BloodLust Shadowhunter

I want to hate and love this game at the same time. It can be really obtuse and frustrating but that can be said for a lot of my favorite games over the years. It's not good but if you enjoy dungeon crawling character building games you might find a little entertainment. Whatever problems I have with the game have not stopped me from picking up the other games from this developer.

The story is bad and not well told, which just makes the whole game feel pointless. Many mechanics are either not explained or explained in a way that's easy to miss. And I don't know if it's a bug or what but I heard whispering CONSTANTLY which was driving me insane. I had some fun with the game but can't recommend it.

Can't get the mouse to work with it. It just floats off to the left which means this is unplayable.

The dev says in the forum that removing the controller helps with that. It doesn't.

If you're on a modern PC, don't bother with this one.

The Good

• The story is passable and the characters you meet along the way add a lot to the weird, dark vampire theme.
  
• Puzzles are enjoyable.
  

The Bad

• Graphics are dated. Characters models are poorly animated. Textures and world design is dull. Much of the game is dark and hidden from sight, with minimal brightness and lighting effects that attempt to mask the ugliness.
  
• Combat offers very little in terms of variety. You'll be using the same combat tactics no matter what level your character is.
  
[*] Dungeon delving is repetitive and tediously boring. Every level is randomly generated floor with nearly identical enemies as the previous. Exploring becomes painful quickly.

Final Thoughts

88/100

I hear that this game was janky as hell when it came out in 2015. This doesn't appear to be the case for me now, as I just bought it today. I'm gonna give it to you straight. This is the best indie game I have ever played. The way the dungeons are cleverly tied to the hub areas, items, secrets, puzzles, attention to detail is unbelievable for a game made by one person. I simply cannot stop playing and although its not really a lot like it, its the best vampire-themed game since Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Except maybe the underrated (for me) Vampyr. Many times my jaw dropped as vampire magic-focused puzzles, traps, special abilities and secrets kept ramping up the mystery every time I retry, while the city environments on top ooze with atmosphere and present you with some respite to take the urban spots in.

Now, some people complain about combat being a little janky. What I would call it is the combat does not feel empowering and that's exactly what I think it should be. Too many modern arpg games have perfectly snappy and smooth combat that works just like an action game and sacrifice the rpg elements in return. Deus Ex, Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077, you name it. In the original Deus Ex, System Shock 2 and VTMB, planning, your stats, items and a bit of luck was more important and your skill at dodging and timing wouldn't save you. Its a lot like that here and feels more than satisfying to me.

With regards to the graphics, it looks a little bit better than Half Life 2 with some Unreal 3 engine bump mapping on some wall and vegetation textures, with many character models of course not looking as good as Half life 2, while a few are even slightly better. This does not include lip-synch however, as that aspect is primitive. I really find the combat and magic effects appealing as all hell however, and as a whole, I find the game pretty and lovable, with its own style.

My complaints are mostly minor. Although the voice acting is generally better than one would expect, there is some recording static sound heard in some lines. Some character dialogue repeats way too often on the streets. I understand the budget and man hours is next to nil, but they could just stay silent for a long time and say things like "yeah, nah, hmmm" every few minutes or so. And I don't know why the game opens a command window each time I start it to ask if I want to force it to run in direct x11. I do, but just ask me once and keep it that way.

Overall, this is a masterpiece and at this price, straight up robbery; on your part. :D

A very tentative yes on this game, because it doesn't feel fully baked.

What it is: A one-man project recreating the feel of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, with some original worldbuilding, an absolutely perfect mood, and a lot of vacant-feeling MMO elements.

Gameplay is a first-person, over-the-shoulder hub-based dungeon-crawler. Areas in Bloodhunter are either lavishly designed or completely bare, depending on whether they're handmade by the creator or thrown together by the program that generates the dungeons. The handmade areas feel a bit like Grimrock in that they're bristling with puzzles and secrets that the three different starting classes of the game interact with in different ways. They can be a little frustrating until you figure out the gimmick (always have vampire sight on and play as a witch), but it's neat to see so much content crammed into the starting area.

Unfortunately, as the game opens up, the more boring randomgen dungeons start to predominate. On top of that, enemies aren't really complex or interesting, and player powers are mostly either utility (vampire sight, mistform, teleport) or different flavors of dps. There are a handful of temporary buffs, but I've never felt the need to use one, because combat has never felt like a challenge. Even boss-fights are just circle-kiteing with a ranged weapon. They drag, but there's no real danger in them.

