Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 Review – The mother of all wasted opportunities

NOTE: This review was written before the Spring Update (April 27, 2026) went live, which, among other things, added the ability to wield melee weapons without telekinesis. However, this change ultimately doesn't alter my opinion on the game, nor the overall conclusion of the review.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is one of my favorite games of all time. Released all the way back in 2004 by the now-defunct Troika Games (on the very same day as Half-Life 2, no less!), Bloodlines was a genuine diamond in the rough. Though saddled with glitches, peculiar bugs, a clunky combat system and numerous other growing pains, it was a Vampire RPG through and through – with choices, consequences, an RPG-like dialogue system with skill checks, as well as several playable vampire clans providing unique play styles. The writing was brilliant, full of personality and charm. The characters were colorful, the world full of dark mysteries and intriguing locations to uncover, and every last corner of the game, from the back alleys of Santa Monica to the night clubs of Hollywood had something new and interesting to offer. Side quests took you on small-scale adventures that, though completely independent of the main plot, told stories that were just as – if not more – interesting and memorable than the primary narrative. Despite its issues, Bloodlines is a game I’ve replayed numerous times over the years, and its uniquely fascinating atmosphere has permanently seeped into my brain and kept a firm grip on my soul for the past two decades.

So, to say I was looking forward to the sequel is an understatement the size of the Ventrue Tower.

Once upon a time…

When the game was initially announced, I was beyond ecstatic, and not just because one of my favorite games was finally getting the sequel I thought it rightfully deserved, but also because it was being handled by key team members from the OG Bloodlines, including writer/designer Brian Mitsoda and composer Rik Schaffer. Even prolific RPG writer Chris Avellone was originally on board for the project before being removed. Imagine that.

So, we fast-forward a couple years and the original developer, Hardsuit Labs is fired, along with Mitsoda himself, only to be replaced by The Chinese Room, a team primarily known for narrative-focused walking sims such as Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. This raised some very obvious – and dare I say, reasonable – questions in my mind: why is a complex Vampire RPG being given to a developer that seems to specialize in a very different kind of genre? I was skeptical, to be sure, but then again, we’ve had instances where a team known for a wildly different genre managed to strike gold – like how Creative Assembly, a team known mostly for Total War games, went on to create Alien: Isolation, one of the greatest survival horror games of all time. So yeah, miracles do happen.

But now, after having spent nearly 40 hours with Bloodlines 2, I can confidently say that my fears were unfortunately justified. This game is not an RPG. It’s a glorified, though occasionally atmospheric, walking sim spiced up with a reasonably adequate combat system; a woefully linear action-adventure that pushes you along from point A to point B while occasionally letting you fight groups of enemies in a way that feels mildly reminiscent of Dishonored. That’s it. That’s the game. What’s worse, it’s not even good at being an action-adventure – even if I turn my brain off and pretend that this is a completely standalone vampire game that has absolutely no connection to Troika’s original, Bloodlines 2 is still mediocre at best, and aggressively forgettable at worst. So, if you’re wondering if the game can at least stand on its own when removed from the shadow of its predecessor, the answer is no. It cannot.

Which is why I now feel the need, or rather, the obligation, to dissect it piece by piece, letting you know what Bloodlines 2 did right, and what it did wrong. Well, one list is going to be slightly longer than the other, but… uh, yeah.

Voices in my head

Bloodlines 2 puts you in the role of the Nomad (also known as Phyre), an elder vampire who awakens in Seattle and immediately has two major issues to deal with. First off, you’ve been bound by a mark that not only weakens you, but also chains you down and makes you physically unable to leave the city – this is essentially the game’s explanation as to why the Nomad can’t just respond with “screw this, I’m out” to pretty much everything that’s going on in Seattle. Because they physically cannot leave. Secondly, there’s a disembodied voice in your head. At the very beginning of the story, the Nomad attacks and drains the blood of a vampire detective called Fabien, which somehow transfers his consciousness over to them. In short, Fabien becomes your vampire Cortana; your very own Johnny Silverhand, always ready to provide helpful quips during your adventures as the two of you try to figure out why he’s being kept alive as a voice inside your head. In addition to all that, the game also features extensive flashback sequences where you control Fabien and try to untangle the mystery of an unknown serial killer. These flashback sequences are a major offender in terms of disrupting the game’s pacing, since playing as Fabien strips you of all the cool powers and abilities you had as Phyre, namely combat and parkour, essentially turning the game into a pure walking sim where all you do is walk around Seattle and talk to people.

