For two decades, fans of the original from Troika Games have been waiting for a sequel and building expectations that no modern studio could meet. And considering the long and convoluted development history, the change of teams, and the modest budget, one wants to say – it's not a disaster, and thank you for that. But if you put aside the high expectations and don't cling to the subtitle, we have before us, if not a great, then certainly not a bad adventure in one of the most enchanting settings of the "World of Darkness."
Sleepless in Seattle
The differences from the original game meet us literally from the doorstep. Instead of a newborn vampire, we find ourselves in the shoes of an ancient Elder nicknamed the Nomad, who wakes up after a century of torpor, a magical sleep, and finds himself on the snowy streets of Seattle shortly before Christmas 2024. After spotting the name on an advertising poster, he takes a new name – Phyre.
Our hero is almost four hundred years old, and in the Bloodlines universe, this age means a low blood generation. By the standards of vampire society, we are the elite, a predator at the top of the food chain, with whom even modern vampire princes are forced to reckon.
However, a hundred years of sleep is a dubious pleasure even for an immortal. Waking up, the Nomad finds a mysterious magical mark on his hand, limiting his abilities, and hears a strange voice in his head. It introduces itself as Fabian, a vampire from the Malkavian clan, who until recently served as a police detective, but is now dead. It so happened that both have memories like a sieve, so the involuntary allies are forced to unravel the chain of events that led them to their current state.
Every city needs a sheriff
Introducing himself to the local bigwigs, Phyre – largely thanks to his legendary status – quickly gets the position of sheriff. This title opens new doors for him and gives him more ways to get to the truth. Formally, he is subordinate to the vampire prince of Seattle and carries out his orders, but such a powerful figure can afford a little more than an ordinary follower of the Camarilla.
Meanwhile, their own "game of thrones" is boiling in the upper echelons of power: shortly before our awakening, someone took the head off the former prince, the new one barely managed to gain a foothold on the throne, and a third force rules the city from the shadows. And all this is just one thread in the bloody tangle of local intrigues.
On his way, Phyre meets a dozen colorful characters, each of whom represents his clan of the "vampire masquerade." This gives them recognizable features and habits, but does not reduce the characters to a template: each has his own motivation – obvious, hidden, or deliberately false. Thanks to this, The Chinese Room manages to avoid typicality and fill the world with heroes with a double, and sometimes triple bottom. All this sounds in the spirit of the original, I note, but the main difference lies not in what they are, but in how exactly we interact with them.
I think you already guess what we are talking about. Bloodlines 2 is not a role-playing game in the usual sense, but a linear action game with light role-playing elements. Here you can choose lines in dialogues, but, like the choice of clan, this mainly affects the tone of the conversation and the hidden level of relations with factions, while the real impact on events remains minimal. There are, of course, decisions that determine the fate of individual characters, but their consequences catch up with the player only in the animated epilogue – after the finale.
Without spoilers – perhaps this is all that is worth saying about the plot. I will note only one thing: I do not consider linearity a disadvantage. I knew what to expect from Bloodlines 2, and I was not disappointed. Moreover, the main plot seemed to me much more complete and fascinating than in the original – and I say this with the confidence of a person who completed the first part just a few days before the release of the sequel.
In many ways, this is due to the two protagonists: thanks to them, the authors built the narrative in an unusual way – through two perspectives and three timelines, gradually intertwined into a single canvas.
At night, when Phyre is awake, you explore Seattle in 2024, immerse yourself in the political intrigues and social conflicts of the "masquerade", tear off heads and tear out the hearts of the unwanted, step by step approaching the unraveling of the conspiracy behind your awakening.
But even vampires need a daytime sleep. When the Elder falls into hibernation, Fabian comes to the fore. At these moments, the action is transferred to a few days in the past – before the detective ended up in Phyre's head – and you investigate a series of brutal murders committed by a certain maniac. Similar crimes have happened before, back in the "roaring twenties", and you will also have to live through these short flashbacks.
Detective method
The gameplay for Fabian is a classic noir detective with a touch of vampirism, made in the best traditions of "walking simulators" – a genre well known to The Chinese Room. Therefore, we can safely say: from the point of view of narration and atmosphere, this part is worked out perfectly.
Fabian is a representative of the Malkavian clan, whose vampire curse is easiest to describe in one word – madness. It allows him not only to manipulate people, penetrate their minds and cloud their minds, but also to interrogate inanimate objects. This, in fact, is what you will have to do throughout all the episodes where we control Fabian. He explores crime scenes, wanders through the neon-dark streets of Seattle, talks to suspects – and with things that "remember" much more than you might expect.
