Reviews aren't looking very promising...
www.metacritic.com
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Reviews
Sired in an act of vampire terrorism, your existence ignites the war for Seattle's blood trade. Enter uneasy alliances with the creatures who control the city and uncover the sprawling conspiracy which plunged Seattle into a bloody civil war between powerful vampire factions. Feed Your Power...
www.metacritic.com
GodisanAtheist
Diamond Member
- Nov 16, 2006
- 8,512
- 9,944
- 136
Reviews aren't looking very promising...
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Reviews
Sired in an act of vampire terrorism, your existence ignites the war for Seattle's blood trade. Enter uneasy alliances with the creatures who control the city and uncover the sprawling conspiracy which plunged Seattle into a bloody civil war between powerful vampire factions. Feed Your Power...
-Honestly a Meta of 65 is so much better than I was expecting, this game just went up from a $5 pick-up to a $10 pick-up on that bit of info alone.
GodisanAtheist
Diamond Member
- Nov 16, 2006
- 8,512
- 9,944
- 136
- It was starting to verge into Duke Nukem Forever territory, so exceeding those expectations is already a win.
DigDog
Lifer
- Jun 3, 2011
- 14,809
- 3,089
- 136
i've just started playing this, it looks .. okay. haen't gotten in the story yet, but likely will today.
GodisanAtheist
Diamond Member
- Nov 16, 2006
- 8,512
- 9,944
- 136
I can't see how it can be anything other than warmed over crap but I am ready and willing to be surprised.
DigDog
Lifer
- Jun 3, 2011
- 14,809
- 3,089
- 136
well, it's time for a review.
i did not like it.
I will need to reference both Redemption, and the P&P game, to explain why.
Bloodlines 2 is a first person melee combat game; you walk around the city of Seattle where you're given a mission by the town's prince, and you get to a spot, fight a bunch of anarchs in melee, and then you repeat this until the end of the game.
You have a healthpool of .. well, there is no numbers, but approximately 3 to 5 hits, depending on how far you are in the game.
If you stun an enemy, you can feed on them (in this game feeding is immediate), which kills them and heals you fully or almost.
Enemies are quick, hit hard and fast, gank you, so you're always playing this minigame of light attacks stunlock, maybe move to dodge the other several anarchs, and when the (F) icon comes up you kill one enemy and heal - and then you repeat this for however many anarchs are in that fight. For every fight.
Think of the Doom Eternal thing where you're constantly having to replenish ammo by doing finishing moves - it's the exact same thing.
Supposedly, you're an elder. Now, elder has a very specific meaning in VTM. And this guy you're playing is no elder by any stretch of the imagination. Let's approximate that Fire (spelled Phyre in the game because lolz) is a sixth generation; by this level in VTM you can interr yourself, turn into mist, paralyze entire stadiums with awe, are undetectable, can punch through walls and throw cars, firearms cannot injure you, you can boil blood out of a vampire, summon storms of fire, and are in general untouchable by anything short of a group of vampires *also* of a very high generation.
In Redemption, you get to be, i think, 6th generation if you do everything correctly. Not a 6th generation Elder, but someone who has access to level 7 disciplines, and the same blood pool as any other 6th. During the game you do fight some truly impressive enemies, but even with those you're just unstoppable.
(generation alone only gives you blood pool and stat max, but how long you have lived determines how many attribute, skill and power points you have)
This is built into the VTM game. You cannot compete with any vampire that has certain stats or disciplines above a certain number, unless you too have the same. And progression is *extremely* slow in VTM, because VTM is a game about politics, and maybe investigation, but very rarely about combat, because due to the way the game is designed, combat tends to be either trivial or catastrophic. If your party meets an angry vampire with 4 celerity and 4 potence and you haven't got another brujah to throw at him with the same stats, it's game over for everyone still there.
