Tom Marks
Guest
Much like the thought of becoming an actual vampire, there are some things I really like about Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, and some I really don't care for. Developer The Chinese Room has undeniably done a remarkable job breaking out of its typically slow-paced and linear realm to give us a streetlight-soaked, open world Seattle that's enjoyable to explore, with a side of positively exquisite writing and voice acting. But combat never rises much above the level of being merely pretty good, and a lack of payoff for both mechanical and story choices hold this nocturnal sojourn back from greatness.
The slice of Seattle that serves as a hub for Bloodlines 2's searching, stalking, and politicking is impressive to behold, though don't expect GTA scale here. At around five by five blocks with most buildings climbable and rooftops fully navigable, there’s quite a bit more room to prowl than in Bloodlines 1's Santa Monica, with several distinct and memorable areas from the charming Pioneer Square to the lantern-lit Chinatown. Moving around it by clamoring, leaping, and gliding is some of the most fun I had.
This is also where your semi-customizable elder, Phyre, will hunt their prey, in the form of hapless humans who can be provoked, scared, or seduced depending on your hunting style. I appreciate that feeding is a major, unavoidable part of the nightly routine, but I think it could have been done better in a couple ways. For one, you only need to feed to recharge your combat powers. In the tabletop game, you get thirsty upon waking up every night, and in Bloodlines 1, your blood pool would steadily drop over time. I don't think this needs to be a hardcore survival game, but something like that would have helped sell that vampires need blood like we need food and water, adding a sense of desperation, because right now it’s just something you need to top up before going into battle.
For another, there just isn't enough variety in the NPC models and voices to keep me fooled across the 30-plus hours my first playthrough took. I probably fed on one specific woman wearing the same exact hat at least a couple dozen times.
You are required to maintain the Masquerade while at street level, meaning no using your powers or feeding in front of normies, which is appropriate. You can't have a Vampire: The Masquerade game without, well, the Masquerade. But I did find it was a bit too easy to shake off any suspicion if I messed up.
Bloodlines 2 can feel like a generic vampire game rather than a Vampire: The Masquerade game.
The key component of Vampire: The Masquerade lore that is almost completely missing (outside of one cutscene that happens no matter what you do) is The Beast, the dark and ravenous voice inside each vampire that drives them to do terrible things and can provoke an uncontrollable state called Frenzy. The absolute best mechanic in the 5th Edition of the Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop game, upon which Bloodines 2 is based, is an increasing hunger track that makes your character more likely to behave in a monstrous or unpredictable manner the longer they've gone without feeding. I get that people don't usually like losing control of their character. But this is so crucial to the vampire fantasy that its absence is an almost fatal flaw. It's the one choice that really consistently made me feel like I was playing some generic vampire game, not a Vampire: The Masquerade game.
At least the combat is challenging, pulse-pounding, and overall pretty decent. It can get a little disorienting, and I really wish there was more of a "hard" lock-on ability given it's all in third-person and both you and your opponents are constantly zipping around at high speeds. But there are some exciting nuances to master like the various kicks, parries, and telekinetic grabs. At least for a melee build, it could be really exhilarating once I got the hang of it.
Stealth is satisfying and rewarding as well, though it's limited in certain segments like boss fights in a way that can come across as punishing you for deciding to focus on it. Some of the more esoteric fighting styles like Tremere Blood Sorcery are absolutely sick nasty amazing the first few times you pull them off – boiling someone's blood from the inside is every bit as bombastically brutal as you'd imagine – but can come to seem like more of a gimmick than a playstyle after a while. Overall, though, the frantic and action-packed sequences that combined my abilities to use the environment, my movement powers, and even my enemies against each other were some of the high points of Bloodlines 2.
Where it falls down the most, unfortunately, is as an RPG. You are playing as an elder vampire, so it's not exactly a typical zero-to-hero story. But just to give a representative example, the damage your melee attacks do at the very beginning is exactly the same as it will be in the final boss fight. You awaken new powers called Disciplines, like being able to turn invisible or smooch an enemy to turn them to your side, but you'll get all of them for your chosen clan within the first eight hours or so, after which point anything else is mostly a sidegrade. You can upgrade your health track by finding hidden symbols painted in blood across Seattle, but overall there isn't much of a sense of power progression throughout most of the campaign.
The action-packed sequences that combined my abilities were high points.
This is further limited by the fact that you can only equip four Disciplines at a time, and only one from each category – so, for example, you can't mix and match two different clans' movement abilities to create your own hyper-mobile playstyle. I don't see the wisdom in these restrictions at all. I also don't really enjoy that each Discipline can only be used once in battle before having to feed again, since they each have their own separate pool of power points, instead of having them draw from a common pool of stored blood that I could spend however I like. Sometimes restrictions are good. I just don't think any of these ones are. I'm a dang vampire. Just let me do what I want.
I did really appreciate the options Phyre has for visual customization. Each clan has four different outfits to unlock from the punk rock streetwear of the Brujah to the sharp business attire of the Ventrue. NPCs will actually react differently to you based on what you're wearing, such as being easier to seduce if you show a little more skin. That is honestly amazing. But what we're missing is a weapon slot, and that is definitely not amazing. I get that Phyre is an elder and a living weapon herself. She can telekinetically use a gun as a sort of one-off combat consumable, or throw a fire extinguisher across the room. But melee is always a hand-to-hand affair. And again, this is just cramping my style from a character customization angle. Do I need weapons to kill these chumps? Nah. But a vampire with a trenchcoat and dual pistols or a sweet-ass katana is just too cool and iconic to not allow in your vampire RPG. It's part of character creation and self-expression in the tabletop game. What are we doing here?
The story about solving a series of dramatic murders and navigating court politics is overall extremely well-written and voiced by a fantastic cast, from the sarcastic Nosferatu Tolly to the self-indulgent queen of seattle herself, Lou Graham. It's so good, in fact, that for the last few hours, I was ready to throw the windows open and start yelling into the night that everyone needed to experience this.
But then it absolutely broke my cold, dead heart. I'll do my best to avoid spoilers here, but you can skip ahead to the verdict if you're really sensitive to that kind of thing.
Basically, every interesting decision I made throughout the entire chronicle was unceremoniously chewed up and spit onto the pavement before being crushed under the uncaring bootheel of anticlimax. All of the machinations I had put into motion, the allies I had made, the chess pieces I had manipulated, all of the awesome vampire elder shit I had been vibrating about in the magnificently inspired lead up to the finale… were resolved in a 30-second epilogue voice-over that completely denied me the real showdown I had been dreaming of all this time. I was devastated. This might be worse than the original ending of Mass Effect 3. It's like they ripped out the last chapter of the book and burned it.
There's also the fact that you play maybe about a third of the story through the eyes of the Malkavian film noir detective Fabien, who somehow ended up in Phyre's head. And I love Fabien. I really do. He made me cry at one point. His segments are just as skillfully penned, and give you an interesting look into the history of Seattle. But his mind-altering Malkavian powers, like getting someone to recognize you as a different person or reading their surface thoughts? Cool idea, but every time you are allowed to use them, it is for a railroaded story beat. There is never a point at which they can be combined or deployed in a clever way that would make me feel like I solved the case, which is another huge wasted opportunity.
At the end of the night, this is a story that seems almost annoyed by the fact that it has to offer you any kind of choice at all.