Sometimes it's a frightened phone, sometimes it's a girl who is sure that she has become a vampire, but in fact turned out to be a victim of deception. And sometimes your interlocutor becomes a lustful filing cabinet with documents, which is "dusty below" and which reproachfully notes that you use it, but never stay for tea.
Here the scriptwriters and the voice actor of Fabian worked hard. This detective line feels like a fusion of the Jack the Ripper case investigation with the internal monologues of a hero resembling a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Max Payne. Fabian comments on his own "hallucinations", talks to objects and turns each dialogue into a miniature performance full of irony, black humor and noir cynicism.
Dialogues bring special pleasure. Yes, the staging is far from the level of AAA blockbusters: the animations of NPCs are sometimes clumsy and shamelessly repeated even among key characters. But Bloodlines 2 is perfectly localized into Russian (strange names are not a mistake, they are the same in the original), and the lines have retained the signature sarcasm and poisonous irony of the original. It is really interesting to watch vampire skirmishes: they know how to surprise, intrigue, amuse and at the same time do not lose seriousness.
The original Bloodlines captured the feeling of belonging to a special community – not heroes in masks and not knights in shining armor, but vicious night predators balancing on the verge of the permissible and the forbidden, between animal and human. And although Bloodlines 2 is more linear and devoid of deep role-playing, it achieves the same effect – just by other means. Among them is the enchanting atmosphere of the night, snowy Seattle and battles, which, although not immediately, allow you to feel like a real night predator.
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Pre-New Year's Seattle turned out to be an ideal place for a vampire drama. The winter metropolis, drowning in neon and covered with snow, turns this adventure not only into an interesting, but also into a truly mesmerizing sight. The developers certainly cannot be blamed for the lack of style. But it is worth taking a closer look at the textures, models of passers-by and other details – and the charm inevitably fades. Not all streets of the already modest-sized Seattle are worked out equally: somewhere you can feel the soul and attention to detail, and somewhere everything is done in a hurry, as if "carelessly."
What I noticed in the preview has been fully confirmed: the city is really all scripted and as if "nailed down." It is beautiful, but essentially dead. In Bloodlines 2, the seams of a limited budget stick out everywhere, and technically the game is far from perfect. This is manifested in unstable optimization, and in collisions of objects, when enemies fly through walls with enviable regularity. A couple of times I myself ended up inside houses that have no entrance. Nevertheless, I did not encounter any serious technical problems that could spoil the passage.
Art design, on the contrary, pulls out a lot. The contrast of warm neon and cold winter, white snow and scarlet blood creates mesmerizing images and fills the world with a special mystical atmosphere.
Despite the conditionality of the environment, it is pleasant to move around the city. Phyre deftly climbs walls, clings to balconies and pipes, soars between roofs and moves with inhuman speed. Running on the roofs is unexpectedly fun: flying over the streets and watching the neon flicker below, you feel the same lightness and excitement as in Spider-Man. Yes, the "hook" system is not always convenient, but Seattle is compact enough, and after a couple of hours these streets seem like home.
At some point, I caught myself thinking that I just like to travel around the city. This feeling reminded me of Spider-Man: Miles Morales – when during the New Year holidays I launched the game only to fly over the festive winter New York. Now Bloodlines 2 will probably be added to this tradition, since Seattle at Christmas is too good for night walks.
However, it was the atmosphere of the city that became the main reason why I did side quests at all. After all, what Bloodlines 2 definitely does not offer is interesting content outside the main plot.
Each new night you are given several monotonous tasks from three characters – most often these are killing targets or delivering parcels. In addition, there are also collectible missions: searching for crosses, destroying graffiti and surveillance cameras. I almost completely completed the first ones in passing, and I never got to the last ones – they appear in the second half of the game, and there is no motivation to do this on purpose. "Orders" for murder and delivery are worth fulfilling only for the sake of opening additional abilities.
Deadly aesthetics
The combat system, which many feared – and not without reason, remembering the "Vietnamese flashbacks" from the first Bloodlines and the reputation of The Chinese Room as the authors of "walking simulators" – turned out to be surprisingly fascinating, albeit not without reservations.
It is based on first-person battles, combining elements of beat 'em up and immersive action. They easily recognize the features of Dying Light, Dishonored (which, it seems, only the lazy did not remember) and Ghostwire: Tokyo. The mechanics combine classic melee combat with dodges and parrying, implemented according to the principle of "mikiri" from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, when you need to make a dash towards the attack.
