Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is richly authentic, intriguingly written, dripping with brooding atmosphere, and… not very fun to play, unfortunately
A certain kind of person is going to fall completely in love with Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. Playing through a new hands-on demo showing off more of its dark vision of Seattle, I'm struck by how much it nails the atmosphere of the original tabletop RPG. If you were a goth kid in the '90s, you are going to feel completely at home.
Between two preview builds, I've now played about 3 hours of Bloodlines 2, and in terms of its authenticity, I'm sold. From the moonlit streets, to the moody fashion, to the derelict mansions and art deco apartments, it couldn't feel more like a world where sexy-cool vampires would be at home. And there's no shyness about taking the tabletop lore seriously—concepts like the Camarilla and the Masquerade aren't just background, they're core to the story.
It can feel a bit like Proper Noun Overload, and there is something inherently stuffy about a lot of the bloodsucker politics. But that's punctured nicely by the two playable characters—Phyre, an ancient vampire awoken from over hundred years of slumber, and Fabien, a disembodied 1940s vampire detective who lives in their head (for slightly tangled reasons).
The former is old and scary enough to allow you to feel a bit above and outside it all, and the latter young and hip enough (relatively speaking) to translate a lot of the denser world-building for you into more modern terms. It lets you feel more like the cool kid humouring the nerds to get what they want, rather than a fresh recruit having to puzzle out where they stand in a complicated pecking order.
All the wheeling and dealing between different movers and shakers is elevated by character writing as sharp as everyone's teeth. The game is as full of quirky weirdos and pompous villains as I expect, nay, demand, of a secret vampire society. Even when they were telling me off for violating Vampire Law or something, they were still good fun to hang out with.
That's especially true in playable flashbacks to Fabien's days as a vampire detective, pre-decorporealization, which see you doing a spot of light mystery solving and interrogation amidst a cast of colourful, film noir-inspired characters.
Conversations with all these various children of the night are stuffed with different dialogue options, which the game is quick to tell me are affecting their opinions of me. It's not super clear at this early stage how much this will matter down the line, or how much narrative freedom is really going to be on offer, however. Most conversational paths seemed to be leading to the same endpoint to me, making it feel rather more buttoned up than the original Bloodlines—but it may be that that's just to keep the early game on track before things properly open up.
Mask off
Bloodlines 2's combat is too awkward to be empowering.
So far, so good, for the most part. But while all this authentic World of Darkness flavour goes a long way, where the game has me much less convinced is when the talking stops and the action starts.
Bloodlines 2's combat is too awkward to be empowering. Fights against ghouls and lesser vampires almost always saw me badly outnumbered, and with the first-person perspective limiting my peripheral vision, the result was that my respected elder vampire spent rather a lot of time getting sucker-punched in the back of the head.
Unlockable bloodline powers—including everything from mind control to boiling a target's blood until they explode—go some way to evening the odds, but I never felt like they wove naturally into the rhythm of combat. More complex powers felt too fiddly to deploy in the chaotic melees, while simpler ones often just worked as a limited use 'I win' button rather than part of a rounded arsenal.
Fuelling these powers requires drinking blood from stunned enemies, and while that's appropriately thematic, it means you're constantly popping in and out of third-person feeding animations. It disrupts any flow to the fights, and often strains logic—why is everyone just standing around letting me finish my dinner before the brawl resumes?
In theory sneaking around is an alternative option, and many bloodline powers do feel better suited to that—but in practice, the stealth system is disappointingly crude and held back by dim-witted enemy AI, while the design of encounters usually forced me into open combat after just one or two silent takedowns. If there's a clever approach to entering a big square room with six enemies standing in a crowd in the middle, for example, it wasn't obvious to me.
The demo ends with a boss fight against a powerful rival vampire, and it's here that things fell apart completely. My target was far too strong and tough for a toe-to-toe fistfight, so the only path to victory I could see was cheap tricks.
I ended up sprinting around the arena, hiding behind pillars and exploiting the poor enemy pathfinding while I frantically sucked blood out of respawning minions to charge my powers. The boss was resistant to most of my supernatural abilities but some at least made him stumble or pause for a moment clutching his head, allowing time for a few quick punches or a cheeky bite to chip away at his mammoth healthbar before sprinting away again to continue this flimsy David and Goliath bout.
Midnight run
Traversal is similarly rough around the edges. It's built around a solid core idea: on the streets, you have to move around like a normal person to avoid tipping off humanity to your nature, but Phyre is empowered with superhuman agility, allowing them to sprint across rooftops and glide between buildings, up where no one can spot you.
It's a neat way of making you feel like a grand predator without disregarding the Masquerade so core to the franchise. You have those moments of walking unseen among the throngs, but up on the rooftops, you're like a deadly bird of prey watching all the squishy walking meals go slowly about their business far below. It goes a long way to making you feel like something beyond human.
Inside the crumbling mansions and sinister office blocks, it was often difficult to determine where I was supposed to go next.
But the controls just aren't quite smooth enough to fully sell the fantasy. Climbing is hampered by both the first-person perspective and a lack of clarity around the best routes up buildings, which left me floundering in alleyways trying to figure out how to get up high. Once I was up there, jumps didn't transition into glides quite as elegantly as they should have, and it was easy to misjudge how far they'd take me, leaving Phyre floating down awkwardly to the street below.
Story missions highlighted those shortcomings further with alarmingly poor interior level design. Inside the crumbling mansions and sinister office blocks, it was often difficult to determine where I was supposed to go next, particularly because Phyre's sometimes expected to pull off parkour moves that the system doesn't really feel equipped for. In the two demos I've now played, all of these spaces have been awkwardly cramped and linear, offering none of the intriguing freedom of the first game—though again, it's definitely possible things open up more after these early hours.
Bite the bullet
None of these flaws add up to a disaster. After the tortured development Bloodlines 2 has endured, you might have come to expect a complete trainwreck, and this isn't that. I don't think traversing the city or punching its many insomniac thugs is fun, but it all basically works as intended with a minimum of bugs. It's frustrating at points, but not infuriating—and if we're being frank, that's more than can be said for its predecessor.
And like the original, how much you're able to overlook its flaws will come down to how much its dark world and brooding characters resonate with you. As I said up top, I think a certain kind of person is going to fall completely in love with this game for those things, and wave off these mechanical complaints as minor.
In my case—more of a bespectacled D&D kid back in the day than a World of Darkness goth—I'm not quite seduced. And though I have so far enjoyed Bloodlines 2's uncompromised vision of the tabletop setting and old school vampire charm, how far that really carries the game will depend a lot on where things go from the point this demo ends. Does the story stay this linear, or does it blossom into the kind of layered and captivating sandbox play that made the first game so beloved?
At least it's not long before we'll find out: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is due to launch (for real!) in time for Halloween this year, on October 21.