During other combat specifically designed to be feasible for your party, you as a player/character combo do "spend" some resources - your blood points, and in some cases aggravated wounds or loss of humanity, and none of these things are easy to recover. They also inherently have a larger blood pool and can burn through more blood points per turn, where these points serve to activate powers (that last for the entire "scene"), buff stats, heal wounds, plus a host of other non-combat powers.
VTM is vastly different from a game like D&D. While also in D&D you have spells that run out and HP that need to be restored, these return normally with time - in VTM using a lot of blood is something that can put you out of play for a few days.
"Power" is very .. dramatic, in VTM. Each different "level" makes you exponentially stronger to the point where the previous level's challenges are now almost trivial. If you make a Dominate build for example, and you are 1 generation older than another vampire, you will pretty much always be able to fully dominate them.
VTM is also very much a social game, so you can't just go around killing other vampires, which means that opportunities to learn new powers or raise in generation are extremely rare and valuable.
It's also important to note that anarchs, thin-bloods, are essentially humans. Even a Gen 9 can rekk a horde of thinbloods because they just cannot increase their stats in any significant way, while the Gen 9 can likely kill them with a single attack - of which they may even have multiple per-round.
Now, let's be honest, the first Bloodlines wasn't this lore-accurate. But it did have a blood pool, you did need to spend blood to activate powers, and managing this resource was a key aspect of the game.
Anyway, back to B2.
There is no blood pool in B2. But then again there's no Wounds either, but rather a mishmash of the two. And you have little of it, but can always replenish it in this absurd minigame .. that doesn't even play that well. I've lost more than once to a casual encounter with some anarchs, which, meh, it's the game they wanted to design, but this sure as hell doesn't scream Elder. One may argue that there is a story element that limits the powers of Fire, some ward she has on her wrist, so maybe we can pretend we're playing as an anarch, but at the same time we're playing a story where we are a "notoriously fierce Elder".
The combat is just horrendous. I am thinking of the Far Cry games where you get a tattoo that increases your abilities as you play, and that game had a combat that was substantially better while at the same time being closer to what i would expect out of a melee combat game.
Once you're done with the combat, you got the story. Now, i cannot really judge this because, well if you like the story, you like the story. It's not a great story from the VTM lore perspective, because in VTM lore pretty much every story goes like this:
"you are in a city. this city has a Prince. the Prince keeps the law, so essentially no vampire is allowed to do anything dangerous except feeding regularly and basically staying (un-)alive. Then a dickhead vampire decides to do something bad and you and your gang try to find out what to ingratiate yourself to the Prince, so then the Prince can give you permission to kill him with Diablerie".
Because the VTM lore is all about RULES.
Vampires are a weird bunch who speak in weird languages with strange words that mean nothing to a human. The actual lore of the vampire world is of critical importance to every vampire, because their lives all rotate around Gehenna, the Masquerade, learning the secrets of Caine, all the while being bound by extremely strict rules with the penalty of death for pretty much every infraction.
So, the gay Nosferatu is .. well, it's .. it's weird, ok? I'm not saying it's an implausible character, but it's .. really edgy. Almost to the point where i imagined it was a front, because if you're an old 8th Gen Nosferatu you're generally a much more dangerous adversary than a comic relief.
If you think of D&D and you imagine a warrior, he's got his attack that goes up with his level and with how good his magical sword is, he's got his hit points plus whatever hitpoints the cleric can heal every day, and he's got his healing potions, which are single-use but are generally restocked during dungeon crawls.
The equivalent VTM character has their attack through their strenght, dexterity, plus their potence, celerity, fortitude, or other combat ability; they have powers of invisibility through Obfuscate and Protean. They have mind control, they can see the unseen via Auspex detecting lies, invisibility, past history, Diablerie.
They can send rats to scout a city. They have a vast information network where power is bought and sold.
They have their mundane skills, such as using Guns. They have wealth that can be used to assemble small armies.
They have their Herd, which determines how many Blood Points they get every night. They have their heaven, their ghouls, and their children.
