But perhaps the biggest problem with the combat in Vampire is the game's collision detection - it can be very difficult to tell whether you're hitting your target, because your weapons will pass through the enemies' bodies in just the same way, regardless. The action happens quickly, and keeping track of four different characters ends up being nearly impossible, especially when the three characters you're not directly controlling keep making mistakes.
That's not to say combat is especially difficult in Vampire. Nine times out of ten, you'll see your enemies standing 50 feet away, and they'll never approach you until you walk within a particular range. So you'll frequently find yourself luring one or two foes at a time and dispatching them easily. It's a time-consuming and repetitive process that's necessary for playing through what's otherwise a rather short game. What's worse is that you'll face only about two types of enemies in each area, so whatever specific tactics you learn, you'll apply repeatedly.
It's true that there's some nuance to fighting in Vampire. Each of your characters commands a number of different disciplines - effectively, magic spells - that you can use to bolster your strength or to weaken your enemies. Some of the powers cause you to move at faster speeds and to hit harder, while others let you change shape, summon creatures to your aid, wither and burn your foes, or increase your perception. However, you'll find that many of these powers are redundant and basically useless within the game, as they're all holdovers from the pen-and-paper version of Vampire and thus not all practical for what's essentially an action game. You'll use certain disciplines over and over, while your experiments with many others will usually fail. In Vampire, you'll get to do battle with a host of different vampire clans and other sinister foes, but that's the only appeal of the near-constant combat. Meanwhile, you'll find that the game's seemingly interesting character-building system is actually rather limited, as it's ultimately useful only for letting you upgrade the few disciplines you'll keep using. And you'll also eventually become annoyed with the game's simplistic inventory management, and with the game's various oversights, like how it's perfectly permissible to walk past London police officers while brandishing firearms. Even Vampire's save-game feature is cumbersome, because you're permitted to save only in certain specific areas - but the game also automatically saves between level transitions, so you'll learn to abuse the auto-save function by returning to a scene exit whenever you think you're in for trouble.
Vampire's ambitious storyteller mode is the only way to play the game with other players, and it effectively lets one player manipulate the game world on the fly for the other players by granting them rewards, giving them quests and surprise encounters, and so on. It's a great idea that doesn't seem effective within the game itself, as Vampire's single-player mode's own inferior storytelling is suggestive of the shortcomings of the storyteller mode. For one thing, there are few character models and settings for you to choose from, and for another, effectively manipulating the storyteller tools is difficult, especially compared with the basic challenges you'll face throughout the single-player game. Vampire includes a couple of prefabricated multiplayer scenarios, but it would've been much better had the single-player game been playable with up to four people; that way, at least, a lot of the bad pathfinding and micromanagement problems would have been resolved. Some players, especially fans of the White Wolf source material, will doubtless struggle to create scenarios using the available scripting tools and the forthcoming editor, but as it stands, multiplayer Vampire is much more appealing in principle than in practice.
It's unfortunate that such a great-looking, ambitious game falls so short of its potential. Vampire seems to have a lot going for itself, and its graphics are second to none. But its gameplay will be disappointingly familiar to virtually anyone who's played an action role-playing hybrid, while the game's numerous problems are just barely offset by the quality of its presentation. Similarly, Vampire's thin plot will likely frustrate those expecting the game to take fuller advantage of the fiction that inspired the game.
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