After six and a half years, we are now just one month away from the release of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. After changing developers several times, numerous delays, and a fair few controversies along the way, I managed to go hands-on at Gamescom 2025 with an early preview build and came away excited at the fact that The Chinese Room is getting to flex its writing and narrative expertise on a big, meaty project.
However, the aspects of the game that The Chinese Room are least familiar with, specifically open-world and combat, quickly began to get in the way of that enjoyment to the point where I wonder if a more limited scope would have served both the game and its developer better.
Story Shines
Unsurprisingly, given The Chinese Room’s history with Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, and Still Wakes The Deep, the collection of aspects that make up the narrative half of Bloodlines 2 is where things are strongest. The Voice acting is expertly performed, and the dialogue is well-written and feels true to the World of Darkness IP and the mystique embedded within it.
Fabian, the voice that narrates your experiences and accompanies you as you play, does an excellent job of acting as a running monologue, breaking down aspects of the lore, the different vampire clans, and helping to explain connections between characters in the small Seattle map that The Chinese Room has created.
The level of detail on show in their character models is extremely impressive, and a considerable step up graphically compared to anything else The Chinese Room has done before. Bloodlines 2 feels more like an immersive sim-lite than an RPG. These characters feel like figureheads within Seattle, people who move around have their own goals and intentions as they skulk around in the shadows of Seattle.
Quests I have played both at Gamescom and in the early preview have also been impressive, consisting of multiple stages that go from learning information by talking with people, to finding clues, using environmental puzzles to solve riddles, and more action-oriented combat (more on that later). The point is, there is a lot of depth and thought that has been put into the narrative, characters, and quests of Bloodlines 2 that I think will please newcomers (as it doesn’t really feel like another game on the market with its pacing and structure). Most immersive sims are set in some kind of sci-fi world, and it feels great to be able to play in a fantasy-driven, vampire-filled world, even if that world feels quite limited in scale.
The one thing that has worried me so far is that the game feels like you are playing on autopilot at times. While the quests and stories being told are interesting, it does feel a lot like you are running around from point A to point B, simply following an objective marker constantly, which is where the game sort of feels trapped between its desire to be an RPG and the more immersive-sim elements The Chinese Room has implemented.
An Attempt At Action
The one aspect of the game that really struggles when under any kind of pressure (whether that be a small, enclosed environment or a lot of enemies at once) is combat. It feels good physically. Attacks have a lot of weight and power behind them, and being able just to punch people across a room feels great. Similarly, using your vampiric abilities like an instant head twist to execute someone feels snappy and responsive.
But when the game forces you into fights with more than a couple of enemies, things quickly get out of hand. It becomes impossible to manage all these enemies, forcing you to play a strange game of cat and mouse, running around a room or a set of rooms in the hopes of slowly ticking down an enemy’s health and then being able to heal, repeating this for every enemy.
Because the game’s main form of attack is a melee strike, Bloodlines 2 suffers from the plague of “auto-lock” melee attacks that can’t keep up with the speed and dodges of enemies. This leads to you constantly jerking forward as the game locks onto an enemy, and that enemy dodging or moving out of the way, forcing you to spin the camera around to try and relocate them again. It just sucks, and I grew especially frustrated as soon as the game presented me with anything more than one or two enemies in front of me.
It also doesn’t really feel like the game has enough tools for a stealth or full chaotic combat playstyle, so you are forced to sit awkwardly in the middle of these two playstyles, with neither one being fully fleshed out.
While Bloodlines 2’s combat isn’t bad, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a first combat system from a developer that hasn’t really had a chance to craft this type of gameplay, which, to be fair to The Chinese Room, is the case. It still doesn’t make the game more enjoyable in the moment.
Victim To The Weight Of Expectations
That game’s issues overall feel emblematic of the problems Bloodlines 2 has faced over the years. There have been so many iterations of this game that the one we are getting feels almost too broad in that it is trying too much. It isn’t really an RPG at all, despite some effort to deepen the vampire clans through their abilities and skill trees. The depth just isn’t there. At the same time, its combat isn’t robust enough to support a game revolving around it. On top of that, the immersive sim elements when it comes to the narrative are much better, but it also feels like a half-step towards fully embracing the genre.
The end result, from the few hours I have spent with it, is a game that feels trapped by the weight of the expectations on it, trying to juggle so many different things that it underdelivers almost everywhere. Would a more limited scope for the project have worked better?
For example, the game is open-world, but the map is tiny, no bigger than a few blocks of Seattle, and it isn’t particularly interesting or full of things to do. The skill tree isn’t really a tree at all, and there seems to be almost no build customisation beyond the skills you choose, as you just follow a linear upgrade path. The game has collectibles listed on the map menu, but they seem fairly underwhelming, and the only items you really pick up during missions are dozens of lore notes, which offer a wealth of flavour text to read from the menu, but nothing else.
We’ll never really know what Bloodlines 2 would have looked like in a different situation. Still, I do get the sense that The Chinese Room could have created a really compelling narrative-driven, vampire game in a vibrant Seattle if they were able to focus more on the aspects of game design that come naturally to them.
Instead, Bloodlines 2 feels like a game that will come out during a hectic October release window and be forgotten about weeks later. Solid, but nothing I have seen suggests it is anything special, and I doubt if it is a game that will bring in newcomers to the IP or if it is the game fans have been waiting 21 years for.
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