All of these things you need to buy with points as you create your character. Having access to a bunch of groupies that can supply you with several blood points every night is no less useful than having another dot in a discipline or a skill.
Rather than just being an adenturer that goes into a dungeon with a backpack, "fighting" as a vampire is closer to a business management game.
When you create a new character in VTM, you have the option of being anywhere between 8th and 13th generation.
If you go for the best you can be, 8th generation, you will have to spend ALL your points into generation. You will be an extremely basic and incapable vampire for a very long time. And your sire OWNS YOU. You have been blessed by the choice to make you an immortal, and here is a pile of books where everything is a rule and if you break a single one we will kill you. Oh and everyone wants to scapegoat you for their own interests.
If you go with 13th generation, you are a NOBODY. You may have still a lot of ties to your living life, you may have some modern skills, maybe good stats, but you are very far from any kind of political power, you have practically no useful disciplines, and also funny thing, your sire owns you, just not as strictly because they are a shitty 12th gen that can barely do anything vampiric.
Fun fact: around 14th-15th generation, vampires start to fail when trying to embrace a mortal, i.e. they cannot make new vampires.
Climbing up the political ladder is a very difficult affair in any lore-accurate VTM product.
I don't think the guys from The Chinese Room knew any of this stuff. I don't think they have ever played a single game of P&P VTM. There is a scene where a nobody NPC says "im dying i want to become a vampire" and you're just given the choices "kill her" or "make her into a vampire".
Siring children without permission is punished by death. NO vampire would ever do this outside of an anarch, no vampire would do this if they were expressly working for the Prince, no vampire would f* do this for a generic human that means nothing to them. Only thinbloods, and only in a specific game setting, do this stuff. The first bloodlines literally starts with your sire being killed for having made you !
So B2 just starts with this weird lore-unfriendly elder who wakes from torpor with nothing, but isn't actually an elder, so .. you're playing a 13th Gen basically. And you're just constantly in combat, something that very few vampires would find suitable. And the story is .. it would be already average if it were not that it uses the same exact schtik as Cyberpunk - you have a Keanu Reeves in your brain.
Except that he's not Keanu Reeves, he's the gumshoe from Fallout. He's Nick Valentine - the robot who thinks he is a P.I.
Nick decided to wake you from torpor, and you diablerized him. And now he's stuck in your head, so you two can find out why he did it.
And there's substantial parts of the game where you play as this guy .. and he's also supposed, SUPPOSED to be a Malkavian. Maybe the part of the instructions where it says MALKAVIANS ARE COMPLETELY INSANE got lost as it was being sent to the developers. Or that Nosferatu are repulsive to other vampires, and completely horrific to humans.
.. idk, this Fire guy is such a non-VTM character. You were not much of a VTM character in B1 either, but that guy had just been sired - you were exactly 0 days old when you start the game. At least the dialogue around you matched this, which the dialogue in B2 matches what should be an actually powerful elder, which you're totally not.
So ..
If you want to hear the story of this VTM elder vampire that through some weird circumstance lost every aspect of being a VTM vampire, and play a game that ends *exactly* the moment that you finally get rid of this condition of being a not-a-VTM-vampire, then this game is 100% for you.
For me, it didn't do it. I got about six hours in, then watched a playthrough.
would not recommend.
5/10
i did not like it.
I will need to reference both Redemption, and the P&P game, to explain why.
Bloodlines 2 is a first person melee combat game; you walk around the city of Seattle where you're given a mission by the town's prince, and you get to a spot, fight a bunch of anarchs in melee, and then you repeat this until the end of the game.
You have a healthpool of .. well, there is no numbers, but approximately 3 to 5 hits, depending on how far you are in the game.
If you stun an enemy, you can feed on them (in this game feeding is immediate), which kills them and heals you fully or almost.
