SO after recently coming off of my first playthrough of Bloodlines and wanting to play another vampire RPG I decided I'd check out VTM: Redemption. I'd heard mixed things about it, and the only person who even gave it a single point in the last Codex best RPGs poll was hiver, so I was hesitant about playing it. So after 3 days of very long gamin' sessions I finished the game and I thought I would offer up some thoughts on it now before I forgot all about this thing.
The game has some cool ideas but reeks of wasted potential. It's a linear hack-n-slash dungeon crawl with absolutely no sidequests or optional objectives. Unlike Bloodlines, you don't have a whole lot of roleplaying options here. You are Christof Romuald and the only thing that you have control over is influencing your humanity meter through some dialogue choices (there are 3 different endings based on Christof's humanity meter). The writing ranges from competent at best to pure cringe at worst, and aside from the protagonist himself there aren't any interesting or well-developed characters to be found here.
About that protagonist... he manages to be a genuine fucking badass crusader for the LAWD while also being kind of annoying in his undying devotion for his hot nun girlfriend Anezka. He's a hero in the classical sense of the term, and it's honestly pretty refreshing seeing the hero trope played so straight in this day and age after decades of everyone trying to do everything but.
For 2000, the game has excellent graphics. Art direction and atmosphere are superb and the soundtrack is fantastic. These are by far the best aspects of the experience.
I can't think of another RPG which transitions to another time period halfway through, and some of the game's better moments come from the bewilderment Christof experiences in waking up in 1999. I've read before that the game gets considerably worse in the modern era, but that really isn't the case. The game DOES tempt you with a ton of cool guns and modern weapons, and most of them are shit in practice. If you stick to meleeing and mostly disregard the guns, content-wise it isn't any better or worse than Prague and Vienna.
The game is mostly very easy all the way through, but the final boss in both of his forms is basically unbeatable unless you have a very specific character build and arsenal of weapons. Save yourself the frustration and use cheats. Enable the console, and whenever one of your characters goes into torpor pause the game and type 'revive.'
Gameplay is like 3D Diablo with up to four party members. It's clunky as fuck and your party AI is fucked. If you don't want to constantly be ripping your hair out over the retarded AI, here's two things you MUST do:
1) Go in the controls menu and disable all party AI except auto-casting healing disciplines. If you don't do this, your characters will constantly be wasting precious blood casting disciplines on trivial encounters. This causes them to frenzy more and generally makes the gameplay experience 100x more annoying.
2) Go in solo mode when navigating through tight spaces. Seriously. When you get to the part in Vienna where you have to dodge the sunlight, guide your party members through one by one. Don't move them as a unit.
The gameplay can get awfully dull at times, but I will say that it never got as actively unpleasant as the sewers or the Hollowbrook Hotel in Bloodlines, and for as much flack as the second half of this game gets, it holds up a lot better in comparison to its first half than Hollywood and Chinatown do to Santa Montica and Downtown. Despite the monotonous gameplay and juvenile writing I actually enjoyed Redemption a lot. It isn't a particularly good game by any means, but it's an interesting one, which is a lot more than can be said for recent nu shit like Shadowrun Returns, let alone all the consolized popamole trash to come out in the 2000s. Sadly, the studio behind this game, Nihilistic Software, went on to make a bunch of shovelware console titles including a recent critically panned COD game for PSVita.
Seriously Codex, what the fuck. This game deserved a mention on our top 70. I mean, Arcanum consistently makes the top 5 and that game is shittier than this one.
The game has some cool ideas but reeks of wasted potential. It's a linear hack-n-slash dungeon crawl with absolutely no sidequests or optional objectives. Unlike Bloodlines, you don't have a whole lot of roleplaying options here. You are Christof Romuald and the only thing that you have control over is influencing your humanity meter through some dialogue choices (there are 3 different endings based on Christof's humanity meter). The writing ranges from competent at best to pure cringe at worst, and aside from the protagonist himself there aren't any interesting or well-developed characters to be found here.
About that protagonist... he manages to be a genuine fucking badass crusader for the LAWD while also being kind of annoying in his undying devotion for his hot nun girlfriend Anezka. He's a hero in the classical sense of the term, and it's honestly pretty refreshing seeing the hero trope played so straight in this day and age after decades of everyone trying to do everything but.
For 2000, the game has excellent graphics. Art direction and atmosphere are superb and the soundtrack is fantastic. These are by far the best aspects of the experience.
I can't think of another RPG which transitions to another time period halfway through, and some of the game's better moments come from the bewilderment Christof experiences in waking up in 1999. I've read before that the game gets considerably worse in the modern era, but that really isn't the case. The game DOES tempt you with a ton of cool guns and modern weapons, and most of them are shit in practice. If you stick to meleeing and mostly disregard the guns, content-wise it isn't any better or worse than Prague and Vienna.
The game is mostly very easy all the way through, but the final boss in both of his forms is basically unbeatable unless you have a very specific character build and arsenal of weapons. Save yourself the frustration and use cheats. Enable the console, and whenever one of your characters goes into torpor pause the game and type 'revive.'
Gameplay is like 3D Diablo with up to four party members. It's clunky as fuck and your party AI is fucked. If you don't want to constantly be ripping your hair out over the retarded AI, here's two things you MUST do:
1) Go in the controls menu and disable all party AI except auto-casting healing disciplines. If you don't do this, your characters will constantly be wasting precious blood casting disciplines on trivial encounters. This causes them to frenzy more and generally makes the gameplay experience 100x more annoying.
2) Go in solo mode when navigating through tight spaces. Seriously. When you get to the part in Vienna where you have to dodge the sunlight, guide your party members through one by one. Don't move them as a unit.
The gameplay can get awfully dull at times, but I will say that it never got as actively unpleasant as the sewers or the Hollowbrook Hotel in Bloodlines, and for as much flack as the second half of this game gets, it holds up a lot better in comparison to its first half than Hollywood and Chinatown do to Santa Montica and Downtown. Despite the monotonous gameplay and juvenile writing I actually enjoyed Redemption a lot. It isn't a particularly good game by any means, but it's an interesting one, which is a lot more than can be said for recent nu shit like Shadowrun Returns, let alone all the consolized popamole trash to come out in the 2000s. Sadly, the studio behind this game, Nihilistic Software, went on to make a bunch of shovelware console titles including a recent critically panned COD game for PSVita.
Seriously Codex, what the fuck. This game deserved a mention on our top 70. I mean, Arcanum consistently makes the top 5 and that game is shittier than this one.
Last edited:
