Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong Reviews
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong offers an impressively flexible story, but that can't save it from its mediocre writing and scattershot game design.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong falls short of its ambitions as a story-focused detective RPG due to a dense but uninteresting plot, bland characters, and unintuitive puzzles.
A complex, vampire-centric role-playing game where conversations replace violence, but whose boring puzzles and undercooked script suggest its budget didn't stretch nearly as far as its ambitions.
A bland and occasionally baffling return for the Vampire: The Masquerade series
Rarely have I played a game where I wanted to restart a scenario to undo bad decisions as I have here. Swansong makes you pay for your missteps and should be an excellent game for watercooler discussions with others who have played it.
My relationship to Swansong has become almost like my ritual appointment with Passions — until I fully exhaust the entire story, I need my dose of ridiculous people making ridiculous decisions, and the nuclear fallout of their mistakes.
Vampire The Masquerade: Swansong is a dialogue-driven RPG that stakes everything on writing that isn't up to the task.
Solid and definitely have an audience. There could be some hard-to-ignore faults, but the experience is fun.
Swansong is a good investigative adventure dressed up in vampire finery, but doesn't quite live up to my expectations due to some overly restrictive design and a disconnect between the third person perspective and the largely text and table top mechanics. Once some of the bugs are patched and there are resources available to support the build choices you make, there is a solid adventure to be found here. It's not the new Bloodlines, but it's an authentic Vampire: The Masquerade experience nonetheless.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong is a brilliant adaptation of the themes, the atmosphere and the mood of the homonymous pen and paper RPG. The alchemical mix between cinematic adventure and light RPG works great and Big Bad Wolf Studio gives a fresh take on the concept of "playing a role" in a video game. It's a pity that technically wise the game sometimes doesn't stand up to its own ambitions.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Vampire - The Masquerade: Swansong offers a deep RPG game and an engrossing story, with some well-designed puzzles along the way.
Mystery and intrigue at a vampire court is fun, and there are some great puzzles and conversation battles. But Swansong also has a lot of walking in between them - as well as some potentially annoying bugs.
Vampire: The Masquerade — Swansong is a narrative, investigative RPG centered around three vampires in Boston. While the writing and quests are enjoyable, the visuals leave much to be desired. Swansong loses a lot of its charm with its jarring graphics.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong is a fantastic, yet very messy game. It lacks some desperately needed polish and refining, but the core is so fun and engaging you can put the problems to the side for a time. They'll rear their head pretty frequently, but pushing past them is well worth the rewards.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong brings players back to the World of Darkness to investigate an attack on the Camarilla.
Moral murkiness helps preserve the tension across Swansong’s duration. There’s always something at stake – your life, the masquerade, your integrity – and that does a lot to infuse some meaning into all the talking and scouring rooms for notes. I doubt that Swansong is set to become a vampire RPG of legend, like 2004’s Bloodlines, but it nonetheless makes vampires scary again.
Within the opulent comforts of the luxury apartments and exclusive private clubs of Boston, Swansong positions high society politics as a game played by the rich, a realm that’s far outside the influence of the working class and the poor. To be invited into such an exclusive circle in Swansong is a frankly riveting proposition—I can’t deny that there’s a thrill, verging on tabloid-level curiosity, in mingling with the distastefully powerful, uncovering their dirtiest secrets, and conniving with the Prince of Boston. But still the most intriguing bit about Swansong is to have all these politicking depicted as layers of conversations and sleuthing, which are exploits that are far more human than the game’s supernatural brethren would believe.
While the visuals and voice acting didn't sell me, there was plenty else to sink my fangs into. Choices. So many different, split second choices that made me feel that what I did mattered. A story that kept me searching out clues to find what was really afoot, and great RPG elements too. I was a bit unsure how a game would handle three main characters, and while they're all kinda jerks in their own ways, they're my jerks. I was able to overlook any issues I had without having to sacrifice much to do so.
With its intricate and well-realized setting, engaging story, compelling characters, and well-implemented RPG mechanics, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is a truly groundbreaking game that no fan of narrative-driven games should pass on.
Swansong's biggest problem is that at times it's perhaps not as clear as it could be about what you're actually meant to be doing or how to bypass certain problems, and you'll find that it's trial and error that gets you through. There's also a couple of technical issues, including one in which we spent ages wandering around trying to solve a puzzle only to reset the game and discover that the solution to the problem hadn't loaded the first time around. Not cool.