Enemies are quick, hit hard and fast, gank you, so you're always playing this minigame of light attacks stunlock, maybe move to dodge the other several anarchs, and when the (F) icon comes up you kill one enemy and heal - and then you repeat this for however many anarchs are in that fight. For every fight.
Think of the Doom Eternal thing where you're constantly having to replenish ammo by doing finishing moves - it's the exact same thing.
Supposedly, you're an elder. Now, elder has a very specific meaning in VTM. And this guy you're playing is no elder by any stretch of the imagination. Let's approximate that Fire (spelled Phyre in the game because lolz) is a sixth generation; by this level in VTM you can interr yourself, turn into mist, paralyze entire stadiums with awe, are undetectable, can punch through walls and throw cars, firearms cannot injure you, you can boil blood out of a vampire, summon storms of fire, and are in general untouchable by anything short of a group of vampires *also* of a very high generation.
In Redemption, you get to be, i think, 6th generation if you do everything correctly. Not a 6th generation Elder, but someone who has access to level 7 disciplines, and the same blood pool as any other 6th. During the game you do fight some truly impressive enemies, but even with those you're just unstoppable.
(generation alone only gives you blood pool and stat max, but how long you have lived determines how many attribute, skill and power points you have)
This is built into the VTM game. You cannot compete with any vampire that has certain stats or disciplines above a certain number, unless you too have the same. And progression is *extremely* slow in VTM, because VTM is a game about politics, and maybe investigation, but very rarely about combat, because due to the way the game is designed, combat tends to be either trivial or catastrophic. If your party meets an angry vampire with 4 celerity and 4 potence and you haven't got another brujah to throw at him with the same stats, it's game over for everyone still there.
During other combat specifically designed to be feasible for your party, you as a player/character combo do "spend" some resources - your blood points, and in some cases aggravated wounds or loss of humanity, and none of these things are easy to recover. They also inherently have a larger blood pool and can burn through more blood points per turn, where these points serve to activate powers (that last for the entire "scene"), buff stats, heal wounds, plus a host of other non-combat powers.
VTM is vastly different from a game like D&D. While also in D&D you have spells that run out and HP that need to be restored, these return normally with time - in VTM using a lot of blood is something that can put you out of play for a few days.
"Power" is very .. dramatic, in VTM. Each different "level" makes you exponentially stronger to the point where the previous level's challenges are now almost trivial. If you make a Dominate build for example, and you are 1 generation older than another vampire, you will pretty much always be able to fully dominate them.
VTM is also very much a social game, so you can't just go around killing other vampires, which means that opportunities to learn new powers or raise in generation are extremely rare and valuable.
It's also important to note that anarchs, thin-bloods, are essentially humans. Even a Gen 9 can rekk a horde of thinbloods because they just cannot increase their stats in any significant way, while the Gen 9 can likely kill them with a single attack - of which they may even have multiple per-round.
Now, let's be honest, the first Bloodlines wasn't this lore-accurate. But it did have a blood pool, you did need to spend blood to activate powers, and managing this resource was a key aspect of the game.
Anyway, back to B2.
There is no blood pool in B2. But then again there's no Wounds either, but rather a mishmash of the two. And you have little of it, but can always replenish it in this absurd minigame .. that doesn't even play that well. I've lost more than once to a casual encounter with some anarchs, which, meh, it's the game they wanted to design, but this sure as hell doesn't scream Elder. One may argue that there is a story element that limits the powers of Fire, some ward she has on her wrist, so maybe we can pretend we're playing as an anarch, but at the same time we're playing a story where we are a "notoriously fierce Elder".
The combat is just horrendous. I am thinking of the Far Cry games where you get a tattoo that increases your abilities as you play, and that game had a combat that was substantially better while at the same time being closer to what i would expect out of a melee combat game.
