biggest problem with Ninja Gaiden is that it’s a platforming game which includes a knockback on damage, meaning that getting hit while jumping from platform to platform- and you will get hit, over and over- frequently means falling to your death. Hell, getting hit within about six feet of the edge of a platform means falling to your death.

It’s a rare game that is both brutally hard and immensely fun.

Oh, my. There’s so much wrong here- and this is only after about two hours of gameplay- that it’s amazing it was released the way it was.

When you launch the game, you get to sit through a video of blurry black and pink blobs moving around while an hilariously melodramatic voice talks about how the world is full of paranormal threats and the Jericho team fights them to make us safe. Over the minute and a half that this runs, the video slowly resolves into a mass of flesh with flies crawling over it. Just lovely. And guess what the background of the title screen is? Of course, before you can go to the title screen, you’ll get to sit through a completely context-free video of some paramilitary types (I don’t remember if they were the Jericho team or not) going into a crypt or something and getting brutally killed. Then and only then can you stare at flies crawling over flesh some more.

The title screen brings an interesting surprise in the form of the Bonus Codes option- clicking it takes you to a screen with an access code which appears to be unique to your copy of the game and provides a list of phone numbers (all for European countries in my copy). Each of the numbers is a toll number- you’ll be charged a dollar or two a minute for calling. Apparently you have to actually call them to get the “Bonus” (read: cheat) codes, and the unique access code is a way of making it impossible to just look them up on GameFAQs, and some sources on the web claim that they were required to give credit card info also. Classy as hell.

So once you check the controls (and notice that the game natively supports a controller, because god knows that I’d rather use a controller for a first person shooter than a mouse and keyboard), you hop into the game, and meet your first loading screen. Now, some games that put interesting information or flavor text on the screen have this problem where they finish loading and automatically move on before you finish reading the text. Jericho doesn’t do this; instead it types the flavor text out, letter by letter, agonizingly slowly. The levels load in about fifteen seconds; I’m sitting at the loading screens for around a minute because I only get about three letters a second of the paragraph of text. I have no idea why this was done; perhaps the devs only had a couple of TRS-80s to do the testing on and so the levels loaded slowly enough that this wasn’t an issue.

So the first thing you actually in the game is your main character waking up from a nightmare. Entirely in the first person, he picks up a phone, holds it to his (your) head… and you hear his half of the conversation. The phone is right up against your character’s ear and you hear only what your character is saying. What the hell?

You get inserted at the area where the game takes place and the first thing you’ll notice is that the only member of your team who’s not wearing bondage gear (and I am not even a little kidding, one woman’s outfit has the sides of her top and the area of her hips cut out for no discernible reason) appears to be wearing Brotherhood of Steel-style powered armor. Not like it matters, though- as soon as you get into combat, you’ll discover that you- along with every other member of your team, whether they’re dressed for fetish night at the club or fighting for the glory of the Emperor- are made of tissue and die pretty much as soon as a monster gets close. Not like you’ll care when your buddies die- you get absolutely no introduction to who they are and what they do, their mouths barely move when they talk so it’s hard to figure it out by watching subtitles, and while over time you’ll get familiar with their abilities and powers, when the fighting starts and you see fireballs flying around, you have no idea what’s going on, a situation which is exacerbated by the enemies all being sort of vaguely clad in black and looking, in the dark, pretty much like your friends. And it’s going to be pretty goddamn dark because the flashlight you’re given would embarass those cheap plastic Everready flashlights we had when we were kids.

You can give orders to your team, but there’s very little reason to; the system is less advanced than the one for ordering around the bots in UT99, and there’s little point in having the Jericho squad take up defensive positions when every fight takes place in a claustrophobically tight corridor or room, which makes the fact that one of the most common enemies can only be killed by shooting each of three yellow spots on him- whereupon he explodes and kills anyone nearby- loads of fun. The monsters take several shots to kill and come in groups of two to four, with reinforcements crawling up out of the ground after their predecessors die, which means that every fight lasts for ages, and you’ll be losing a couple of people per fight. That’s okay in theory, because you’ve got the ability to quickly resurrect fallen comrades, but the AI is so dumb and your squaddies so weak that it begins to resemble healing in World of Warcraft- running around healing people instead of, you know, shooting the fucking monsters in this first-person shooter. Possibly the idea was, following in the footsteps of Thief as inventing the First Person Rogue game and Hexxen inventing the First Person Fighter game, to create the first First Person Cleric game; god only knows.

Oh, and the fucking levels are even smaller than the ones in Undying, so you’ll be looking at a load screen every few minutes. Seriously, avoid the shit out of this and watch an LP or something. I’m probably going to keep playing it just because I’m that kind of masochist, but you should definitely stay away from it.

E: Also, the website for the game contains screamers- you know, horrible face appears suddenly and a loud scream plays. So if that sort of thing bothers you like it bothers me, avoid that as well.

Much of the voice acting is not good. At all. Occasionally, NPCs will be voiced by noticeably different awful fake accents at multiple points in the same conversation. And, then, there are the bugs. I have had so many issues with this game, had exchanges of dozens of emails with their support team — only to find that they kept *losing* my case numbers. I tried using some of the unofficial patches, and they helped some, but still — one glitch consistently crashed the game whenever I entered a certain room in a dungeon. I needed to enter the room in order to finish one of the Mage’s Guild Recommendation quests, thus making that whole series of quests impossible to complete. At one point, the game started crashing every time I saved, which required me to start over from the beginning, as uninstalling and reinstalling the game didn’t seem to fix the issue.

Well, by now, I’ve forgotten what I rated this game. But it would have been a 9 had my experiences with technical issues not been so severe.

I love this game a lot.

Oddly, I simply LOVE L4D2. It’s very difficult for me to pin down why (there are so many small gameplay things that are unequivocally better) but I enjoy playing Infected in Scavenge and Versus (the very thing that drove me to rage every time I tried it in L4D1) so much that I almost always want to keep playing when people are leaving to go to bed, an experience that only TF2 has every delivered for me in fun-quotient.