One of Bloodhunter's more engaging features is the host of vampire clans that the player can encounter. Each has a hidden base in the hubworld, each has a string of quests, and each quest chain intersects with those of the other clans. Unfortunately, many of the quests involve going down into the dungeon, but those that don't make the world feel more immersive.

Progression in Bloodhunter is a mix of attributes, skills, talents, and gear. Gear is relatively low-churn and can be had pretty easily, although a reasonable ammount of inventory space is locked behind spending talent points to get new inventory pages, and reasonable sale prices are locked behind having a high Persuasion stat.

Taken together with the kind of barren dungeons, the simple but balanced skills, and the gear progression that's entirely divorced from the plot progression, a lot of the game's balance decisions make sense for if it were going to be an MMO and then sharply veered off, which appears to be what actually happened.

Still, what remains is exceptionally good for a one-man project. It's sprawling, not constrained. The tone is dead-on for the kind of melodramatic action-goth thing the game is trying to invoke. If you liked the Underworld movies, or you didn't take Vampire: The Masquerade too seriously, and if you don't mind playing through something that isn't perfectly cohesive, this is a totally reasonable way to spend a dozen hours or so.

It is a shame that I can't recommend the game.
Some parts of it are enjoyable, but there are just so many bugs etc. that I just end up frustrated more than anything while playing.

Lets start with the good:
-A game inspired by tabletop RPG's. Not as good as either VtM Bloodline nor VtM Redemption, but that most likely is because of the budget which is ok.
-The game tries to create a vampire society feel with different "clans".

The neutral stuff:
- The talent trees are randomized for every character. This can be either good or bad. I personally dislike it because I tried both a witch and a warrior and both had awkward skill trees. The witch got talents that improved fighting (+ dexterity every level, +axe damage), while the warrior had a few talents that were for spell casters.
- The dialogue is very hit and miss. Sometimes I like it a bit and at times I just cringe at how it is written.

Now for the bad things and the reason I won't play it anymore:
- Spell casting flat out doesn't work at times. While playing a witch I had a huge number of times there the animation for a spell started, but nothing happened after that. I also had the reverse where I was for instance knocked down, but the spell casting did continue through it.
- Mist form is a spell in the game that transforms you into a cloud of mist, but it doesn't function as it should (I think). At one point I transformed into mist, but a spike trap still damaged me (killed me even) and an enemy was just tracking me while I passed it.
- Your own spells are dependant on you hitting the enemy, but spells of quite a few enemies are either tracking you or instant hits. There are a few spells you can dodge, but those are only the spells you can learn aswell.
I will give 2 examples of what I mean with tracking/instant hitting.
The first is that when you fight a vampire golem or ice golem or similar and they hit the ground to knock you down, you can see the path of the shockwave bend quite far if you dodge around while the shockwave is approaching you.
The second example is that of spider webbings. If a spider decides to lock you in place with its webbing, it hits you instantly without the possibility of doding or responding.
- Enemies quite often spam their spells/attacks. In a fight with a golem it just knocked me down 4 times in a row without giving me a possibility to do a thing about it.
- At one point I ran into a bug that caused my stamina, health and energy to stop regenerating. At first I thought my character lacked blood, but that was at 83. So I thought of a debuff, but there was nothing indicating this. In the end I suicided to respawn in a safe area which fixed it, but needing to die to fix this is not that good to say the least.

Bloodlust Shadowhunter is a 3rd person action RPG where the player is a newly turned vampire. The game has some interesting ideas but unfortunately they are poorly implemented. I haven't finished the game, but I haven't enjoyed playing it so far, so I've decided to abandon my playthrough.

The combat is weak, due to a combination of "floaty" physics, and stiff character animations. Attacks don't feel like they've got any weight to them. You can turn Humans into vampires who will then fight at your side, which is good in theory, but the AI is dumb as a brick. Sometimes they just stand around and do nothing. Fortunately they can't die, at worst they get knocked out for a few seconds, so at least they still function as a distraction while you kill the monsters, but its still annoying.

The main content of the game involves dungeon crawling. There are several different dungeons, and the deeper you go, the better loot you find, but you also have to fight tougher monsters. There's an achievement for reaching the 200th floor, but I think these dungeons might just continue on forever. Every floor has a randomly generated layout and item/monster placement. Again, this all sounds good.

However, what I don't like is the number of quests that ask you to find a specific item within those random dungeons. Maybe you find it immediately, or maybe you wander around aimlessly for hours. It also doesn't help that when you leave a dungeon to complete a quest, everything resets, so when you get a new quest that sends you back to the same dungeon, you have to grind through everything all over again. It gets tedious pretty quickly. Maybe if the combat was more enjoyable it would be less of a problem, but I still think its poor design. The story, dialogue and voice acting are all terrible.

From reading the forums I understand the game is developed by one person, so I feel kinda bad for trashing his work. But at the end of the day it doesn't really matter to me how many people were involved or how much resources they had to work with. I just want to play good games, and a bad game developed by one person is still a bad game. I wouldn't even recommend picking up Bloodlust Shadowhunter on sale, because it would still be a waste of time that could be spent with better games.

A very nice game that can be played for many hours if you explore the dungeons.
I enjoyed my minions (especially Walter) and the creative monsters.
Extremely well woth the money.
Kudos to the developer who seemed to do the game by himself.

I dunno. I don't really want to give the game a bad review per se, but I just can't recommend it. If I were to go by the general rating systems used by mainstream gaming sites, it would be in the 6/10 range. It's really commendable one guy made it and all, but the game is essentially a mediocre rendition of several gameplay elements, and pretty lackluster visuals.

I don't really mean the poor textures either. Rather, the whole scale of the game, maps and field of vision just seem weirdly constructed relative to the player. Everything in the hub areas feel very claustrophobic and simply dumped there to tick a checklist of what needs to be in a game requiring objective locations. (oddly enough, Bloodlines had a similar feeling, but the gameworld was like 100 times more fleshed out, so it worked).

The combat is incredibly clunky and plays out in an awkward, third person hack and slash style. I'm sure attacks being halted if an enemy hits you is intentional, but it just plays out in a very sluggish and turgid way. Attacks don't even seem to connect when doing damage. The physics are as such, that you never feel in controls of combat. You may as well stand there and play it as if you were playing an MMO.

Character growth is just bizarre and stats seem to progress with the intention of minutely progressing a pretty selective path. Rather than making a 'build', you feel like your character isn't really going anywhere other than being able to utilize one of a few methods of play. When STR and DEX do almost nothing to help your damage/defense capabilities, you have a problem. The talent tree promises a nice random factor, but comes across as rather redundant as a whole.

The random dungeons are really well done and perhaps are the most worthy aspect of the game. The problem is everything around it; the questing, the story, leveling up, and general sense of accomplishment just didn't make me feel all that invested, or interested to keep going. The story is just stale, the characters around all feel like bad extras who turned up with no director to give them any degree of motivation or method. Characters running around idle in the hub area just so you can constantly bite them without any consequence is incredibly dumb too.

Also, I've no idea how this game is coded, but it EATS resources. My rig feels like it's going to explode as soon as you load the game up, and it's specs are way above being decent.

All in all, this is merely for old school RPG enthusiasts. If you liked some of the RPGs from yesteryear like VTM:BL and Arx Fatalis, there may be a very rough gem here for you. If you're selective about what RPGs you play, you'll probably not enjoy this, and will get rather frustrated early on.

Don't let the indie look and feel (and price) fool you. This game is very deep first-person ARPG, filled with more randomly-generated items and dungeons than you can shake a cross at. There's a thin main story (some nonsense about going after your vampiric sire) but the meat of the game is buried in vast roguelike dungeons where you'll use your own vampiric powers and weapons to mercilessly slaughter legions of the undead, monsters, and other trash. The game is easy to pick up and play, and the ingame tutorials will get you up to speed quickly, although there's a few game systems that you'll need to puzzle out during your own play time.

It's not all just hack and slash, though. Bloodlust also tosses in helping helpings of alchemy, crafting, and other activities to spice up the grind. There's really nothing really new here -- BloodLust is, at its core, a very familiar ARPG grind -- but the unexpected level of polish by this one-man-band production is very surprising. Highly recommended, and there are some major studios out there who could learn from this game!

