Casey, I beat Vampire. Here's my assessment.
Pretty good. Had a story with a fair amount variety, and open ended routes. Good development for stats. Likable characters. Nostalgic Fallout-like dialog choices. I liked the novelty of typing on a computer inside of a game, even though the hacking part could have been more interesting. City design was good, up until Hollywood and Chinatown. Santa Monica had a simple elegance to it that worked great for introducing the player to the game, while Downtown just felt big, like anything could happen. Hollywood was just a bunch of stuff crammed together, with most buildings not having much of a point at all, and Chinatown was just tiny, with nothing to do there, except the main plot story.
Not a solid game, even with the best patches it's still flawed. It is obvious it was rushed, as some parts of the game are just so painfully boring and repetitive, and certain areas are just plain broken. Once an elevator just wouldn't work anymore, so luckily there were vents in the building, and another time there was a barrier in front of a door that just wouldn't move (I looked it up, it's a common bug), so I had to use noclip to get by.
There also is a serious lack of variety in enemies, weapons, and maybe it could've used a longer main story plot. Subquests were fun, but after a while, I felt like I was just running circles, do this, do that, go in this creepy building, da da da, etc. I'm pretty sure I beat them all, or at least, all those that were available through my class/dialog choices. On a final note, playing through as a melee character, this game was way too easy, most bosses died within 5 minutes. One took me a half hour, the one chick in Chinatown. I spent more time just running from A to B in sidequests than I did in boss fights.
I'm confused what to rate it. Since I spent some time writing this, I'll just steal IGN's method of rating.
Presentation: 7.5. The look of the vampires, the detailed faces, the monsters, all cool. At times some of the levels were just bland.
Graphics: 7.0. Hard to say with this one, I don't remember what else game out in 2004 that I can compare this game to. Half Life 2 looked better, but V:tM is using the Source engine. How is that possible?
Sound: 7.5. Repetitive, but ood the first 8 hours. The creepy house song did creepy me outty though.
Gameplay: 8.5 Combat was fun, stealth made the game a little too easy (able to kill a guy while another guy is staring directly at that guy with 0 dexterity). It was fun just running through the world, and the story was good.
Lasting Appeal: 8.0. I'm sure there's plenty of different ways to play through this game, but some parts of the game were just so frustrating, I don't want to right now.
Overall: 8.0. Worth my time. Maybe took 20 hours. Made me think a lot about how games should be made.