So essentially, there are three major questions the plot tries to answer. #1, who put the mark on the Nomad, and why? #2, why is Fabien a talking voice in your head instead of, you know, being dead? And #3, who is the mysterious serial killer and what are their motivations?

I’ll be honest: these are some pretty juicy mysteries, and I was really looking forward to a storyline with some exciting twists and turns as the final culprit is revealed and all the connections begin to make sense. However, I feel like the story I was expecting and putting together in my head was probably more interesting than the one I actually got, because the answer to all three of those questions is… underwhelming at best. The game sets up a handful of intriguing mysteries to keep the player interested, and it succeeds at this – there’s a strong initial hook, but the actual answers provided by the story are beyond unsatisfying.

The characters you meet throughout the main narrative are similarly disappointing, with my biggest issue being that most of them simply don’t feel like vampires. Now, obviously I’m not expecting every character to be Count Dracula, but I have played the first game, so I remember what Kindred society should feel like. In Bloodlines 2, however, I couldn’t shake this atmosphere of immaturity when engaging with the Kindred of Seattle. Both their voice acting and the actual dialogue felt extremely hit and miss, ranging from somewhat stilted to straight up cringeworthy, and I often felt like I was surrounded by wisecracking college students rather than centuries-old political predators. I will, however, give credit where credit is due: Fabien was probably the only character I genuinely cared about to some extent. I imagine some players will find his quirky Malkavian antics to be more annoying than endearing, but in my case, he kind of managed to grow on me by the end.

So much to see, so little to do

Next up, let’s talk about the visuals, the vibes, and the city of Seattle itself, because one of the strongest aspects of the original Bloodlines was its unique atmosphere and unforgettable locations. Well, the good news is that visually, the game looks fine. More than fine. It feels a lot more stylized and vibrant than the original Bloodlines, with strong, vivid colors dominating the various neighborhoods of Seattle, but this isn’t really a problem. The handful of interior locations you explore are also extremely well done, and as someone who almost compulsively needs to inspect every last nook and cranny of every room in video games, I felt like my needs were sufficiently met. Rooms are detailed, feel lived-in, and the engine does a perfect job of conveying the dark and moody tone the game so desperately needs.

However. While visually nice to look at, the world of Bloodlines 2 feels disappointingly sterile and empty. It’s almost like a theme park with only you in it; a place where you can only watch, but never touch. There are civilians passing by, and each street is lined with curious shops and storefronts just waiting to tell their stories – but they never can. There’s so much to see, and so little to actually interact with, that it almost makes the city feel like a collection of unfinished assets; locations that perhaps would’ve had fleshed-out interiors to explore in an earlier version of the game, but which were ultimately discarded during the game’s infamously troubled development.

There are no NPCs to chat up in meaningful ways, no random people giving you side quests on a street corner, and no optional areas to go into. Sadly, Seattle is not the bustling RPG hub I was hoping it would be; it’s reduced to nothing more than background décor, a shiny movie set that’s simply there to look pretty while you run from point A to point B. Effectively, in terms of what you can actually interact with, the entire city comprises of 5 or 6 key buildings, each made up of a single room that gives home to a key NPC to talk to; they are glorified reception halls, utterly empty and uninteresting, sucking the life out of the game faster than even the hungriest vampire could. There’s a recurring problem in certain JRPGs that I tend to highlight: namely, how even the largest cities consist of only a couple of shops and maybe a tavern, while none of the NPC homes are interactable or enterable – I usually bring up the Trails series as a good counterexample, where every single home, even the most insignificant building, can indeed be entered, and its inhabitants can be chatted up. Unfortunately, Bloodlines 2 follows the former example, and somehow the entire city of Seattle ends up feeling less exciting and less populated than a single zone in the original game.

I mean, for the sake of comparison, let’s look at Santa Monica, the first hub area you get to explore in the original Bloodlines: you’ve got the apartment complex with several apartments to potentially break into, the medical clinic with an entire second floor, the blood bank, Jeanette’s night club, the diner, the pawn shop, the parking garage, the creepy basement with the creepy doctor, the beach with the thin-bloods, the beach house up on the hill, the bail bonds building, the Santa Monica pier, and the art gallery. I probably still missed a couple locations there, but remember, this is JUST Santa Monica, a singular zone in the original Bloodlines. There’s also several other, similarly fleshed-out zones like Downtown Los Angeles, the streets of Hollywood and Chinatown, and that’s not even mentioning the unique locations you visit for specific quests such as the sewers, the haunted mansion, the abandoned hospital, the park with the werewolf, the Nosferatu tunnels, the ship known as the Elizabeth Dane or the house in Hollywood Hills where a Tzimisce has turned the walls into flesh. I mean, what happened? The original Bloodlines was bursting with variety; it was a juggernaut of creativity and ideas that made full use of a twisted, supernatural world of vampires while also making you feel like an integral part of that world. Playing this after the OG is like going from the Mona Lisa to a random person’s drunken doodle on a brick wall. The drop in quality is insane.

