Playing a few hours of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has put a lot of my worries to rest

As a former teenage goth and Anne Rice fanatic (dog collar, black nail polish, absurd prosthetic vampire fangs) who still pines for the days when Troika was designing RPGs, my excitement levels following the initial Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 announcement were off the chart. But that was six years ago, and since then it's faced a cavalcade of delays, a hiatus and a change in developer. It's been such a mess that publisher Paradox never wants to make another RPG again.

So I was unsure of what to expect when I visited The Chinese Room for the very first Bloodlines 2 hands-on. I went in a sceptic. Now, though? I'm cautiously on my way to becoming a convert. After playing through the prologue twice and getting to muck around with a bunch of end-game ability combos, the thing that's stuck with me the most is how powerful I felt, and how much the game delights in leaning into the vampire power fantasy.

It's a very different experience from Redemption and Bloodlines 1, both of which put you in the blood-soaked boots of a fledgling vamp, clueless and weak. Phyre (also known as the Nomad, but neither is their true name) is not a baby. They are an Elder. A 400-year-old vampire celebrity, awoken a century after abruptly vanishing. As an Elder they have access to not just the powers of their clan, but those of the other clans too, and are much stronger and more resilient than a newborn undead monster. In classic videogame form, however, they've been sapped of this strength, yet they remain a heavy-hitter.

After I wake up in an abandoned Seattle building, I immediately murder a security guard—a violent statement of intent. After that, I'm in tutorial mode, accompanied by the voice in my head: former vampire PI, Fabien. Why is he in my head? Well, that's one of several mysteries that make up this surprisingly investigation-focused RPG. The tutorial is stealth-heavy and pretty standard, but once I'm out of the derelict building, things really pick up. Now I can flex my vampiric muscles.

You might roll your eyes at the whole ancient vampire sapped off all their power conceit, but The Chinese Room has gone to great lengths to ensure that you still feel like a supernatural apex predator—to a degree not even remotely attempted by the previous VTM games. So while you'll still need to go through the levelling process and deal with the city's other important vampires before you have access to all the clan-specific powers, you still have a lot of toys to play with from the get-go.

Blue blood

Right away you've got supernatural strength, speed and agility; you can scramble up buildings in the blink of an eye, glide for long distances, and pull off air-dashes. Even better: you've got unlimited telekinesis. And you better believe the team has littered the game with detritus that can be weaponised.

Fights are a trip. After last year's big gameplay reveal, I was pretty critical of how it looked. As a viewer, it's easy to brush it all off as jerky and messy. When you're in control, though, it all comes together. That messiness becomes gleeful controlled chaos as you juggle bodies, rip out throats and use your vampiric powers to make mortals and vamps alike explode in a shower of blood. And that jerkiness reveals itself to be the snappy, rhythmic flow of battle, letting you effortlessly bounce between victims, chaining powers and kills for maximum carnage.

After a couple of hours, I realised what it reminded me of: watching a turn-based game being fast-forwarded. This is even more evident if you choose to use your supernatural speed to slow down time and make tactical choices. To be clear, this is a 100% real-time game, but the rhythm definitely has turn-based vibes, as you slide from target to target, following the plan of attack that you settled on when you were spying on your prey from the rooftops. I'm also pleased to say that Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja's claim that "people who have seen it talk about Dishonored" is not an idle boast. It really does feel like Dishonored.

The stealth, the supernatural mobility, the wild flexibility of your powers—Arkane would absolutely approve. On their own, each power is impressive and usually comes with extra situational utility. I was playing as a Tremere in my first run—in classic RPG parlance, think mage. These undead alchemists stole the gift/curse of vampirism through diabolical alchemy and in Bloodlines 2 are highly mobile, ranged attackers. It's worth noting that your choice of clan is made early but not straight away, letting you first settle on some of your backstory and get to grips with the World of Darkness first. As a Tremere, my first power was a doozy: effectively turning my target into a blood bomb. And yes, it's a blast.

You prime your target, which takes a few seconds, and when they take damage they go kaboom. If they're in a crowd of enemies, you're going to rack up a nice body count. And you can be very, very sneaky. If you've progressed to the point where you've unlocked powers from other clans, you can pair this with the Ventrue's Possession power, temporarily taking control of an enemy, walking them into the centre of a group, and then setting off the bomb.

There are so many combos that will leave you malevolently giddy, cackling away as you watch your victims succumb to your powers and clever plans. Here's a good one: you can use the Ventrue's Mass Manipulation power to put everyone in your gaze under your sway. This subdues them, but also primes them for any powers from the Dominate discipline. Taunt, one of the Brujah clan's tricks, is one such power, and as well as making enemies attack you, it also forces them to drop their weapons. Maybe one of those weapons is a gun. And maybe you then use telekinesis to lift that gun up into the air and start firing into the charging horde. And maybe you will have a very good time.

