This is one of my favorite RPG's of all time. The gameplay is quite linear but it seems more open world by providing several explorable districts and plenty of side quests. I like the stat system which reminds me of the tabletop RPG of Vampires. Characters are well designed even for today's standards, all in all a fantastic RPG which is still lacking a worthy successor. Be warned though that towards the ending it seems like the game is getting stretched by throwing dozens and dozens of mindless enemies in meaningless buildings at you. Playing with the latest community patch is highly advised, bugfixes and more content was added into the game.

One last advice for beginners: I would not recommend playing a malkavian in your first playthrough, they are literally insane and without past experiences of lore and their behavior, a lot of their "interactions" could be misinterpret.