And don’t even get me started on the side quests. In the original, they were interesting little side narratives that fleshed out the world, introduced memorable side characters and felt like proper self-contained stories. Bloodlines 2 does the bare minimum, and honestly, it’s almost embarrassing what counts as a side quest in this game. It’s essentially just, “go here and kill this person” or “go here and deliver a package to this NPC” and that’s it. No story, no dialogue, no nothing. Even the most generic radiant quests in Skyrim had more personality than the ones you get here. There’s literally a side quest that has you pick up a package from a dumpster. Let that sink in. You’re an elder vampire and you’re made to pick up trash and deliver packages like some underpaid intern.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

I mentioned earlier that Bloodlines 2 is essentially a walking sim with occasional combat encounters, so you’re probably wondering if it’s any good. The combat, that is. Well, I’m not going to pretend the original Bloodlines had a masterfully deep combat system, but I’d also be lying if I said that the sequel wasn’t without its glaring issues, either. For starters, the game relies almost exclusively on hand-to-hand melee combat. You cannot equip guns like you would in a proper RPG: instead, Phyre will snatch them up from the ground and have them float in the air with telekinesis, after which you get a few shots before the magazine is depleted and you’re forced to discard the gun.

So essentially, guns are one-time use items instead of being persistent pieces of gear you could carry around in your inventory (because there is no inventory), but so are melee weapons, which work in a similar fashion: Phyre will simply pick them up with telekinesis, then hurl them at the enemy to deal minor damage. Vampire abilities – known as Disciplines – are another important element of combat, but they work in an entirely different way compared to the first game. Instead of having a fixed blood pool that depletes a little every time you use a vampire skill, Disciplines in Bloodlines 2 can be used once before requiring you to feed a certain number of times in order to “recharge” them, with more powerful abilities requiring more feeding compared to simpler ones. Personally, I didn’t have any major issues with this system, but I still prefer how the first game handled it.

Ultimately, your main tools in combat will be your fists, but the game doesn’t have a satisfying enough melee system to really make this feel like a sensible design choice, especially since your punches feel awkwardly weightless, and to make matters worse, most enemies in the game feel like damage sponges that need to be hit like a million times before they finally die. Now, the game does feature stealth takedowns along with instant-kill abilities that greatly alleviate this issue, and acting like a vampiric Batman who goes around picking off people one by one was admittedly pretty enjoyable when the level design allowed for it. However, every time I was forced into a direct confrontation with multiple enemies, I found myself in a hectic brawl characterized mostly by awkward controls and janky mechanics. The game also has a tendency of throwing literally dozens of enemies at you, so being swarmed and overwhelmed is a very real possibility if you don’t rely on stealth takedowns or hit-and-run tactics – plus, being taken out by ghouls and thin-bloods despite being an elder vampire just really hurts that inherent power fantasy you’d expect from the genre.

All that said, though, combat in Bloodlines 2 is still probably the thing I enjoyed the most about the game, despite it not being that great. Zipping from rooftop to rooftop while snapping necks or making people explode with blood magic could be pretty fun, even if it did get somewhat repetitive towards the end.

An RPG without the RP

Now, since this is a sequel to an RPG, I should probably discuss RPG mechanics as well – or rather, their lack thereof. Character customization is both woefully limited and ultimately pointless: it boils down to hair styles, eye color, makeup and piercings, but at the end of the day, Phyre will always have a pre-defined facial structure that you cannot radically change. Back in the original Bloodlines, your choice of vampire clan had a decent amount of impact on your gameplay experience, and even opened up unique scenes or dialogue options, but here, it means absolutely nothing. Because guess what: you can learn the Disciplines of other clans, too.

I started out as a Banu Haqim, but I was dominating people with Venture mind tricks, hurling Tremere blood magic at bad guys and manipulating the shadows with Lasombra abilities by the end of the game. There are some EXTREMELY minor differences between the clans: certain NPCs will occasionally reference it with a throwaway line of dialogue, and your melee animations are somewhat different, but as far as meaningful roleplaying possibilities are concerned, there’s absolutely nothing here. And no, there are no skill checks during dialogue either, because the game has no skills to begin with. Lockpicking, computer hacking, stealth, seduction? Nope. None of that here. Humanity was also removed, and so was the Frenzy mechanic.