The system is complemented by the magical abilities of vampire clans. At the beginning of the game, we are asked to choose one of six: Brujah, Banu Haqim, Tremere, Ventrue, Toreador or Lasombra. Each offers its own set of abilities that determine the style of combat.
Brujah, as it should be, is a living embodiment of rage with powerful power attacks. Banu Haqim prefer to act from the shadows, becoming invisible and cutting off heads with one movement. Tremere are able to boil the blood of the enemy and turn him into a living bomb suffering in agony, and Toreadors use their charm to lure opponents to their side.
However, our hero is an ancient Elder, and therefore is not limited by the framework of the chosen clan. You can fully pump the branch of one clan in just three hours of the game, after which you can start creating the ultimate build, opening the disciplines of others.
This is where the completion of side quests comes in handy: this is the only way to get additional skill points and blood points, which can also be obtained by "drinking" people with different temperaments – choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic.
I initially chose the Lasombra clan – masters of shadows, capable of teleporting behind opponents, controlling the battlefield and dragging enemies into the shadow dimension. It would seem that this is an ideal set for stealth passage. But in practice, constant intimidation and separation of targets did not suit me very well. But the ability of the Ventrue to calm opponents and full invisibility from the Banu Haqim branch turned out to be much more useful for the stealth build.
Although it is worth noting that there is no serious variability in clearing locations here either. The local Seattle is not Danuoll, which can be analyzed in lectures on level design, therefore, with rare exceptions, the path from point A to point B is almost always the same. By "stealth passage" I mean not a hidden exploration of levels, but a style of combat in which most enemies in a closed arena die even before they know about your presence.
The real cherry on the cake was the passive ability of the Tremere, which accelerates the restoration of blood points – a resource necessary for the use of vampire skills. This is another unobvious plus of unlocking other people's disciplines.
Only four abilities can be active at the same time, so if you are satisfied with the clan's set, you can do without borrowing. But, having learned all the skills of a particular clan, you open its passive – and it already works constantly.
Theoretically, you can collect them all, although there is no special point in this. But the ability of the Tremere is too strong to pass by: it was she who allowed my assembly to fully unfold and easily deal with enemies alone, even in the middle of a crowd, juggling skills, where the use of one ability restores another – and so on in a circle.
Fights and the intelligence of opponents do not pretend to be deep, but they have their own special aesthetics and kineticism. They give a sense of power, superiority and encourage a creative approach to battles. However, this does not always work. In the second half of the game, you often have to deal with inanimate, bloodless enemies, from which you can not "feed".
These segments seem superfluous and boring, because it is impossible to use abilities, and tiring, because there are too many enemies, and the clashes themselves occur in cramped corridors and stuffy sewers. Which, in its own way, is funny – because almost the same thing can be said about the first Bloodlines.
Another strange decision can be called the vulnerability of the character during the "drinking" of the enemy. The vampire "bite" not only restores abilities, but also heals, but on high difficulty it is easy to lose more health than to return during the animation, or even die, going to the checkpoint. This is probably the most frequent cause of my deaths for the entire passage – but you learn to cope with this when you begin to better understand how to create chaos in battle, and then you learn to control it.
And then, when you tear out the beating heart of an enemy thug once again, the realization comes: let this not be the game that fans dreamed of, let it be far from ideal, but inside it there is still heart and passion. Once in Max Payne there was a thought: "The fear of death makes us control our emotions. But without passion, you are already dead." Bloodlines 2 reminded me that the franchise is still alive. Let the "World of Darkness" has changed – it is still beautiful in its own way.
Diagnosis
As you know, you can endlessly do three things: list what Bloodlines 2 lacks compared to the original, lament about the lost depth of the role-playing system and dream about the ideal game that would be made by "the right people" with unlimited budget and technology. But the reality is that in the modern industry I simply do not see a studio capable of translating these fan fantasies into reality.
The Chinese Room never promised to create an RPG at the level of the original from Troika Games, but even without these promises, the team jumped above their heads and their previous games – and they should be praised for this. Bloodlines 2 is a well-written linear detective story that does not try to seem deeper than it is, but confidently leads forward, weaving three timelines into a single mosaic.
There is a mesmerizing atmosphere of night Seattle, bright characters, witty dialogues and a chaotic, but spectacular, and most importantly creative combat system. And this is enough to charm the player and give another bloody night in the "World of Darkness."
After all the vicissitudes of development, the project could have turned into a disaster, but it turned out to be strong, honest and charming in its own way. And then – who knows? The sales of the game, apparently, are good, which means that the future of the franchise has become less vague. And this alone is probably enough to look ahead with hope.
