Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice

This game starts strong. The narrow streets and canals of Venice look nice and serve as a great backdrop for sneaking around. The vampire powers feel great, allowing you to jump around and kill enemies quickly with style. The introductory stealth section was simple, but still not bad; kind of a Dishonoured light.

But it goes downhill pretty quickly.

I think the first sign that something wasn't right was the extensive sewer level right after the first section. Sewer levels are so played out in video games that they are basically a joke at this point, but it is especially damning for a game that supposedly emphasises verticality and multiple avenues of attack. It's also dumb for a game so explicitly situated on Venice.

All that should tell you that this is not a game with a lot of though put into it. Level design goes from serviceable to terrible. Even with such linear levels, the developers couldn't manage to not craft a confusing layout full of samey areas that didn't need literal arrows to point the way.

Enemies are also extremely dumb. Their AI is extremely simple and glitchy. You can walk centimetres behind them and they won't notice. They are also never in enough numbers that there's a need for strategy. You can just pick them out one by one without thinking. This makes the whole game trivial and most skills and equipment completely unnecessary. The best strategy from beginning to end is to use the tranquiliser dart and feed on them. Anything else is waste of time and vitae. God only knows why the developers think we need a skill to "blend into the shadows" with enemies this dumb and blind.

A simplistic game like this could be saved by good story, but the story is as generic as it gets. Someone kills your sire and steals a macguffin so you go to Venice to avenge him and recover it. Then you are given a bunch of mostly irrelevant missions for other people. I didn't finish the game, so I don't know how it all ends, but also I don't care.

The game has some good ideas. I like the generous climbing mechanics and how they allow you to essentially vault over some obstacles. I also like what little Venice there is. The claustrophobic streets, canals and meandering rooftops make for a great stealth game. The I like the crossbow mechanics; creating arrows with blood could have lead to interesting resource management in a more challenging game.

At the end of the day, though, this feels like a 2 hour prototype stretched out to full game.