Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 review – a reimagining that hasn't really worked
The Chinese Room has managed to make something from a box of inherited parts, but this action RPG feels hollow and functional, and is only redeemed by some stellar performances from the characters and cast.
Sadly, it hasn’t worked out. We already knew this follow-up to 2004’s scruffy but well-loved Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines wouldn’t be a role-playing game in the same way. We knew that developer The Chinese Room, which inherited the troubled project from Hardsuit Labs, had repurposed Bloodlines 2 into something more resembling an action game – an action RPG specifically. Expectations were tempered. That’s okay, ideas change. But Bloodlines 2 isn’t much of an action game either, or a stealth game, or an immersive sim or whatever it tries to be. It feels caught in the middle of ideas and unsure of what it is, and in the end feels like nothing much at all because of it.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 reviewDeveloper: The Chinese RoomPublisher: ParadoxPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Releases 21st October on PC (Steam, Epic, GOG), PS5 and Xbox Series S/X
A lot of Bloodlines 2’s problems begin, paradoxically, as the game’s strengths. Hardsuit Labs’ original ‘you are a recently turned, thin-blood vampire who needs to grow in power’ story has been replaced by The Chinese Room with an idea where, instead, you start the game as a powerful Elder vampire, awakened from a 100-year sleep. Immediately you’re incredibly capable. You can send a mortal person flying through the air with one punch. You can scuttle up the side of a building like a spider and dash with intense bursts of speed. You can leap great distances and even float, a little like flying, through the air. And when you combine these things you will feel like the super-powered terror that Bloodlines 2 wants you to be. You are the apex predator of the game from the moment you begin, and it’s an exhilarating feeling to have.
But it doesn’t develop. This is an action RPG with barely any character development (or even customisation) in it. You have four abilities you can use, tied to the clan you belong to, and you will unlock all of them within a couple of hours of play. And that’s it – you won’t get any more powerful after that. Powers don’t evolve or change. You can, if you like, unlock powers from other clans, but this won’t increase your overall power or offer more abilities to use in combat. It only offers variation and the potential to mix which four abilities you use, which might lead to finding a new combination you prefer, but it didn’t for me. I ended up using more or less my default abilities for the entirety of the 25-hour game. This, coupled with there being no loot or equipment in the game, makes character development feel thin to the point of nonexistent. Action RPGs are power fantasies. The mechanical driving force of the game is to grow more powerful as you go through, to deliberate over character builds, but there’s nothing like that here.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 Review Watch on YouTube
The knock-on effect is the desire to do things like side quests, which reward the points you need to unlock other clan’s powers, soon drains away from the game. Though to call them side quests at all makes them sound more robust and interesting than they are. Really, they’re fetch quests, in Bloodlines 2, either literal or thinly disguised, involving assassinating nondescript people or groups, or retrieving parcels. There’s no actual story to them, or narrative worth. The only thing these quests have going for them is the quest givers, the leaders of vampire clans, who are actually worth meeting for their characterisation alone. They’re voiced wonderfully and often have unexpected perspectives or things to say. You can even chat them up and have naughty rendezvous with them, if you play the situations right, but these are disappointingly realised as black screens with a tiny bit of dialogue (and some spitting and slapping noises, depending on who you rendezvous with). But as delightful as they can be to chat with, the lack of a meaningful reward for their turgid tasks, and no apparent relationship development, means you’ll probably stop visiting them. And these are the only side quests in the game.
