Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 review – an interesting and toothless piece of dark fiction | Games

YesYou are an ancient and powerful vampire and you wake up in the basement of a decrepit Seattle building, with no recent memories and a strange sigil on your hand. The first thing you do is feed on the cop who finds you, before slamming his partner into a wall so hard that his blood splatters on the brick. A violent fang rampage ensues, in which you beat and tear apart rival undead and their ghouls while currying favor with the local vampire court and trying to hide your existence from the mortal population of this sultry city.

But it’s also a detective story: there’s a young night stalker who shares your brain, a voice in your head named Fabian, who talks like a 1920s detective (probably because he once was one). Fabian is not violent at all; he obviously works with the human police and the vampire underworld, munching on the blood of willing volunteers and using his mind-probing powers to solve murders. These two stories are two entirely different games in the same setting, but everything about Bloodlines 2 feels awkwardly put together. It’s unfortunate that I’m playing this right after watching AMC’s Interview with the Vampire TV series, because the contrast is stark. One is a masterful, frightening, sexually charged and cleverly comedic reimagining of vampire mythology. The other is ALL RIGHT.

Fittingly, the development of this vampire saga seems to have been cursed. The first Bloodlines game was a cult PC role-playing game released in 2004, and it took over a decade for a sequel to take off. Development of Bloodlines 2 began in 2015 at Seattle-based Hardsuit Labs, under the direction of the first game’s screenwriter. But development was fraught with challenges, and in 2021 the entire project was handed over to a new developer, The Chinese Room. The result is an interesting set-up and closure job with elements from the Hardsuit version of the game woven together by The Chinese Room into a 25-hour story that just about makes sense. It’s not a total failure, but there are a lot of obvious details.

For example, there’s a giant screen of vampire abilities you can learn, obviously meant to give you some choices about how you approach the game – seduction, brute force, manipulation. But you already start out super powered, and you get the most fun dark powers of mind control and neck snapping within the first couple of hours, giving you little reason to learn more. When I tried to do something interesting with these abilities – like possess deadly prey on the street or interrogate someone by breaking into them – the game often refused to comply.

And while my interactions with my vampire brethren have been interesting, my interactions with the humans of Seattle have been downright confusing. As you walk the streets, you’ll hear sex workers shouting “I just have to pay these tuition fees!” » to anyone. A businessman sitting on a bench started with the phrase “Want to go into business together? Sexy business?”, then got up and followed me through the streets saying “I can’t wait to fuck you!” until I got so bored that I ate it. I know vampires see mortals as unimportant puppets, but not like that.

The bizarre and out-of-place behavior of non-player characters isn’t the only thing about Bloodlines 2 that feels extremely late 2000s. It reminds me of the wave of clunky but interesting first-person games that followed 2000s Deus Ex, and not just because of the outdated animation. Sliding at abnormal speeds across the rooftops of Seattle is fun, which is just as well because most of the game’s missions have you running back and forth across the city talking to people. But when you meet ghouls – and there are some such among them – you’re drawn into some of the most awkward first-person combat I’ve played in decades. It’s so unfun that I reduced the difficulty to easy after the first few hours so that these boring skirmishes would end more quickly.

There’s an OK vampire story hidden here; Careful, risky conversations with other dangerous vampires are by far the most interesting thing about Bloodlines 2. And I enjoyed some of Seattle’s neighborhoods, especially the dive bars filled with people gyrating to (of course) goth music. The Chinese Room managed to make something playable and vaguely interesting out of a game development disaster. But after the first few hours, I continued more out of morbid curiosity than enjoyment.