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How do you follow up one of the greatest role-playing games (RPGs) ever made? The answer, according to developer The Chinese Room, is a shallow action title set in a lifeless, empty world with a bland story, apocalyptically bad pacing, and janky, repetitive combat.
Review info
Platform reviewed: PS5
Available on: PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, PC
Release date: October 21, 2025
Where its legendary predecessor offered fantastic freedom of choice, a cast of complex, well-written characters, and a dynamic open world filled with opportunities for emergent play, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 brings absolutely nothing similar to the table. It looks pretty at times, but that’s literally all that can be said in favor of this disappointing follow up.
To be outclassed in almost every regard by a game from more than twenty years ago should be a source of embarrassment, let alone by one that was literally released in an unfinished state by its original developer.
It’s hard to view Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 as anything other than a cynical cash grab that will massively disappoint long-time fans like me.
(Un)dead world
Set in the World of Darkness universe from the Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop game, Bloodlines 2 takes you to an alternate version of Seattle gripped in a battle between the living and the dead. It’s a world that looks a lot like our own, but has an alien, sinister edge to it.
This is most obviously conveyed in an atmospheric, neo-noir art direction that sees the dark streets bathed in fog and glowing neon lights, but extends to everything from the depressing barks of random non-player characters as you walk past to the aggressive tone of in-game advertisements.
Although the visuals are impressive enough at times thanks largely to the gorgeous lighting, there’s nothing here that appeals beyond the surface level. Almost the entire game takes place within the same city block and it’s just depressingly barren. Random civilians roam the streets, while others stand around nearly motionless on street corners dispensing the same canned voice lines every single time you walk past.
Best bit
The visuals are by far the best part of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 and can be pretty impressive when you first boot up the game. The night-time Seattle setting is striking thanks to its bright neon lights and a smattering of thick snow.
There are a handful of buildings with modeled interiors and their inhabitants never waver from their set positions – making everything feel sterile and lifeless. There are no moving vehicles at all, exacerbating the issue.
It’s hard to adequately convey just how little there is to do in this map. Sure, there are some collectible marks that you can hoover up for bonus experience points (spoiler: you won’t need them, and there’s seemingly no reward for getting them all), but that’s your only real activity aside from some bland side quests. Attacking civilians sees you chased by the local police who often spawn right in front of you and, if you keep it up, instantly killed in a canned animation.
Santa Monica in the original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was not a large map either, but felt significantly more lifelike and gave you some interesting ways to mess around with your chosen vampire powers in between its missions.
Plodding along
Story is clearly the big focus in Bloodlines 2, but sadly it does nothing to make up for its shortcomings everywhere else. The basic thrust is that you’re an elder vampire awakened from a centuries-long slumber with the voice of a dead detective called Fabien in your head. With a sinister mark on your hand that limits your original power, you team up to solve Fabien’s murder as you try to work out how to remove it.
It’s an interesting premise, but the narrative is extremely rigid, which severely limits the possibilities for role-play. Your vampire has a set name, Phyre, and beyond choosing your gender and one of six vampire clans, you have vanishingly few opportunities to impact the plot.
As far as I can tell, your choice of clan barely makes any difference either. I went with Toreador, the alluring artiste faction, and this fact was referenced about three times in throwaway dialog in total. Even when you are able to make choices, they seem incredibly inconsequential beyond a brief epilogue cutscene that you see right at the very end of the game.
If that wasn’t enough, the storytelling suffers from terrible pacing throughout. It’s split between three separate time periods which it alternates between at the end of each main quest. One is in the 1920s and takes place entirely in tiny rooms, while the other two are modern. In two of the timelines you play entirely as Fabien, which basically involves trudging through the deserted streets with none of your usual traversal powers (like the ability to climb walls or glide) to reach one of the few buildings with interiors to talk to someone.
It’s absolutely miserable and many of these segments seem consciously designed to waste your time, forcing you to frequently double back with every completed objective. Named non-player characters (NPCs) sit around in the same static spots, meaning that you’re constantly walking between the same buildings to glean a new spec of information over and over and over again. It doesn’t even pay off as the plot veers awkwardly between entirely predictable and completely stupid as it plods towards its unsatisfying twist ending.
Fabien has a few special powers up his sleeve, like the ability to converse with imagined objects or dead bodies, but they can only be used at very specific points decided by the developers. They also serve to cheapen any actual detective work that you would otherwise be doing by simply telling him what he needs to know for the story to progress.
I love a narrative-driven game, but there is nothing here that’s particularly enjoyable. As a Malkavian vampire (a very madness-prone faction), Fabien is suitably bonkers, but beyond some annoying quips there’s very little examination of what that actually means and how it would impact his crime-solving role in the blood sucking community.
It’s significantly worse written than the compelling indie Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York visual novel from a few years back – and that game mercifully didn’t force you to haul yourself between buildings for each new line. The voice acting is also hit and miss. The performances for Phyre and Fabien are decent on the whole, but minor characters are often flat and awkward-sounding.
Tooth and claw
There is at least some combat to break up this monotonous formula when you’re playing as Phyre. The bad news is that it’s simply bad, with buggy heavy and light strikes and sloppy finisher animations that get old the two hundredth time. It might not impact the story, but your chosen clan does dictate which abilities you’re able to unlock, and some of them are quite good. I enjoyed using my charms to turn foes against each other, though there aren’t very many powers per clan and no ways to develop or augment them.
Your choice of clan is also undermined by the fact that you can still unlock the abilities from other clans by collecting the right blood types (obtained by harvesting highlighted NPCs around the map), which only further de-emphasize player decision-making in what is purportedly an RPG.
You have no inventory, so you can’t keep any guns on hand for fights, but can at least pick them up via telekinesis for a few shots if they’re dropped by one of the five or so enemy types that you’ll be facing ad nauseam throughout the game.
The combat designers presumably went on strike at some point towards the end of the game’s production, too, as the initially quite tightly designed encounters soon devolve into massive swarms of enemies equipped with overpowered ranged weapons that are just frustrating to deal with.
The game is also a technical mess, at least on PlayStation 5. Crashes are frequent later on, with a particularly nasty one forcing my console to reboot several times, and the frame rate always completely tanks whenever you enter or exit a building.
All of this leaves Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 almost impossible to recommend. If you’re a lover of the original game, you’re going to hate it, as it represents the antithesis of everything that made it so great. If you’re new to the universe, literally any other World of Darkness game would be a better introduction. Yes, even Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood – at least it’s not this dull.
Should I play Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2?
Play it if…
Don’t play it if…
Accessibility features
There are a small number of accessibility options in the game, namely the ability to enable or disable subtitles and tweak their size. You can also reduce camera movement using a slider. Controls cannot be rebound on consoles, though there is a setting to invert the Y axis.
How I reviewed Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2
I played almost 15 hours of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 on PS5 for this review. During that time, I completed the game once, having experienced every major story beat and a small handful of the boring side quests.
As a huge fan of the original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, I frequently compared my experience to that game, having completed several full playthroughs over the years.
I also compared it to other games set in the same universe, namely Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York and its sequel Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York in addition to others like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Justice plus Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood for good measure.
Throughout my time with the game, I played it with the standard DualSense Wireless Controller and an Astro A20 X gaming headset for audio.
First reviewed October 2025
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dash.wood@futurenet.com (Dashiell Wood)