Power up

You don't need to combine different clans' powers to have fun, though. I became rather partial to using the Ventrue's Mass Manipulation with its Terminal Decree power. Basically, you just command a bunch of people to break their own necks. It's a good way to clear out a room.

Now, you won't be able to do most of these things in the prologue. Creative director Alex Skidmore cheated a wee bit to let me access these abilities long before I was meant to. But even when I was limited to what the prologue offers, I was genuinely impressed by how dangerous Bloodlines 2 makes you feel.

With just your basic attack, first power, and telekinesis, you're a proper monster. During the prologue, I only actually fought one other vampire, though. The rest were humans and ghouls. And when other vamps are involved, things get a lot more tricky thanks to their powers and their substantial health pool. My one undead foe was a Brujah berserker wielding a massive hammer, and juggling both him and his ghoul minions together piled on the pressure. That said, I still turned him into a bloody smear.

What's surprising is how often you can actually use your powers. See, they all have a blood cost. So Blood Curse (the aforementioned blood bomb power) costs three blood points. Which means you have to feed three times to recharge it. You might assume this means you can only use it sparingly, but that's not really the case. This is because you can perform combat feeds on weakened enemies, and thanks to the pace of the fights you can effectively chain these together and get up to full power again in seconds. The feeding is brisk, too, though you are vulnerable while you're chowing down.

Bloodlines 2 has been referred to as an action-RPG a lot, but that can mean a lot of different things. We're not dealing with a Path of Exile or Elden Ring here. The action is violent, visceral (one of the few times when this is actually an appropriate adjective) and frequent, but it's not all Bloodlines 2 is. It's also a labyrinthine mystery and a Machivellian tug of war.

Phyre wakes up to a city in shambles. Seattle has been ruled by the Camarilla—a deeply conservative faction of rule-loving traditionalists—forever, but the night you awaken, its grip over the city is under threat. Murders, an attempted coup, and dire portents—it's a bad time to be a supporter of the status quo. The city has been engulfed in snow, rather than its usual rain; the rebellious Anarch faction is making big (and bloody) moves; and the number of thin-bloods, who are treated abysmally by the Camarilla on account of their weak blood, is growing.

And into this tumult walks a powerful Elder and agent of change. Naturally, vampire society is curious and very cautious. Phyre's goal is to find out why they've been in a torpor for a century, who weakened them, and why they have another vampire's voice in their head. But to do that they have to play nice with the vampires of Seattle, who all have their own complicated agendas.

Dinner conversation

This means that there's as much chatting as there is violence, and the conversations are just as dangerous. How these chats play out is evocative of Telltale's dialogue system, but a bit more complex. Phyre's backstory—elements of which you get to pick, but not straight away and not all at once, making them as much a mystery to the player as they are to Seattle's denizens—clan and carefully chosen words all carry a lot of weight.

What makes conversation such a tightrope walk is how elaborate the reputation system is, and how it's all tied to personal relationships and individual points of view. Most RPGs treat reputation as this global resource, like Fallout's karma system. Individuals and groups might react differently to you, but they're all basing this on the same information. In Bloodlines 2, however, you have a discrete relationship with everyone, and one response can be taken in a variety of different ways depending on how you've acted with that person previously.

So if you've been rude and brash in your dealings with a specific character, and then say something friendly and sincere, they will assume you're being sarcastic and will react accordingly. But if you've always been nice to them, they'll take it at face value. This way, you're not really able to game the system or become a social chameleon: you can't just say what you think everyone wants to hear.

Bloodlines 2 also eschews the RPG tradition of exhausting every dialogue option, and you never know what option is going to have an impact. For instance, most RPGs fill your conversations with questions that flesh out your knowledge of the world, and they are typically low stakes topics of conversation. In Bloodlines 2, these questions are all part of this elaborate diplomatic dance and are just as critical to building a relationship as the more meaty options.

Take, for instance, my first chat with Lou Graham, Seattle's big mover and shaker. Lou is actually a real historical figure, but while in life she was a brothel owner, in death she is a Ventrue vamp and former Prince of Seattle. She gave up her throne, but then she installed her own undead progeny on the big seat, so she remains extremely influential. In my Tremere playthrough, I mostly just pissed her off.

We got off on the wrong foot initially because of my clan. Most vamps don't like the Tremere because they stole their power and, even for vampires, can be a bit creepy. So Lou litters our conversation with barbs, suggesting that I smell bad, need a bath and that the Tremere are a bunch of loser nerds. She is every bit the arrogant, haughty Ventrue—a clan that sees itself as vampire society's natural leaders. But by asking her about herself, playing into her narcissism, I briefly manage to get on her good side. Until I ask some more questions—awkward questions—and irritate her all over again.

Friends in low places

In my second playthrough, armed with more knowledge, things go better. Because I picked Ventrue this time, we're on more even footing. There's mutual respect. She compliments me rather than spitting venom, and I manage to avoid stepping on any landmines this time. Your choice of clan also opens up new opportunities during dialogue scenes, revealing new information or just helping you develop the relationship.

