Of course, an attractive game without gameplay is as useful as a vehicle without wheels. Sticking with that analogy, Redemption is a twenty-four-wheeled juggernaut of gameplay. Although play often involves cutting your way through a number of enemies it gets a lot more interesting than that. Vampires have "Disciplines" which are basically spells fueled by blood. Vampire has a ton of disciplines taken from the original roleplaying game such as Blood Healing, Acidic Touch, Immolate, Entrancement, and Vigor Mortis, which raises the recently deceased. These numerous disciplines are not only great fun to use but are also important in completing the game. Increasing your attack damage with Potence can make all the difference in a conflict and a resurrected enemy can turn the tide of a losing battle for you. Using disciplines is a breeze as is the whole control system where everything is only a few clicks away. Moving the camera involves "pushing" at the screen edges. You can be viewing things from above and behind the currently selected character one moment and with a quick flick of the mouse downwards the view shifts to a top down perspective that we found useful during combat. While careful use of disciplines and the well-designed interface can improve your chances of survival, it doesn't necessarily make Vampire an easy game. In fact, Vampire is one tough title to beat.

You have to keep an eye on your blood level, making sure it doesn't get low enough to stop you casting those ever important Discliplines, especially Blood Healing as vampires can't use healing potions. You also have to watch your humanity rating. This drops when you kill an innocent or choose a more inhumane dialogue option and if it falls to zero, it's game over as you turn into a beast that barely resembles the human you once were. While some of the regular enemies are hard to beat, the numerous bosses scattered throughout the game are hard as nails, requiring patience and thought to defeat. Redemption is certainly a reasonably hard game to finish, but this only adds to the length of the single player experience and makes each success more satisfying rather than proving impossibly frustrating. One of its downfalls, though, is the save system. It autosaves when you change levels and there is a save point in every city located at your haven. The ability to save more often would have made things a little nicer though, and we often found ourselves running to the start of a level and changing to the previous level and back again just so it would save the game. Thankfully a patch has recently been released that not only allows players to save anywhere but will also let you pause the action to issue orders, making it a little easier to order your coterie about during larger conflicts.