Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 review - not bloody bad

You’re the Nomad, a vampire elder who’s just awoken from 100 years of dreamless sleep, living my ideal life until someone wakes you up. There’s a strange mark on your hand because the developers have played Dishonored, your true powers need awakening, and there’s a softboiled, sarcastic, fedora-wearing vampire detective trapped in your head. 

You find yourself in modern day Seattle, bathed in blue and red neon and scattered with the twinkle of Christmas lights, blanketed in snow, forcing most people indoors and bringing traffic to a standstill. In this modern city you must navigate vampire fronts – dingy dive bars and hazy jazz clubs, alternating between warm interiors and the cold city night – to search for your unlikely passenger’s body. 

Despite your differences, things are amicable from the start and your goals broadly align — you both want to know how you ended up copiloting this ancient meat. It’s a setup we’ve seen before with Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077 and The Joker in Batman: Arkham Knight, but without the adversarial layer. 

This common narrative tool is used well, though, allowing the game to explain away how an ancient vampire instinctively understands the lingo and technology of the modern day without questioning any of it, letting the writers feed you lore and background naturally without resorting to wordy codex entries and character glossaries. But it’s also a pacing tool. Every day you play as Nomad is bookended by a playable flashback to the sepia-tinged prohibition era, as the detective attempts to solve serial murders that are somehow tied to your current situation. 

As odd duos go, it’s not quite Silverhand, but it’s still one of the better pairings. The detective comes from the school of noir, but he’s irreverent and goofy, rather than nihilistic and fatalist. Since he knows all the major players of vampire society – these beings who have grown mad and bored from their longevity – you come to each conversation prepared for what you’re about to deal with, allowing you to properly navigate the murky politics of the vamp underworld. 

Strategy game publisher Paradox Interactive and Bloodlines 2 are another unlikely duo that somehow works against all odds. The original developer, Hardsuit Labs, was canned and replaced by The Chinese Room four years ago. All the work was thrown out and the Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture developer stepped up, pitching a first-person action RPG as a sequel to one of the original immersive sims. The fact the game even exists is a minor miracle. The fact it’s pretty good – from such a strange pairing and a developer that’s never made anything like this – is surely some kind of divine intervention. 

Now, I’m a big fan of the original Bloodlines, but you have to come into this game with the right expectations. This is not an immersive sim. It offers you a massive suite of powers that give you some freedom to play your way, but the systems rarely interact in the same way an immersive sim’s systems do. There’s a bit of emergent play – especially when different AI factions duke it out – and you can crouch through plenty of air vents, but it’s not designed around it. 

Level design is straightforward with a couple of sneaking routes and cheeky ledges, but encounters are best described as combat arenas, and stealth is a way to thin the herd instead of slipping through unseen. Often, the next area stays locked down until you’ve cleared the enemies out. This is an action RPG where the action plays closer to Ghostwire Tokyo than Dishonored, which is a sentence that will probably annoy fans of the original. What Chinese Room has done, though, is nail the vibe. 

Sure, you can punch men across the room and shuffle up drainpipes with frightening speed before magic-parkouring your way across Seattle’s rooftops, but a lot of Bloodline 2’s best moments happen in conversation. You have to read each vampire you deal with and respond in a way that pleases them, often while hiding your true intentions. 

The Masquerade is a vampire ruleset that governs how bloodsuckers must act, never revealing their true nature to humans, but you have to wear a metaphorical mask as you navigate hierarchy and politics, too. There’s the Masquerade where you play human in front of the bloodbags, but all the vampires are wearing masks with each other, showing fealty where it’s needed, applying a little social lubrication, saying what people want to hear before staking each other in the back. It’s a game you have to play, and it’s done well, backed by sharp, engaging writing that keeps you locked into the drama of every conversation. 

Unfortunately, this only extends to the main quests. The side characters you meet have backstories that you’ll uncover through the main quests, but the side objectives you do with them are just repetitive activities and fetch quests — an excuse to unlock more powers or a sex scene (a fade to black and some audio). About halfway through the game, I started ignoring the side stuff entirely and Bloodlines 2 is a much better game for it. 

The main questline is full of surprises and standout moments that paper over the issues with the janky combat and the sterile world, which has atmosphere but rarely feels truly alive. It’s a world of gorgeous environmental art, convincing clutter and smoky alleyways, heavily shadowed and hyper real, where ambient music spills from shop doorways, filtering out into the sound of sirens, barking dogs and muffled conversations of the street. But the people in its streets are just vessels for you to feed from, and the rooftops are filled with goons to fight. 

Combat is a weird one because it works to sell the fantasy, letting you switch between various vampiric powers to sneak up on, manipulate, and kill your enemies. You can turn them into temporary allies, make them explode in a cloud of gore, you can vanish, teleport, and use other tricks to disappear whenever you’re overwhelmed. And to top your powers up, you just need to sneak up on someone or weaken them and bite down hard on their neck, filling yourself up like a Doom glory kill (except here you’re vulnerable while you do so). 

You have a series of fast attacks which auto lock and magnetize to the nearest enemy, but you can also hold and do a powerful punch, or dodge and attack, which performs various other moves like kicks when paired with offense. Then there’s a slide kick, which takes out knees, or a jumping drop kick that never hits anything and sends you careening over everyone’s heads like you failed a dice roll in Disco Elysium, for some reason. On Normal and Hard difficulties, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, but that’s where smart use of telekinesis comes in. 

Your ability to remotely manipulate most objects is infinite and infinitely useful. You can pick up explosive barrels and launch them at groups of enemies, pull people from rooftops, and even pick up firearms and fire them remotely as they hover by your side. Once spent, launch the gun at their heads. Speaking of heads, you can chop those off and throw them at people as well. In one fight, I decapitated a guy, picked up his head with telekinesis, slowed time, threw the head at his friend, and walked around the back of him. He got a one-two remote headbutt to neckbite combo he wasn’t expecting when he got out of bed that morning. When you’re in the zone, it’s fast and intense — it’s just a shame performance can’t keep up.

Even on performance mode on PS5 Pro, Bloodlines 2 stutters during intense sequences. It certainly isn’t going to convince anyone that the rumours around Unreal Engine games being a technical mess are overblown. Every transition from a scene, every hectic action sequence, every parkour route is plagued by stutters, and while they don’t ruin the game, they are noticeable and frequent enough to warrant a big old caveat. 

Still, despite its issues with underbaked sidequests, technical polish, and combat jank, I’m glad I played Bloodlines 2. It’s a game that shouldn’t exist from a publisher that’s never put out anything quite like it, and a developer best known for slow-paced experiential games, who salvaged a failed project and put its own spin on it. It has no right to be this good. When you’re playing your part and wearing your social mask, navigating murky alleyways and murkier politics, solving grisly murders and listening to the sounds of the street, Bloodlines 2 pulls you into its sharp embrace and refuses to unlatch until you reach its climax.