Found a game breaking glitch at the beginning of the game and posted it on the forum, dev responded and had it fixed in about an hour.
I would recommend this game even without that, but to see a 1 man development "team" being so responsive compelled me to actually take a minute of my time to write this and recommend the game.

11/10 would lust for blood again

An amazing game that takes me back to old school dungeon crawling with some additional advantages. I know there are a few that can't recommend the game but I honestly don't think a good recommendation can come from less than an hour of gameplay. Now that it's finally been released out of EA; I want to say a few things about it.
The story is interesting although a bit non involved with the overall gameplay. I would say, it really doesn't need to be followed as closely to enjoy the game in its entirety.
Combat is a bit clunky but enjoyable once you get the hang of it. Reminds me a bit of the Gothic series.
Looting and dungeon delving is probably my favourite part of the game. There are tons of loot to find in the game with qualities from common to rare and unique. Dungeons are randomly generated each time you start one. There are random stairwells that appear every few floors to help with escape if needed.
Character progress is fun as well. Many skills and traits to choose from that increase your inventory size, allow mist transformation to save keys and move through gated doors, allow summoning of more minions, increase specific stats every level and even transform into a beast for brutal melee action. You can also increase the stats of your minions as you progress.
Overall, I would rate it an 8/10. I'm not one for considering graphics into my rating so please take into consideration for yourselves that it isn't top of the line. I think the developer did an amazing job and the game is enjoyable for what it is. I've played enough AAA titles to know looks and prices aren't everything.

BloodLust Shadwhunter is the bastard child of Vampire the Masquerade and Diablo that both amazes and disappoints me at the same time.

*PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING IS BASED ON MY AND ONLY MY OPINIONS*

The first thing you'll probably notice when browsing through this game's steam page is the relatively lacklustre screenshots. Yes... the visuals are.... lacking to say the last. However, don't let that fool you though as the game's real charm is hidden under its layers of ugliness. Graphics settings will let you tamper with texture, AA and resolution settings to a certain extent; although, I found that with everything maxed my fps hitches a bit everytime I use a spell that produces clouds on the ground. With a GTX 770, this really shouldn't be happening with these kind of visuals. Enemy design is blurry and unimaginative although some well placed monster spawns do give you a heartbeat spike while you're dungeon crawling. Animations are stiff at best while more than a few cases of figures clipping through walls.

The game has a small town area that you will be able to explore during the story as well as some prostitues/hobos to suck blood from or turn into your family. Past that is where the real juice of this game is. There is a well fleshed out randomly generated dungeon system in this game filled with traps, treasures, monsters, etc. It's actually quite charming to go into the depths and worry about being making the decision to go further or turn back while you still have the chance. When your hp goes to 0, you will get knocked out. During that time, you can either choose to wake up where you were or spawn in the last safe zone. The caveat is that your body may have been looted while you were down.

The class system is basic with 3 in total. There are skill and talent trees that will let you have some diversity in builds. I felt that weapons are extremely restricted to certain classes though as each weapon type usually requires you to heavily invest in one of the three main combat stats. Warriors usually invest in strength to get more dps, witch with charisma, etc. I got a gun early on that required 50 points in strenght and another sword that wanted 30 in agi. These are stats that I wouldn't ever invest in as I picked the witch class. Another odd deisgn choice was separating persuasion from charism. Persuation has its own stat while charisma increases your magic... Lastly is the game's family system. You can suck someone's blood and build your own family. You need to level up the blodo sucking skill to increase family size and your minions have their own stats and skills you can upgrade. As a result of this however, they feel like faceless npc's with no personality.

Overall, I highly recommend this game given its low price. While a one person developer certainly doesn't excuse its faults it does engender some sympathy for the lack of resources.

Very similar to VTMB (which is one of my all time favorite RPG games), except with a bigger emphasis on action and exploration with secret doors, traps, hidden walls, etc. While not having as many options for character models or clans, you are able to choose your breed instead of just the basic vampire. Seriously liking this game. The only thing I personally don't like is the save system. I was used to the old manual save style where you could choose when to save, with F5 and F9 quick save/load always at the ready. This game uses the traditional dungeon crawler save system in where everything you do is automatically saved, making the choices you make kinda final.

