RPG Codex Review: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has cultivated quite a positive reputation since its release in 2004. Looking back at our own reviews at the time, our staff found it rather disappointing ("...it really isn't the great game we were hoping to get," "...had the potential to be exceptional but landed far too short of its intended goal," "...some absolutely idiotic design decisions that reduce a perfect 10 to a mediocre 7.5."). However, its merits were acknowledged, and some aspects held up in light of many worse role-playing game trends to come.
In 2019, when Paradox announced they were publishing a sequel developed by Hardsuit Labs (a studio that had only ever assisted other studios with multiplayer first-person shooters), the response was a mix of optimism and pessimism. The latter grew as the development team revealed more details and showed off more gameplay footage. It grew even further when Paradox/Hardsuit publicly fired the lead writer, who had also been the principal writer of the first one. It grew further still when they announced in early 2021 that the entire project had been rebooted with a new development team. It possibly reached the nadir in late 2023 when they finally released the details of the new iteration, now being developed by The Chinese Room (once a walking sim developer, now a Ship of Theseus), and showed off gameplay footage of the new version in early 2024.
It's been a long, hard road out of development hell, but Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has finally been released. It shouldn't be too surprising that the reception has been mixed, lukewarm at best. What surprised me is that I actually liked it. I was more pessimistic than ever after the extended gameplay reveal back in 2024 on account of how terrible it looked. Yet they kept iterating, and I was so impressed with how much had been improved that I had to play it immediately, foregoing my usual long wait for patches and a deep discount. My instincts were correct, so despite this not being the type of game this site goes for at all, I find it worthy of a long-form analysis.
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Final Death
To dust off an old phrase, Bloodlines 2 is good for what it is - a stealth action game with reactive dialogue - and bad at what it isn't - an RPG and a proper follow-up to Bloodlines. While I personally enjoyed the stealth action, story, music, art, and vocal performances, it's simply far too lacking in RPG systems, gameplay variety, and meaningful optional content. It would have been more dignified for Paradox to outright cancel or rename the project after Hardsuit failed to deliver; too bad for them and all the disappointed Bloodlines fans that the incentives weren't strong enough to do either. Oh well. As far as disappointments go, I'll gladly take one that personally appeals to me and hardly anyone else.