The game also makes a big deal out of upholding the so-called Masquerade, an ironclad rule among vampires that essentially demands they refrain from using their vampiric powers in front of mortals to avoid exposing themselves. The whole idea is to keep humans unaware of the existence of vampires: the Masquerade is a carefully built illusion that says monsters only exist in fairy tales and movies. Think about it: if mankind found out supernatural bloodsuckers walked among them, they would likely start actively hunting them down.

However, the way the Masquerade is implemented in Bloodlines 2 is inconsistent at best. Using vampiric abilities in front of mortals will get you in trouble if you do it for long enough, but at the same time, civilians will barely bat an eye when seeing you jump off the roof of a ten-story building and landing in front of them like a superhero. Then again, the NPC AI in the game often feels like it’s living in a bubble that’s completely detached from what’s actually going on in the game world: in the latter half of the storyline, vampire gangs and hunters will often be having an all-out war on the rooftops of Seattle, with gunshots echoing through the streets, but both civilians and police officers will ignore this and act like it’s just another Tuesday.

Resonate with me

Another new thing introduced by Bloodlines 2 is the so-called “blood resonance” system, and the only reason I want to talk about this is because it’s one of the most ridiculous things in the entire game. Basically, the game differentiates between the quality of people’s blood based on their emotional states – there’s Melancholic (defined by sadness), Sanguine (defined by sexual arousal) and Choleric (defined by anger). If you feed on mortals with these characteristics, you’ll harvest blood resonance points corresponding to the category they belong to – that is, Melancholic, Sanguine or Choleric points. These three types of points are basically currency that can be spent to unlock Disciplines from other clans, so it becomes a pretty importance resource if you’d like to branch out and learn new skills, but that’s not the important part. The important part is how badly this whole system is implemented. It’s probably the stupidest, most immersion-breaking thing in Bloodlines 2.

So, how do you get blood resonance points? Well, you activate your vampire vision, which lets you determine which mortal has which type of blood: Melancholics will glow purple, Sanguines are pink, while Cholerics are red. You walk up to them and initiate conversation, and the NPC in question will react in three different ways based on their blood resonance type. Sanguines will immediately get horny for you and start following you around the city until you finally feed on them. Chloerics will drop everything and IMMEDIATELY attack you in the middle of the street. If you run away, they will follow you until the end of the earth like an Oblivion NPC that you accidentally aggro’d. As a side note: if a nearby police officer sees this, they will open fire and murder your attacker in cold blood without a shred of hesitation.

Melancholics, however, are by far the funniest of the bunch. Their blood type is based on fear, so when you trigger their resonance, they will go into full-on panic mode and start running away from you while shouting for the police and begging you not to kill them. Now, remember: if you want to harvest Melancholic blood points, you need to follow this person and feed on them, which means you're essentially chasing down a terrified person IN THE MIDDLE OF SEATTLE like you were Michael Myers from Halloween or the T-1000 from Terminator 2, in full view of civilians and even police officers, who COMPLETELY ignore all of this. "But Gare, you said police officers opened fire on Choleric NPCs when they tried to attack you". Yes, I know. It makes no sense! I guess the Seattle police is very selective about the types of crime they choose to fight. The bottom line is that this is beyond ridiculous and makes the already empty world of Bloodlines 2 feel even more artificial.

I’m not mad, just disappointed

Anyway, this review has gone on for too long, so let’s wrap up it. Is this a good sequel to Bloodlines? Absolutely not. In fact, I feel dirty even calling it that. Like, it’s almost insulting to the original. It just needed to be a different game, and that’s what hurts the most: this WAS a different game, once upon a time! But instead, it turned into… whatever this is. Why this game was handed to a team that’s clearly not well-versed in making RPGs is probably a bigger mystery than anything in the actual game.

I’d also like to dispel what I personally view as a misconception that this is still a great Vampire the Masquerade game if you simply judge it based on its own merits, with no connection to the original Bloodlines. I strongly disagree. This is the most aggressively 6/10 game I’ve ever played, and even then, I feel like I’m being a little generous. Granted, it’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s also not something I’d actively recommend to people. If you’re still curious about it and want to see if it’s really as bad as people are saying, at least wait until it goes on sale.