+ Wonky but fun hack and slash combat where in my character would use the special jump attack, only to get a derp face after getting slapped by a zombie mid-air lol.
+ Voice acting. Yes, lots and lots of voice acting!
+ Sire system in where you can manage your minions and bloodline.
+ Being able to choose who you want to side with.
+ Being able to choose your character's breed.
+ Way more inventory options and items than VTMB.
+ Interesting characters.
+/- As I previously mentioned, I am personally not a fan of the save system but that's just me.

Overall this is a diamond in the rough, and hopefully the devs are able to hammer out more issues within the game. So even more people get to appreciate it.

Early Access Review

Yes this game is under construction. There will be bugs from time to time. But from personal experiance I can tell you the developer works on fixing any problems reported. I got a nice 12 hour turnaround on my issue.

So far in it's current state.

Cons
Graphics slightly crunchy. By that I mean edges can be rough in areas especially those dark dungeons. It's not bad, but I hope for eventual tweeking.
The auto save only aspect. I'd personally would love a save where you will additon. Especially for those quests.
Only 3 character types. But be aware with development there's a nice ablity to tweek this.

Pros
Good combat system.
Nice skill development system with a nice talent tree; basically a well designed character development system overall.
Clan system will be familar to anyone who ever played a certain Vampire roleplaying game.
Story line is excellent.

Basically if you ever wanted a good RPG dungeon crawler Vampire themed game you have to try this. Though in development even this early addition is a joy to play.

After 115 hours of gameplay I decided that it is time to write a small review about a well made classic WOD game.

Story
In Bloodlust Shadowhunter you are playing a newborn fledgling woken up in the middle of some ruins. Having no idea about what has /is happening he starts seeking the meaning of his existence. Fortunately he got help by a voice that is talking and guiding him in the beginning.

Character
In the very first minutes you can select to be a male or female vampire or a dhampir (ok, dhampir sounds funny). A Dhampirs is half vampire, half human, that means he is a bit weaker as a regular vampire, but he also requires less blood and is more resistant to fire, light and silver.

Once this is done you must now choose one of three classes that are warrior, witch, criminal (melee, casting or ranged class). Each of them provides you with different attributes: Strength, dexterity, charisma, vitality, intelligence and persuasion. Ok, now that the easy part is done you have to "Roll the dice" untill your most favorable stats are shown (I always loved this feature) stats like Health, Stamina and Reputation will be determined here and you can reroll till you get the most powerfull combination fitting to your playstyle.

Most of the stats are self-explanatory but some are more important to progress faster in-game.
-Persuation is one stat you should always spend some points because it enables you many dialog options that can help you saving a lot of work and time.
-Intelligence increases the chance of getting talent points when leveling up. These are used in your talent tree that is randomly generated everytime you create a new character. It becomes visible only after you have created your character! Everytime you level up you receive 5 attribute points and 1 skill point +randomly 1 talent point (inteligence lvl /2).

Features
The npc's in Bloodlust are mostly clanmembers of different clans. We got Vangres, Shadistin, Vurkas, Scades and Furlores. If you manage and make them to like you (using persuasion, do quests) your reputation with their clan will increase and enable clan related skills that can be purchased with your skill points. Some clans are more important to warrior classes (Vangres) some more important to caster (Vurkas) and some more to criminals (Scades).

Create your own clan (family)
One highlight of this game is the ability to sire humans by drinking their blood.
Once they become a member of your family you can send them to do various errands for you like collecting loot, collecting blood, assisting in combat and getting more family (victims). I managed to sire 4 and everyone got 10 victims. So I got a nice family of 44 members. In the latest versions you get extras for having more members (like another penthouse and more).

Explore and Dungeoncrawl
You can follow the mainstory with quest and many sidequests but you can also start exploring the city with all the hidden switches and walls or climb down into the sewers and dungeons. Every dungeon map is randomly generated and has a lot of puzzles and traps to survive.

Below you can see how my lvl 110 Vampire had some fun with a few sired members.
at Dungeon level 219 (low quality)

https://youtu.be/P6UkUu-1hVY

Graphics
even if I am spoiled by "high end graphic games" I had a wonderfull experience with this "retro Unreal engine" game because of the great lightning and atmosphere. You feel the darkness in the city (since you are a vampire it is allways night) and the sound fits perfectly to this darkness. This helps you oversee the lack of npc variations and textures.

