Let’s get this over with early: Bloodlines 2 probably should not have been called Bloodlines 2. Shared setting and a couple brief, questionable cameos (plus one utterly rubbish bit of cosmetic DLC) aside, there is little tying this game to Troika’s original janky cult hit FPS/RPG hybrid. This is not an RPG with deep mechanics, a wide variety of character builds or dialogue that reacts to mechanical choices. If that is what you need out of a game bearing this most hallowed of names, then you will be disappointed and frustrated.
But if you are willing to lay decades of dreams to rest and approach it purely on its own terms, you might find an entertaining if flawed romp through the World Of Darkness. A brawl-heavy, linear action game punctuated with Telltale-esque reactive dialogue and held together by a surprisingly compelling, century-spanning undead detective mystery.
Weirdly, I’d say that Bloodlines 2’s closest peer is Teyon’s surprisingly charming Robocop: Rogue City. Another game set within a small spread of dense city streets and combat locations, offering dialogue choices to colour in the margins of a mostly-static story. A story in which your character is a corpse forced into the role of enforcer and investigator at the behest of the city’s cold-blooded rulers. Although, Robocop somehow has more RPG elements. Go figure.
At least your primary protagonist here is more photogenic than Alex Murphy. You’re playing as The Nomad, a semi-customizable (you can tweak their gender, face and outfit, but not skin tone or voice) Dracul-esque elder vampire, waking up from a hundred-year nap into modern-day Seattle. Picking the pseudonym ‘Phyre’ from a band poster, you’re thrown straight into the morally ambiguous action (splattering a couple hapless human security guards) before emerging straight into local vampire courtly intrigue.
I say ‘primary’ protagonist because due to Plot Reasons, the Nomad is sharing their head with a second vampire’s disembodied personality – Fabien, a show-stealing bloodsucking detective who’s been working the Seattle beat since the 1920s. He’s a Malkavian – a member of a clan of vampires often plagued by visions and madness, but manifesting here as just being a quirky Tex Murphy-like gumshoe.
Fabien is an affable, ever-present voice of comic relief and insight, commenting on your actions and choices in dialogue, and occasionally cheering on your victories in combat. While most of the game has you playing as Phyre over the course of a week in the Emerald City, even a vampire needs their beauty sleep. During the daylight hours, control switches to Fabien’s extended flashback sequences – non-combat segments that use his psychic detective-ish powers to investigate a series of grisly murders dating back a hundred years.
Alternating between the two roles and storytelling styles works well, too. Fabien gets to chat with inanimate objects (really just arguing with his own imagination), dig into people’s memories and navigate conversations through psychic disguises, while Phyre handles all the fighting in the present, armed with a set of basic combat moves, plus four blood-fueled combat abilities based on which of the six clans you chose – an assortment of direct-damage abilities, movement powers, distractions and room-clearing ‘ultimates’.
There’s a whole lot of combat too, and while not without some awkwardness (The Chinese Room’s bread and butter has always been walk-and-talk narrative fare), it’s a mostly satisfying power trip. Operating like a blend of Batman: Arkham City, Dishonored and a first-person Streets Of Rage, Bloodlines 2 is very much not a stealth game, outside of a couple mercifully short instant-fail segments. Sneaking can help, but if the game puts you in a room with enemies, it wants them all dead before it’ll let you continue.
Fortunately, the Nomad is built for brawling, with a mixture of basic light and heavy punches – the latter sometimes setting enemies up for satisfying but infrequent air-juggle combos – triggered by short or long mouse clicks, and an assortment of poorly-tutorialised, multi-target kick moves performed by dodging in a direction and following up with an attack. You are tanky, aggressive and can heal and restore uses of your four clan-specific combat powers by finishing off enemies with a quick bite-punctuated finishing move. A bit like nu-Doom’s glory kills, albeit with less varied animations.
As you get further into Bloodlines 2, more powerful, interesting-to-fight enemies are introduced, and more weapons become available. While you can’t equip any gear permanently, the Nomad’s telekinesis power (available at all times with no cost) lets you magically throw knives and swords as projectiles, lob explosive gas canisters or pick up guns just long enough to empty them in the rough direction of an aggressor before discarding. The rhythm of brawling, improvising with dropped weapons, burning through combat powers, and refueling them with finishers is an engrossing loop.
Still, there’s a few rookie mistakes here. Things can get messy if too many enemies corner you in melee range. And as mentioned, parts of the combat are poorly explained, with kicks – especially the powerful dropkick move – never even getting mentioned, and a parry move – the only real defensive option, performed by dashing forwards – being largely useless in my experience. I would also recommend anyone re-bind the keys for the game’s four potion types – a non-replenishable resource only found in combat zones. They’re bound to the 1-4 buttons by default, and it’s all too easy to accidentally chug them, especially given that activating your combat powers requires you to hold the right mouse button and press one of those four keys, too.
