Title pretty much says it all; It's really cheap on Steam right now, but I don't want to buy it if it's unplayable from a modern perspective.

@BaneFireLord:

I recommend this game wholeheartedly just for the story and atmosphere alone. I was able to play it last year and it holds up pretty well. Combat-wise it's not that bad although it can be clunky.

It's definitely worth playing. One of the more underrated games in the last several years. If you grab it, look into the unofficial fan patch. It can help with a bunch of stuff.

It's all right. Good atmosphere, enjoyable story, but piss-poor combat. The dialogue trees are very Fallout 3-esque, with obvious 'moral' shading and skill requirements, as well so there's that. Try and play with as little combat as possible and you should enjoy it.

Just make sure you clean it up with mods and fan patches, because otherwise the game will either A) bug out like a motherfucker or B) not run. I had a bit of progress in the game, like 6 or so hours, that got destroyed by a game-breaking bug that I could not escape from.

In much the same way as Alpha Protocol, there is a particular way to play that will make it a much more enjoyable experience in combat.

This is not a game where combat focus is rewarded with fun.

Totally holds up, when/if you can get it to work correctly.

Also, I've been listening to "Isolated" a lot lately. What an awesome soundtrack that game had.

I've been thinking of playing it for a long time. From what I hear there are massive fan patches/mods similar to what has happened to the STALKER games, so look them up if you want to have a go.

Still a good game. Played it through last year or so. Dat atmosphere man. I particularly enjoy the dialogues when you play as a malchavian, they're batshit crazy.

@Jimi said:

I've been thinking of playing it for a long time. From what I hear there are massive fan patches/mods similar to what has happened to the STALKER games, so look them up if you want to have a go.

Yeah except STALKER is actually playable "without" the patches, Bloodlines? Not so much.

Clunky is a great word to describe it but I enjoyed it immensely when I played it last year. The combat is the roughest part but knocking the difficulty down to Easy (or just cheating) in order to get through the story is absolutely worth it.

Mechanically, it hardly held up when it was released, but like everyone above says, it still has wonderful atmosphere, characters, and story. And yes, definitely play as a Malkavian at least once. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend it, and equally recommend you do a little digging to find the community patches that bring the game up to its full potential, much like KoToR 2.

I love the game, but if you ask me "does it hold up," my answer is "no," even with a big fat community patch to clean things up. I've yet to finish it myself because of this, but I think I'd echo the sentiment that you might want to either turn down the difficulty or cheat your way through it where necessary to experience the good parts of it. The boss fights are about as difficult and dumb as you'd hear about Deus Ex: Human Revolution and some of the decision branches are straight up broken (had to console command some decision flags because they never triggered properly and had to restart the game near the beginning because an NPC needed to progress never spawned).

But even with the pain in the ass parts, I like the setting, and LOVE playing as a Malkavian. I think playing as a Malk makes the game.

I would say yes myself, it still does things really well that very few other games even try. With the patches its pretty great still. I replayed it last year. ALso, yeah, playing a Malkavian is awesome.

it does, somewhat.

The atmosphere is very good and the world it's set in is interesting, but the combat is pretty bad.