It didn't took me 115 hours to conclude that the game is worth his money but I wanted to make a complete review and everytime I was about to start my review the developers updatet the gamecontent adding more features and this daily!

This is the crowning jewel of pre-release games. I kid you not.

Day one, I found an exploit and two major bugs that could have wrecked the game. I pointed them out on the game forum. Day two, they were gone. The very next day I pointed out a couple interface anomolies, such as highlighting the slots where you place pieces of armor. Day three, they were gone. I pointed them out, and within the next six hours a patch arrived that addressed *minor* annoyances, and let me assure you they were minor--this is a pre-release game. I did not expect it to run well on my PC. I did not expect it without bugs.

No, I expected it to be a good game that required polish. Apparently, ONE designer did this whole game! If that's not polish, I'm not sure how teams of 17+ can complain. As far as gameplay, this is Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines meets Diablo, as other reviewers have pointed out. What they have not pointed out is the nuances of dungeon crawling, such as secrets to be discovered, minor puzzles, and side areas nobody gets to discover. They even have lockpicking, keys, doors that require opening, and traps for the unwary adventurer. See? Diablo, this is not. It comes across as a homage to World of Darkness, in its raw form, but streamlined down to a very narrow interface which is easy-to-learn, hard-to-master. If you like vampires.

If you like dark fantasy.

If you like traditional fantasy.

If you like MMOs.

If you like RPGs.

If you like sci-fi.

If you like Chinese soap operas.

If you like dhampires.

If you like your mother.

Hell, if you like anything about PRE-release gaming, or even just gaming in general, BUY THIS IMMEDIATELY. If I could hold ten thumbs up I would! I can only hope the game progressively gets better from here. I feel I have gotten my full money's worth. A cinema ticket costs less! Seriously. Buy it! Games deserve this type of dev support. That's even without the synergy, and gameplay balance, here--that combine to make this video game more than the sum of its parts.

Even in its pre-release form, this is shaping up to be a visceral, and pulse-pounding (forgive the pun) experience. No kidding! Buy.

Just. Click. It.

EDIT: I have just gotten into the city areas. I will continue this review as I go. As it stands, the dev support alone has me sold on that movie theater ticket. ;)

UPDATE 9/27/2015 (Shortly after Release):

I cannot update my original opinions without altering the original review, so as of now, the visuals lack, but the gameplay is nicely polished. It adds up to a more action oriented experience than Bloodlines, but with more depth and sophistication than Diablo. I would ding it slightly for not being as polished as a commercial release, but that is where that ends. In spite of graphics, this is a monumental achievement for one man. For the price of a movie ticket, you get a first-person Diablo, in a World of Darkness-type setting, that nails gameplay and displays polish. Please note this is an independent release, and I think the price tag nicely suits it, though I would have paid $29.95 for the gameplay I got out of it, minus that other games are now haunting my time (Beware of Steam sales!) In conclusion, I would not buy it purely for boredom, but it is one of those "in-between" games where you can engage your RPG addiction before moving onto the dozen or so commercial releases stacked in your library. I would nicely rank it 8/10. Maybe an 8.5 if you like vampires or ARPGs.

First of all, you have to consider that THIS IS NOT A GAME BASED ON THE WORLD OF DARKNESS WORLD, so it isn't related at all with Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines, or Vampire Masquerade Redemption. Nevertheless, it reminds of these two games pretty much on several details, like it is set in an urban modern vampire's underworld, it's pretty atmospheric, it's pretty much a role game that allows you to make choices and it features a bunch of vampire clans with its own habilities.

But BloodLust: Shadowhunter is pretty much a game on its own: it displays an open world, dungeon-crawler-oriented universe with a number of NPCs, plenty of loot-searching and dungeon-crawling exploration (dungeons are large and may have up to 200 levels).

On the down side, when you play the game you soon realize some features are a bit rough round the edges and need more polish: the graphics aren't bad, but they are a bit out of date. So are some mechanics, models, aesthetics and animations, but still, they are ok and they show a certain amout of detail in their design. The voice-acting is good, considering it's an amateur work, but could be much better and more varied if the developers spent some money on hiring professional actors.

