Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice Review After One Playthrough

After completing a full playthrough of Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice here's some quick thoughts and a review about the game.

Overall this is a pretty fun vampire assassination and stealth VR game. What it does best is the feeling of being a supernatural assassin. Sneaking from spot to spot and taking out your enemies one by one.

Your need for blood will also force you to get up close and personal to borrow some from an enemy, which is always a risk, and keeps you from just using your most powerful abilities over and over.

You suck on a lot of necks in this game

This is the core of Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice and what it does well. Put a lot of enemies between you and where you need to be and let you figure out how to sneak or kill your way past them.

It also gives you the choice between being patient or going a little crazy and seeing if you can quickly fight your way through.

There are sections where I found sneaking to be the best option, and other parts where I just went on a wild killing spree until only I was left standing. Either way I was having a good time.

Though of course going for the aggressive approach comes with a lot of risks as your enemies are capable and if they spot you will take you out pretty quickly.

The upgrade tree in Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice

Speaking of options, there's an upgrade tree, and the choices of which upgrade to take were pretty compelling, and you'll always want more upgrade points which really incentivizes you to look for collectibles or complete optional objectives for more.

Even at the end of the game I still want to find out what other abilities and upgrades I could use.

The optional objectives did occasionally make me want to replay a mission later as well, which is a good sign. Though there is sometimes an optional objective to do a mission without killing anyone, and that feels pretty dumb.

Most of your abilities are aimed at murder, you are a vampire assassin after all, and not using those abilities for the pacifist optional objective feels so limiting and takes away most of your options in a given situation.

Using an incredible vampire ability on a poor guard

It feels like a disjointed design choice, and so do other parts of this game as well. For instance the snipers that appear only at the beginning and end of the game, and the boss fights.

There aren't many boss fights, and they all take away most of your abilities and reduce you to your blinking teleport and your punching. Try as I did I couldn't find any other ability that did anything in the boss fights, and that also felt very limiting.

My upgrade choices didn't matter, and neither did my skill at most of what the game had me doing, sneaking and assassinating.

Dodging these is most of what you do in boss fights

Speaking of choices that don't matter, let's talk about the story. Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice bills itself as a story driven game that lets you explore Venice and make choices in the seedy back stabbing World Of Darkness setting.

It doesn't really do that, if you want to come to this game to have fun in the world of vampire power politics, then don't expect much of that. The focus of this game is the fun assassination and sneaking gameplay.

Without spoiling too much, you rarely get choices, and even sinking some ugprade points into Intimidation skills didn't help that much either.

Intimidating for an extremely minor advantage

Your choices really come down to being nice to people or being mean to people, which isn't much choice at all.

Only a couple of times did I notice actions I took in the game changing things later in a throw away line of dialog or a slight difference in a mission.

Maybe my choices were changing things more than I thought, but I didn't really notice that my limited decisions had any effect on anything.

Mostly events just happen to you, and those events are pretty flat.

So are the characters. Your buddy Pietro helps you out, and all the other Vampires are opponents that aren't really sympathetic or deep at all. Except maybe for one, but I never had the chance to take their side.

Despite not being very interesting Pietro is pretty great

This ties into the big twist that clearly meant to feel like a twist, but didn't.

Overall the most disappointing thing in the entire game was at the end where what should have been a big choice on how to treat all the main characters, but that didn't happen.

Their fates were already decided. Maybe my actions earlier had predestined that, but it would have been good to have some indication if that was the case.

The gameplay was pretty awesome though, and the feeling of sneaking through an area and picking off the hapless opponents one by one, or the scary thrill of running away or trying to not be destroyed in a tense fight was fantastic.

This screenshot from the Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice summarizes this entire review

Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice delivers in its gameplay promises, though it does stumble from time to time when it loses focus of what makes it a fun game.

All in all I'd give it a B. If you really love the World Of Darkness or want to do some sneaky assassination as a vampire, then this game is an easy recommendation.

If you're looking for a deep story where your decisions have consequences or you're looking for a more head to head combat focused experience then look elsewhere.

If you've got some thoughts on this game yourself feel free to leave a comment.