It's OK. Not Bloodlines 2, barely an RPG
This worst thing about this game is that it is called Bloodlines 2. It isn't that. It's not even in the same genre as that. It's a mix between an action adventure game like Dishonored 2 or Deux Ex Mankind Divided and a walking narrative game like What Remains of Edith Finch or one of Quantic Dream titles.
It's pretty clear that the Chinese Rooms (probably wisely) decided that they are not cut out to make an open-world sandbox choice-driven RPG like Bloodlines 1, so they made a totally different game. There is no character creation, there is no skill checks, there is no inventory, there is only one save file (with no manual saves), there are no equippable weapons or gear, and so on. It's not really an RPG.
The game is fairly linear, with a very small open world, and, I assume, fairly short. Your clan is far less important in this game and basically gives you affinity for a specific branch of the skill tree (which is super rudimentary - basically 5 levels of abilities for each clan, and you can mix and match ones from different clans after you unlock them (but can only have 1 ability equipped per level, from any clan), and all of them have to do with combat or sneaking in some way, no hacking, lock-picking, persuasion, or anything of that kind (though you do occasionally get unique dialogue choices depending on your chosen clan).
The combat is super simple. As there are no weapons per se, you are limited to using your fists, abilities, and telekinesis, with which you can levitate and throw (or shoot) various objects, including guns. You can dodge and dash as well. It gets repetitive, but it works.
The movement outside of combat is actually really good, surprisingly so. You can climb walls, jump really far, and glide across rooftops. Shame the open world is tiny - reminds me of Arkham or Gotham from the first two Batman Arkham games. In the same way as those games it is also quite vertical, which helps to offset the small area that the world covers to some extent, but you still feel decidedly on a leash (both practically and literally story-wise) when it comes to roaming the world. But then again, there really isn't much to do in it, so perhaps it's no big loss that the world itself is small.
It is very pretty - the snow and the lights look amazing, but it is also a very inert and static feeling world. You can feed on passers-bys and certain random NPCs will provide special charged blood that can be used to unlock abilities, but beyond that and several collectibles there is very little interactability. It's also not very detailed - the more you look at the small things the more you notice things that don't make sense (keyboards that are mirrored, with arrow keys on the left), looks bad (textures on stuff like motorcycles parked on the street look bad enough that at first I thought they haven't loaded in yet), or repeats - and that last part is especially disappointing. It's a linear, limited, closed-up experience - you really have no excuse to re-use the same portrait of a woman literally dozens of times across practically every other interior area in the game. But the artists have done a fantastic job otherwise, in terms of making things look really (really) pretty at a glance. The snowy Seattle (or a very small part of it at least) in particular looks amazing - you kinda start feeling chilly looking at the snowy skies in the game.
One thing that is done very well indeed is pretty much everything that has to do with sound. I like the voice acting, I think everyone plays their characters really well, and even enemy chatter is well done (however it gets repeated ad nauseum), but the overall sound design is fantastic, no other word for it. Sound effects, reverb, distance, echoes, ambience, music (although sometimes different in style from the first game still captures the atmosphere really well), the way your character huffs and puffs and makes animalistic noises when you use vampire abilities, it's all just really well done. It's an aurally very pleasing experience.
I am not very far into the game but so far I've only really encountered one enemy faction - Anarchs. They are as bland as they come - on paper vampires and vampire's ghouls - they are supposed to be vampires who reject the Camarilla rules and rebel against them, in practice they are some punk-looking hoodlums with pipes, baseball bats and an occasional pistol who hang out on rooftops for no discernible reason. In lore it is stated that a lot of them are ghouls (mortals under the control of vampires) and thin-bloods (basically vampires in name only with only rudimentary powers), which might explain why their attacks are basically limited to punching and shooting, with no vampiric powers (so far). They also all look the same - punk styled young people with googles and face masks hiding their faces (helps hide the fact that there are only a few models for them), so much so that they kinda remind me of the mooks from Borderlands.
The story is... so far, not too bad, if derivative. People forget that the actual plot of Bloodlines 1 isn't exactly great, what made it interesting is the world and the variability and freedom, which this game, so far in my playthrough at least, lacks. In my 4 and a bit hours I haven't made a single choice that actually seems to have had consequences beyond Telltale-style "Lou will remember that/Fabien is pleased by this/Tolly was offended by that" pop ups after dialogue choices.
That said, I don't agree with people who say that the voice acting is bad or that the characters look bad or boring. The voice acting is, so far, actually been pretty good, and the characters are all memorable, with solid dialogue. The plot itself is eh, kinda feels like a play on Cyberpunk (you wake up after a slumber with another person's personality tagging along inside your head). Your mental hitchhiker is the star of the show here - hate him or love him (I quite like him, he is a fun character), he definitely has a personality to him. There is more to it than that, and in general it does keep me interested enough to keep playing along, so I would count the overall story aspect of the game as a positive one.
Performance wise it seems like I have been extraordinarily lucky - the game runs flawlessly on my system - starts fine, runs fine, looks fine. I would even go so far as to say that it runs pretty well - I have an AMD GPU (7900XT), and I can run it at a somewhat stable 60FPS (during combat and open world segments) without any kind of frame-gen or upscaling at high/ultra settings in 1440p, so it looks nice and sharp and with no added input lag. However, performance tends to tank when you enter non-combat interior zones. It's weird, it's still a smooth framerate, but it seems to drop from ~60 straight down to 30, as if it's a stylistic choice. But as some say YMMV. All the pre-order bonuses (what little there are at this point) show up OK as well.
It's not the game's fault that the publisher offloaded it to a studio that had no experience with RPG titles like Bloodlines 1, and it's not the game's fault that the publisher insisted on shipping it as "Bloodlines 2", because it is NOT that. On its own merits it is a perfectly acceptable, very simple, action adventure game with a very thin RPG veneer on top. But because it is called Bloodlines 2 people will inevitably not judge it on the basis on what this game IS, and instead focus on what it is NOT. And that's understandable, but I would put the blame on the publisher here and, at the end of the day, I would rather have this game exist than not.
As it is, this game is passable (provided you don't run into technical issues), but nothing more. Certainly worth more than 1/5, but no more than 3/5 if you're generous. It's overpriced for sure, so wait for a sale. I got the Premium Edition, and I honestly would be surprised if we get all the promised DLC in 2026, if at all.
89 gamers found this review helpful