As an early access game, it is common to find glitches and bugs still, but as a whole, the game is quite solid and playable at this moment, and most of the bugs are being fixed by the developer.

In sum, the game needs polish and could reach a very high standard if more people would be involved in the development (most of the work has been done by just one person, which, given the final result, is really impressive).

On the up side, the game is pretty atmospheric and dark, and you play some sort of vampire "tomb raider", so you constantly depend on flashlights. Dumb idea, considering you control a vampire and they can see in the dark? Not really, the dependency on flashlights really adds atmosphere to the gameplay, more considering enemies tend to spawn from the air at every corner, and otherwise you're alone in the dark and won't see a thing except distant lights and glowing eyes gazing at you.

The combat mechanics are quite decent and as a vampire you have plenty of fancy powers and abilities to use against your enemies. You also have the ability to sire some NPCs, command them to carry out different tasks and make your own clan. There's also a vampire clan system, so you can allign with one or another clan and improve your renown among them (which translates into learning their habilities).

BloodLust: Shadowhunter is a more straight-forward game than VM. Bloodlines, it lacks a bit of its charisma or personality, but in some ways it takes the game experience further and expands it, in comparison with the Vampire Masquerade game.

All in all, BloodLust: Shadowhunter offers hours and hours of exploration, fighting, looting, dungeon-crawling and good fun, if you are ready to forgive the usual glitches and unfinished and out of date look of some models and mechanics. Still, consider it is an early-access game and is still beta, and the developer is working hard to polish things and fix bugs in an almost daily basis...

For me, it is definitely a game worth playing, and an ambitious and promising one. If you like proper vampire games, give it a try. In the end, this is the only serious attempt to a good vampire pc game we have had in years -and a successful one.

Let me start out by saying this is not a bad game by any means. There's a lot to be impressed with considering the game was put together almost entirely by one man. I respect that, and he did a lot of things right. For instance, some of the melee combat seems decent, there are some varied vampiric disciplines (spells/powers) you can cast/use. The game even has a Diablo-style loot system with items of different levels of quality, scrolls of identification, etc., 200-floor dungeons that randomly generate their arrangement with more XP and loot rewards the deeper you go, etc.

Although there are flaws with each of these, they're mostly done very well and I know this was a lot of hard work for the developer. The city map looks quite nice. It's a small, urban cityscape. Businesses are still open, though some have closed, and it looks good. A tree is growing out of a curb on one street I noticed, which looks cool, but the city looks too active for that to make sense. Weird, but I'm fine with it, even if it does make me scratch my head. One final note on the positives for this game: most of the music "works" and isn't very noticable, which is just fine, while a couple of the songs (tattoo parlor radio and main city hub in particular) were enjoyable and set the mood, respectively.

That said, I was at odds deciding whether or not to give it my recommendation. Simply knowing few people were involved in the game's creation, the fact it's (at the time of this review) still in early access, and it was decent enough that I could play it as long as I did...these things make me want to give it a recommendation, but those aren't particularly good things about the game.

At the time of releasing the early access of this game, the store page shows the developer estimated 2-3 months before it would leave early access. When I talk about the negatives about this game, I'll keep in mind that this is the state of the game now if someone purchases it, and that the negatives I will point out will not be ones I expect the developer to address within that estimated time frame due to the extremities of these negatives.

Like I said, it's not a bad game; just an okay one I couldn't get into despite having a big interest in the subject matter and genre. Here are some of the negatives:

The NPCs are very poor characters for the most part. The rare few who seem to have the slightest bit of personality are okay at best. The world also feels extremely empty. I don't mean bleak or hopeless; those are great for this kind of setting. No, I mean that there just aren't enough NPCs around for you to interact with or even those that just wander around making the world feel inhabited. I have encountered a total of three NPCs in the big city hub's streets. Imagine if Santa Monica in Bloodlines or Prague in Redemption had a total of 3 NPCs on the streets at night. Each building typically features 1-3 NPCs in it, with the exception of the night club, which I believe has 5 or 6. Many of these do not speak or give quests.