Outside of combat, Seattle is a surprisingly small place, approximately four blocks by four blocks, less than a square kilometer, all of it lying under several inches of snow and gearing up for Christmas celebrations. Less an open world, more a handful of very scenic streets that you’ll quickly become very familiar with. They’re gorgeous environments though, with neon lights illuminating the snowy haze around buildings.
Inside and out, each set is meticulously dressed, if usually static. Curiously, texture detail is wildly variable. Some walls are covered with signs that you can read every bit of fine print on, while others are illegible smears that look twenty years old. Everything looks great from a distance, but the insides of some rooms are full of these clashing assets. At least the end result is mercifully light on hard-drive space, with the game clocking in at a relatively svelte 25gb.
As scenic as Seattle’s streets might be from a distance, they are just sets for characters to act against. ‘Hunting’ humans for blood is a tedious process but only really necessary if you don’t want to bother climbing to the rooftops to pick on randomly spawning packs of enemies for healing. While not really providing any kind of reward – combat provides minimal XP, and there are no money or loot systems here – rooftop fights do get entertaining later on in the game, when rival enemy factions plus Seattle’s police department turn the upper city into a messy warzone, while the locals below pretend to not hear the constant screaming and gunfire. Still, it’s combat for combat’s sake, if the main mission areas haven’t sated your bloodlust.
Back at street level, the worst part is the sidequests, which are unquestionably bad. Each of the six vampire clan representatives scattered around town offers a little bit of dialogue about themselves and their faction, a ‘romance’ option that begins with awkward flirting and ends in a fade-to-black and a couple lines of eye-rolling dialogue, plus (most crucially) the option to unlock powers from the other clans, letting you swap out any of your default four – the closest thing the game has to RPG mechanics.
The problem being that to earn those unlocks, you’ve got to do busy-work, and it is the most shameless padding I’ve seen in any kind of open world in a long time. One vampire wants you to assassinate human targets. One wants you to assassinate named but otherwise regular enemies around the map. Another offers fetch quests, and the last three want you to tediously scour the city for hard-to-spot collectibles. Without fail, they are all time-wasters offering not a single interesting encounter, and should only be engaged with if you really want a specific power from another clan.
Bloodlines 2 does have a lot of little flaws around its edges, some of which could get patched in the course of around half a year of planned DLC, some of which are unshakeably structural, but the story the game tells kept me going until the end. This is a tightly written vampire murder mystery, delivered more theatrically than cinematically, with dialogue and exposition often happening with a handful of characters trading verbal blows against one of The Chinese Room’s exquisitely dressed backdrops. A few red herrings that feel like dropped story threads from a more ambitious iteration of the game aside, it builds up the layers of intrigue nicely, and almost all the cast (a couple dozen vampires and their minions) are just the right balance of shifty and flamboyant enough to keep you guessing at motivations, until the revelation-heavy final act.
Funnily enough, two of the biggest players in the story – the player character and Ryong Choi, the newly-appointed ruler of the city’s vampire population – are the blandest. The latter being a by-the-books corporate type as stiff as her pant suit, and the former’s motivations being yours to shape, within limits. Forcibly assigned the role of Seattle’s vampire ‘sheriff’ not long into the story, whether Phyre is working for personal gain, a desire to keep vampire society on the down-low, or benevolence to man and bloodsucker alike is up for you to choose.
But it’s Fabien that steals the show. Even when playing as Phyre, he’s a cheerful, advising voice in your head that gives everything a bit more colour, and better still when you’re playing as him during those lengthy flashback sections. He’s a goofy 1920s gumshoe archetype that just happens to be a vampire, not so much hunting as accepting blood donations from a handful of contacts around town, fueling his ability to have sassy pieces of evidence back-talk him, or to interview suspects magically disguised as a random person that the interviewee knows, leaving you to navigate dialogue trees carefully to figure out who he’s even playing the role of. His presence turns Bloodlines 2 into a buddy cop drama with vampires. Phyre’s the good/bad/murderous straight man/woman (depending on how you play them) and Fabien’s the funny one. And it mostly works.
But is ‘mostly’ good enough to justify that steep price tag? The overall problem here is that in a year packed with absolutely amazing games of all shapes and sizes, Bloodlines 2 is merely okay. An entertaining mid-budget way to pass a few evenings in a familiar setting. With the credits rolling after around 22 hours, including some skippable sidequests, I can’t deny that I enjoyed most of my time with it, but not enough to have me replaying it any time soon.
Not that there’s much reason to, either. A cursory attempt to yank the story off the rails by picking every antisocial, confrontational dialogue option resulted in the plot following the exact same trajectory, with somewhat snippier interactions with the cast and a few new lines of incidental dialogue based on clan choice. Being an elder vampire means that people will put up with a LOT of your bullshit, it seems. Aside from some Fallout-esque epilogue slides based on your few choices, there’s not much you can do to steer the story. Not an inherent flaw if you’re willing to judge this game on its own terms, but a final nail in the coffin for those hoping Troika’s legacy lives on through this game.