So any early consensus on this? Day one purchase, wait for humble bundle, only worth pirating, never touch?
First impressions are bad and it makes you feel like you're playing Thiaf.
Then it opens up and you become aware that it's broken in 2 parts that don't exactly fit together. In one you investigate, which largely means talking to people and putting their interpersonal relations together and going to places to find hints or items that let you further these investigations. At its best, this masks quest-giving as a natural reaction to a discussion with a npc and the environment you're both in. In the other, mostly while you travel between places, you get to fight endless waves of nameless humans and monsters and the occasional boss.
The problem with the former is that it's slow goings and as someone pointed out, subtitles don't help in letting you proceed faster. The problem with the latter, not only do you become aware of a huge narrative disconnect where your central character that doesn't necessarily want to kill or behave like a mindless monster ends racking up a kill count several times that of any of the monsters but the one crucial aspect is that the characters you're investigating, they're the ones you have to choose to kill in order to feed off of which in turn allows you to level (nameless soldiers' blood doesn't count because reasons).
So essentially you're picking between leveling up and erasing "questlines" or not leveling up and having a hard(er) time while dealing with combat (mostly) but leaving your investigations intact. It would seem that you can take your investigations up to a point where you exhaust all the info about a certain character (a screen informs you of what that is) and then you can proceed to feed on him/her and hopefully not lose out on anything but the fact remains that you were under-leveled for most that point. As for whether or not this works in contrast to the typical "complete quest, level up, complete harder quest" depends whether the two parts of the game work on their own. That is more subjective that one might think.
Dialogue tends to be condensed as in, you get to meet most of the characters on a sort of hub so you best put aside 1 hour so you can go out exhausting dialogue trees like some sort of chore. Writing is all over the place. It reeks of either having 2 bad writers in a larger group, or worse, having a bad editor. Voice acting is mediocre. The main character misses some of his lines outright on occasion ("drug shortages (...) dealing with them" turns into "drugs shortage (...) dealing with shortages") and I can't for the life of me understand why one of the more important NPCs is voiced by a woman that can't shake her french accent. It's not exactly Deus Ex so bad it's good territory but in all, it's a minor complaint even if a complete disappointment after Life Is Strange. In combat, personally speaking, the worst offense is not empowering the player as a vampire because of the leveling issue. So while in VtMB, merely passable combat becomes entertaining because you're a vampire tanking damage and tearing regular humans apart, in here, decent enough combat where you're timing your dodge and striking back with a reasonable amount of choice in attacks depending on whether you want to do damage, stun to get some blood back or both at once, becomes a chore because you're HP/Stamina bar-gawking most of the time.
Oh and there's also crafting for some fucking reason because if Bethesda games have taught anyone anything is that players love to collect garbage. Haven't seen any SJW shit and any of the examples ITT smack more of bad writing/editing than of pushing "The Agenda" but maybe I'm not "woke" enough.
TL;DR - It's always the same: Pirate it and "support the companies; buy it if you like it!", buddy.
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. Still it is shame that games takes away you option of dialogue interactions. It feels that you are just a side character hovering around the protagonist and observing his actions and speeches.
