If you take Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, The Lost Boys, and Dungeons and Dragons and put them in a blender with a couple of drops of hot sauce, you will get the tabletop/pen and paper RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. The game and its story take place in a “Goth-Punk” world and was released in 1991 and became the best-selling tabletop RPG second to D&D. Over time the game has spawned multiple sequels over the years before becoming a video game. The focus today is the latest in the series of games, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong. A big thank you to Big Bad Wolf and Nacon for the reviewing opportunity.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong takes place in Boston where all the vampires living in the city receive a “Code Red” alert, meaning that their existence was discovered and they’re under attack. While the city’s vampires are taking shelter, three vampires, Galeb Bazory, one of the oldest vampires in Boston, Emem Louis, a club owner, and Leysha, a vampire with the gift of seeing premonitions but has little memory of her own past, are tasked with solving the mystery behind a gruesome attack at a party symbolizing the unification of rival vampire clans.
Now onto the game itself! From the start, you’re pretty much dropped in with little help when it comes to the basics like movement and interacting with the world around you, I’m hours into the game and I’m still trying to figure out some of the controls.
I’m a little disappointed with the game’s art, it looks good but it could really be better as the animation of the characters and the cutscenes look a bit cheap especially when details of a character render slowly and in a couple of cases I had characters T-pose at the start of cutscenes or the start of a level.
The voicework of Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is OK overall, but I find the voice acting of Leysha’s daughter, her voice got really old real quick as it’s clearly an adult trying to sound like a child with the added annoyance with adding a lisp.
Overall gameplay is enjoyable, the game has the feel of being a noir story as you have to investigate your surroundings, and how you do in each level will determine the points you earn to upgrade the character’s traits and abilities. the balance of trying to keep your character’s hunger under control depending on your actions. Adding to the tension of trying to keep your hunger under control are the choices you make that determine how the story will unfold.
Overall Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is interesting in both good and bad ways. the biggest thing I don’t like about the game is the deep lore and background the game assumes you already know, I know this is not the first video game of the series BUT it is the first to be reaching out to a larger audience that is most likely made up of people, not 100% familiar with the world the game takes place in. The game does have a codex and a list of terminology and lore but it’s a novella, to say the least, and I doubt many would stop gameplay to read through all of it. The game’s mechanics when it comes to your skills are quite involved more than I think they need to be.
On my scale of 1-10, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is a 5.5 as the game is decent gameplay-wise and story but the assumption you know everything that’s going on, lack of tutorial for basic mechanics, cheap-looking graphics and animation, and so-so voice acting leaves a bit of a bad taste.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong Will be stalking the night May 19th for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, and PC (Epic Game store), with a release for Nintendo Switch coming a bit later this year.