I just don't feel supernatural in this game, despite playing as a vampire. I wanted to play as a monster; not as an average person in the game's world. By not having a real human presence, my character is the average, normal person in the setting. I've only seen 3-4 NPCs which seemed to be human, and none of them are actual characters. One of them was just a random human to send to vampires to feed on, and the other three just lay or wander around until you turn them into vampires. Once you've done that, you're in a world without humans. That takes much of the fun out of being a vampire in the game. What's worse, it makes no sense that this many vampires can sustain themselves in a city without humans. There aren't any "vampires require invitations to enter homes" rules that the game has mentioned, so it's unlikely that the humans are just asleep at home, and as Bloodlines, Redemption, the real world, and many other games have shown, fair amounts of people are outside at night in urban areas. Even vampires aren't walking around the city aside from the player.

Humans seem to know all about vampires as well, because one of the three humans on the city streets says something to the effect of "Oh, your teeth. You're one of those monsters, aren't you?" Although Shadowhunters (vampire hunters) exist, regular humans seem to know about vampires' existence. It feels so awkward without in-game lore and explanation to make sense of vampires' place in this world. Despite there being five vampire clans, bunches of items, a number of powers and enemies, there just isn't much in the way of lore/explanations for things to understand the setting and get into it.

The story is almost non-existent so far, and I've gone through several main quests thus far. The game begins as you wake up in a sarcophagus, freshly turned, and get a message from your sire to come find her. You don't know who she is and you need to get out of some ruins and go to a tattoo parlor to find her. Everything that's been happening since then is a boring fetch quest of sorts. The plot developments haven't interested me or surprised me, and today, I loaded the game up to continue, opened my quest log, and just stared at it, blinking, thinking to myself "Why am I still playing?", and then quit. I'd been forcing myself to play as far as I'd gotten, and absolutely nothing sounded fun to do, even if it just meant going to kill things in the 200-floor dungeons. If a game doesn't have a setting or story interesting enough to interest me in continue, the gameplay must be absolutely fantastic for me to get past that, and the gameplay is just "decent." The controls and combat are comparable to blood lines, which isn't a good thing, though it is a little bit smoother when it comes to melee. You fight in third person and can use a variety of spells/disciplines. I haven't tried the ranged weapons, though I hear you will run out of ammunition pretty often at present. I will say that the combat is better than VtM Redemption's, but that combat was pretty awful (great story, though).

At the end of the day, I had no motivation to play the game and found myself uninterested in the setting and what I was doing in it the more I played, despite loving vampires and enjoying action RPG antics. Its actual gameplay wasn't enjoyable enough to drive me just by itself, and the story and characters are very forgettable with rare exception. This is not a bad game, but it just isn't all that good. That said, the developer really should be proud of what he's accomplished and I applaud him for his hard work, but I simply cannot recommend playing this game. I have many technical issues with the game which I haven't mentioned, but I won't hold them against the game in this review, because I believe the developer is still looking into them. The things I've covered here as negatives, though, seem highly unlikely to change or change sufficiently, given the amount of time and money involved in changing/adding to them.

It starts out a little Janky but after getting used to the controls I found it was kinda fun. Don't think this is an open world rpg, it is not. The game is mostly about loot, deep deep dungeons over 100 levels deep and a little faction questing..........but mostly dungeon crawling and it does that fantastically!!! I'm just over 20 hours in and lv 20 with some nice gear, just did some faction quests which got me to lv 10 down in the main dungeon with lv 25 my next stop. I will be spending a lot of time trying to see how deep I can go..........well worth the few bucks I spent on this..........GET IT if you like chests of loot, bags over flowing with crap and you wondering if you should go back to the vendors and your stash or keep going! 8/10......this may have been in the works for years and that is ok, updates are rolling as of 10 March 2015 so get your sword and helm and get moving.

Think of this as a better version of Vampire The Masquerade Redemption :)

so far only got out of the starter area, however while where to go was tricky to find out, it's not impossible to solve on your own, the combat works quite well (I chose to be a witch), so far my fireballs are super effective and my minion tanks for me!

minor grievances:

- I crashed once. The game saves often for you, so I had no problems picking it back up again though.
- some areas make my FPS drop right down, only lasts for a few seconds.
- my minion has the worst pathfinding ever, I have to keep on using "come to me"

however, the game is in early access, I imagine everything will be fixed in due time.

If you enjoyed Vampire The Masquerade Redemption (combat is closer to that one than to bloodlines, though in this one you will always hit if you aim right, it's just a question on how much damage you will do), I definitely recommend it!