How characters react to you also goes well beyond them liking or not liking what you're saying. When I met a fellow Tremere, a scientist, I went down the flirty route. This made her a bit embarrassed, but she also enjoyed it, and her giggliness gave me an advantage in the conversation. The tactic worked because it was clear she was a Nomad fangirl, but it would have been a mistake if I'd tried the same thing with Lou—which is a shame, because I'm already a big Lou fan.

This becomes a bit more tricky to juggle when you're chatting to multiple people. When I flirted with my new pal in front of two other vampires, she reacted positively again, but her boss was annoyed, and the third vampire, a mischievous Nosferatu, found her irritation amusing. That one seemingly throwaway bit of flirting subtly changed my relationship with three characters.

The dialogue and relationship systems all elegantly reinforce the fact that Bloodlines 2 is an investigative kind of RPG—something it shares with my all-time fave, Disco Elysium. Imagine Raymond Chandler spliced with Anne Rice and you're getting it.

So these chats are puzzles, and in a lot of cases the game subtly fed me information about my conversation companions before I met them. Ahead of my chat with Lou, for instance, Fabien dropped some hints about her, and I witnessed a flashback showing me a meeting he had with her. And before I met my Tremere fangirl, Lou spat out some insults that gave me a rough idea of what to expect. The more I chatted to the vamps of Seattle, the more I learned about their allies and enemies—information I could squirrel away and exploit later.

At times, I felt a wee bit like an undead Sherlock Holmes, identifying characteristics and then using them to adapt. The Chinese Room has made it pretty clear what clan a vamp belongs to right out the gate from their bearing and style—the fine clothes and stuck-up attitude is classic Ventrue, weird goths and bookworms are probably going to be Tremere, and anyone dressed like they're at a fashion show or hosting a gallery opening is almost certainly a Toreador. The clans aren't treated like monoliths, but each member has something that identifies them, and that is incredibly helpful when it comes time to make a deal with them.

My dealings with mortals were more food-based. While you can feed on whoever you want (get caught doing anything vampy out in the open, though, and you'll get hunted by the cops or, worse, another vampire, who'll put a stake through your heart for breaking the Masquerade), there's also a sort of mini-game surrounding "blood resonance". Someone who's angry, or melancholy or turned on has a different blood resonance, and to unlock the powers of other clans you'll need to gather these resonances by encouraging these emotions before dinner time.

Dress to impress

This works a bit like your conversations with vampires in that humans will react differently based on who they are and how they perceive you. Talk to a sex worker while looking rough and they'll tell you to go away. If you're well-dressed they might be more interested. But if you're wearing something a bit sexy, they might assume you're another sex worker and chase you off.

The world doesn't always react like you'd expect, either. I saw a woman getting into a fight with an ATM, and when I approached her she turned her anger on me. I tried to then draw her into an alley where I could feed, but a cop noticed her going nuts on me and—because this is America—opened fire, scattering all of my potential meals. The Chinese Room emphasised that this is not a free-for-all sandbox, it's not Skyrim, but there are definitely some elements of that, particularly in its occasional immersive sim sensibilities.

Once my time was up with Bloodlines 2, I felt incredibly reassured. I'm still shocked by how good the combat felt. Powerful, tactical, delightfully over the top. And I loved exchanging barbs and pleasantries with Seattle's secret rulers. The writing is playful, the mysteries compelling, and the systems underpinning these chats are exactly what I want from an RPG.

The performances, too, are noteworthy—with Bloodlines 2's cast seemingly having a whale of a time playing outrageous predators. I particularly enjoyed Phyre, whose two voice actors do a great job of capturing this old, deadly vamp. Compared to the rest of the cast, they are pretty understated, evoking the low rumble of a big cat stalking its prey.

I do, however, hope that the finished game will polish up the animations, which in dialogue scenes especially seemed very stiff. And I really wish I'd been able to play with a mouse and keyboard. While it was a PC build, I was using a controller, and the fast-paced first-person combat was a bit trickier to get to grips with due to this.

I'm also not quite sold on the open world of Seattle yet. It looks great—condensed but exaggerated, and colourfully dark, like you're seeing the night through the eyes of a nocturnal predator—and I loved navigating it with my supernatural powers, but it also seemed a bit quiet. There were some hidden collectibles and light snacks, but the prologue didn't give me much of a chance to explore its potential opportunities, or understand why it's an open world.

Mostly, though, I just want to play again. It's impossible to judge something like Bloodlines 2 after just a few hours, but this was a fantastic introduction to what The Chinese Room's been working on, and a lot of my concerns have been put to rest (in a gaudy sarcophagus, naturally). I'm already dreaming up builds, and hoping I'll be able to turn Lou into my BFF.

The bad news is that we'll all have to wait a wee bit longer, as Bloodlines 2 will no longer be appearing during the first half of 2025. Instead, it's been pushed back again, and is now expected to launch this October. Another delay is disappointing, but releasing during the spookiest month of the year at least feels appropriate.