It’s always sad to see a great idea fail due to poor execution. That’s been the underlying sentiment behind my time with Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. The Chinese Room’s take on the World of Darkness setting and the ideas that could have made it a great addition to 2025’s crowded list of great titles are there. However, they simply fall flat thanks to a gameplay loop that seems designed around repetition and just running between different areas.
Let’s start with what’s good about the experience in Bloodlines 2. First off, the development team’s take on the city of Seattle is quite impressive, with its midnight setting working well to sell the kind of story that’s being told. I liked the art direction, the decent colour combination, and the overall vibe on display – it certainly seeks to capture the original’s atmosphere, although the game’s design falters enough to take a bit of its charm away.
“The quest design in Bloodlines 2 leans too heavily on generic fetch-and-carry tasks.”
Stepping into the shoes of a vampire, Phyre, whose memories and abilities are mysteriously limited courtesy of a brand they don’t remember getting, should have been a compelling tale. And for the most part, I’d say that the story did a decent job of keeping me interested, especially in its early hours. However, its pacing and the manner in which seemingly important narrative threads taper off into nothing made its twists feel abrupt and jarring. It could have been a lot more, but that sadly isn’t the case.
It’s all the more disappointing because some of the game’s characters are quite interesting. The Malkavian vampire Fabian, for instance, is a compelling addition. As a disembodied voice in Phyre’s head, his struggle to hold on to his sanity, due to his clan’s curse, was a great justification for trying to masquerade as a private detective. Other characters were similarly entertaining when I engaged with them, and you might find some likeable traits upon meeting them.
The game’s soundtrack was another highlight for me, making it suitably moody and atmospheric. It was especially good at making more than a few of the main story’s key moments hit just a little bit harder. Unfortunately, as you probably guessed, none of these strengths were enough to save Bloodlines 2 from its numerous and noticeable weaknesses.
“If you’re hoping that the game’s combat alleviates the fatigue felt from the story and exploration, I have bad news.”
For starters, the gameplay loop’s emphasis on detective work might have been excellent if it didn’t involve some very tedious back-and-forth between different characters placed inconveniently far from each other. It’s like a wheel that just keeps turning, without any real excitement or change. I couldn’t help but feel like too much time is spent wasting by approaching characters just to trigger dialogue that would progress my current questline.
This may not necessarily have been a bad thing if the exploration loop offered enough distractions along the way for me to pursue. No matter how nice the game’s version of Seattle looked, the quest design made the overall experience feel archaic, outdated, and, most of all, dull and uninspired.
So, the quest design in Bloodlines 2 leans too heavily on generic fetch-and-carry tasks, but they are also occasionally padded with combat encounters seemingly added just to break the monotony. In a game built around detective work and the slow unraveling of a mystery, such design feels out of place. Instead of deepening immersion or reinforcing the investigative tone, these repetitive objectives disrupt the pacing and dilute the tension that the narrative works so hard to build. Multi-stage investigations are rare, and the faction angles on offer don’t really come with consequences that made me stop and think about where my loyalties might lie.
Yes, there are a few notable side quests, but they’re mostly chores you carried out, and your choices during these missions and the story felt influential only in the moment, never mind having a tangible impact far enough into the story. It feels like you’re motivated purely by reaching the next marker with little to discover along the way to keep things interesting. It soon became exhausting rather than exhilarating, and I’d say that it should have been the other way around, considering I was playing a literal vampire.
If you’re hoping that the game’s combat alleviates the fatigue felt from the story and exploration, I have bad news. Like me, you would be forgiven for assuming that taking on baddies as a vampire with a few cool abilities, which vary based on the clan you choose when you create your character, is going to be quite the draw. Victory in Bloodlines 2 doesn’t feel earned through mastery or clever play; it’s more about facing the grind than outsmarting it.
The enemies you face are wildly inconsistent, as they might come at you with everything they have or stand around waiting for you to make the first move. Especially the inconsistent collision accuracy, which constantly threw off my timing and made every exchange feel aggravating. I could forgive everything else about the game if its combat had somehow clicked, and yet, here we are.
And don’t get me started on the bosses! I love a good boss fight, but I can ignore a lack of challenge in the interest of keeping a game accessible to players who may not have the time or patience for multiple attempts on the same boss. Having boss fights that at least present some form of challenge, much less using different tools in my arsenal, would still have been ideal.
Instead, the bosses in this game are simply enemies with bigger health bars and easy-to-exploit attack patterns. Doing so feels highly unrewarding, and the arenas don’t really encourage free-flowing gameplay. This was probably the biggest gripe I had with the experience, aside from its antagonists being a rather lackluster bunch that didn’t really raise the stakes high enough for me to care. The presentation has its highs and carries that signature moodiness that the setting is known for, but it’s ultimately an urban fantasy that looks intriguing but is actually lifeless.
“Bloodlines 2’s ambitions are its undoing.”
Additionally, I thought that having to choose your clan of origin and then acquire skills from other clans’ trees by feeding on other vampires would have been interesting. Cool concept, but once again, it’s let down by poorly executed mechanics that don’t really change the way you approach situations. Instead, the game merely nudges your numbers up or down, giving no real feeling of growth or meaningful choice.
Unfortunately, where Bloodlines 2 falters most is in its claim of being an RPG. Despite calling itself one, I struggled to find any real sense of progression. There’s no need to think strategically about inventory, and no tangible growth to chase. In an era where great RPGs thrive on player agency and character development, Bloodlines 2’s absence of both is unacceptable and a massive bummer. The various systems simply don’t intertwine with each other enough for the experience to form a cohesive, enjoyable whole. And that’s not even getting into the lack of basic PC features, such as a field of view slider or an option to turn off motion blur, much less manually saving.
Fortunately, on the performance front, there’s at least some good news. Running the game on a Ryzen 5950X with 64 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA 3080 Ti, we achieved a stable 60 FPS at 4K resolution using DLSS Balanced mode.
Bloodlines 2’s ambitions are its undoing. It’s a game that aims for the skies but never quite takes off. It desperately wants to embody the fantasy of being a vampire, yet what it delivers is a painfully ordinary experience. Rather than delivering memorable moments that highlight their abilities, the game reduces them to repetitive errands, sending them back and forth across the same areas until the whole experience starts to drag.
To conclude, Bloodlines 2 is a mess, plain and simple, which I couldn’t really recommend to anyone, especially at its asking price. Even if you’re a fan of the genre, it’s best to wait for a discount on this one, though even that’s a hard recommendation to make. It teases a world full of mysteries, but never delivers the tension or satisfaction needed to make uncovering them feel rewarding.
This game was reviewed on the PC.
