A three star review usually means that a book was mediocre. Just ok. In this case, it doesn't. It's because some aspects of the book are great and others are terrible. Starting with the terrible: the layout is AWFUL. I could not imagine the layout being botched this badly until I saw it myself. Between changing constantly between 2 and 3 column, often with the middle column empty or almost empty, switching between white text on black and black text on white, and having white text on black on pages that you might want to print separately as references for your group, it's a complete disaster. I hope that W5 and other 5e line books do better in this respect, though I suppose they could compete to do even worse. The art is mediocre to bad. They went with this photographic art that honestly was extremely not thematic for the World of Darkness. They would have been better off either tracking down the original run Vampire artists and commissioning them or else picking entirely new artists who draw in a similar style. The art was also inserted poorly, often with little to do with the text near it, or art that is clearly meant to illustrate something but with no explanation of what. And of course, it committed the cardinal sin of the World of Darkness: it made the vampires look like dorks. From the Ventrue who forgot to zip his fly to the 8-character pieces for each clan, they just look...bad. And lame. Also on the bad list, though they insist it's intentional, is calling the Tremere "Hemetics." It's not clever, and just looks like there's a typo in "Hermetics" if you know anything about the history of the game.

The setting also has some strong negative points. The Second Inquisition is a fine idea, and I love that the Camarilla fucking up was responsible for it, but the idea that there's a conspiracy in the govenrments of the world like this that they're keeping secret is so absurd...no WikiLeaks, no "In Russia, we have no Vampires, but the US is ruled by them!" no drunken agents blabbing that they're government funded vampire hunters? I admit, I always have this problem with conspiracies that don't have a survival-based reason to stay secret, and there's a lot of them in the WoD, but I find this one particularly ridiculous.

Other setting things are really a mixed bag, but moving on, the mechanics are quite solid. Of course, they're 90% Vampire: the Requiem mechanics with 10% modifications to handle the new Hunger system, but they're streamlined and they work. They streamlined character creation a bit too much, changing it from "You have these dots, distribute them" to "Your attributes are 4, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, distribute them" and similar with abilities, but that's easy enough to house rule (though it does net result in lower attribute totals, which is in line with grabbing mechanics from CofD)

The best thing about the streamlined mechanics, though, is that they made Willpower into a health-type stat (I hope some types in 5e can spend Health like Willpower can be spent!) and use it for social combat (and presumably mental), and Vampire has needed a social combat system since the beginning, it significantly reduces the ludonarrative dissonance of playing characters engaged in petty politics but having no mechanics to support petty political challenges.

All in all, actually reading V5 makes me a bit more hopeful for future 5e lines. The mechanics, the thing most likely to carry through, are sound. The setting has many problems, but part of that for me is that I don't like Vampire itself very much, and neither White Wolf directly nor Modiphius is in charge of writing the core book for W5 (the only other core that has been announced), so setting details are mutable. The layout problems could continue, depending on how strict the requirement to style-match is, but I hope there's a return to traditional art, two-column pages (with sidebars instead of mid-bars...or just no sidebars, they often should just be main text sections) and consistently black text on white paper, especially for mechanics pages.