A decade after Bloodlines 2 was pitched to then-new Vampire: The Masquerade owner Paradox Interactive, we're finally able to sink our fangs into the undead sequel. Unfortunately absence has not made the heart grow fonder, and it's currently sitting at Mixed reviews on Steam.
The consensus among the user reviews, even the positive ones, is that Bloodlines 2 doesn't really earn the name, and that it has a surprising dearth of RPG systems for something that calls itself an RPG.
"It is a good VtM game, but it is not a Bloodlines game," one positive review reads. "Paradox could have saved them a ton of outrage by marketing it differently." But they're not all so balanced. "Nothing about this game is what you sold us 6 years [ago]," reads a less favourable review, "and you don't deserve to be let off the hook for that."
I'm not remotely surprised by the response so far. I had a good time skulking through the streets of blizzard-battered Seattle, giving it a respectable 78 in my Bloodlines 2 review, but the most common criticisms are the same ones I had.
It's a narrative-driven mystery, an investigative adventure game, masquerading as an RPG with only the thinnest RPG systems. And it probably shouldn't be called Bloodlines. I don't think sequels always need to hew closely to the original brief, but there's just so little of what made Bloodlines a cult classic evident in Bloodlines 2.
This is all made worse by the fact that the shelved first attempt to make a sequel, Hardsuit Labs' version, actually did seem to have a bit more connective tissue. It was certainly more RPG-like. But the folk wishing that version had been given more of a chance are kidding themselves.
I got to see a hands-off just before the big delay in 2020, and it was not a game I was keen to play. It may have been more of a systemic RPG, but that doesn't necessarily translate to a good game. And folks weren't all that convinced at the time, either, so there's some revisionist history going on.
What I think Bloodlines 2 does actually succeed in is showing, once again, that it's really fun to embody a character in the World of Darkness universe. Outside of Bloodlines 2, we've just got Swansong and some visual novels, and I crave more. If we do get more, though, Paradox ain't interested in being involved again.
"It is not in our strategic direction to make this kind of game," deputy CEO Mattias Lilja told me in an interview last year. "So if Bloodlines 2, God willing, is successful, Bloodlines 3 [will be] done by someone else, on the licence from us. I would say it's the sort of strategic way this would work. So it's still an outlier from what we're supposed to do, we don't know that stuff, so we should probably let other people do it."
Given how cursed Bloodlines is, though, I'm not sure what developer and publisher would be brave enough to pick it up a third time. The original sold poorly, was supremely broken, and Troika never made another game again, shutting down a mere two months later. After Bloodlines 2 was initially shelved, Hardsuit Labs faced redundancies, and now it's a support studio. I would not want to play with this grenade.