Once you're done with the combat, you got the story. Now, i cannot really judge this because, well if you like the story, you like the story. It's not a great story from the VTM lore perspective, because in VTM lore pretty much every story goes like this:
"you are in a city. this city has a Prince. the Prince keeps the law, so essentially no vampire is allowed to do anything dangerous except feeding regularly and basically staying (un-)alive. Then a dickhead vampire decides to do something bad and you and your gang try to find out what to ingratiate yourself to the Prince, so then the Prince can give you permission to kill him with Diablerie".
Because the VTM lore is all about RULES.
Vampires are a weird bunch who speak in weird languages with strange words that mean nothing to a human. The actual lore of the vampire world is of critical importance to every vampire, because their lives all rotate around Gehenna, the Masquerade, learning the secrets of Caine, all the while being bound by extremely strict rules with the penalty of death for pretty much every infraction.
So, the gay Nosferatu is .. well, it's .. it's weird, ok? I'm not saying it's an implausible character, but it's .. really edgy. Almost to the point where i imagined it was a front, because if you're an old 8th Gen Nosferatu you're generally a much more dangerous adversary than a comic relief.
If you think of D&D and you imagine a warrior, he's got his attack that goes up with his level and with how good his magical sword is, he's got his hit points plus whatever hitpoints the cleric can heal every day, and he's got his healing potions, which are single-use but are generally restocked during dungeon crawls.
The equivalent VTM character has their attack through their strenght, dexterity, plus their potence, celerity, fortitude, or other combat ability; they have powers of invisibility through Obfuscate and Protean. They have mind control, they can see the unseen via Auspex detecting lies, invisibility, past history, Diablerie.
They can send rats to scout a city. They have a vast information network where power is bought and sold.
They have their mundane skills, such as using Guns. They have wealth that can be used to assemble small armies.
They have their Herd, which determines how many Blood Points they get every night. They have their heaven, their ghouls, and their children.
All of these things you need to buy with points as you create your character. Having access to a bunch of groupies that can supply you with several blood points every night is no less useful than having another dot in a discipline or a skill.
Rather than just being an adenturer that goes into a dungeon with a backpack, "fighting" as a vampire is closer to a business management game.
When you create a new character in VTM, you have the option of being anywhere between 8th and 13th generation.
If you go for the best you can be, 8th generation, you will have to spend ALL your points into generation. You will be an extremely basic and incapable vampire for a very long time. And your sire OWNS YOU. You have been blessed by the choice to make you an immortal, and here is a pile of books where everything is a rule and if you break a single one we will kill you. Oh and everyone wants to scapegoat you for their own interests.
If you go with 13th generation, you are a NOBODY. You may have still a lot of ties to your living life, you may have some modern skills, maybe good stats, but you are very far from any kind of political power, you have practically no useful disciplines, and also funny thing, your sire owns you, just not as strictly because they are a shitty 12th gen that can barely do anything vampiric.
Fun fact: around 14th-15th generation, vampires start to fail when trying to embrace a mortal, i.e. they cannot make new vampires.
Climbing up the political ladder is a very difficult affair in any lore-accurate VTM product.
I don't think the guys from The Chinese Room knew any of this stuff. I don't think they have ever played a single game of P&P VTM. There is a scene where a nobody NPC says "im dying i want to become a vampire" and you're just given the choices "kill her" or "make her into a vampire".
Siring children without permission is punished by death. NO vampire would ever do this outside of an anarch, no vampire would do this if they were expressly working for the Prince, no vampire would f* do this for a generic human that means nothing to them. Only thinbloods, and only in a specific game setting, do this stuff. The first bloodlines literally starts with your sire being killed for having made you !
So B2 just starts with this weird lore-unfriendly elder who wakes from torpor with nothing, but isn't actually an elder, so .. you're playing a 13th Gen basically. And you're just constantly in combat, something that very few vampires would find suitable. And the story is .. it would be already average if it were not that it uses the same exact schtik as Cyberpunk - you have a Keanu Reeves in your brain.
Except that he's not Keanu Reeves, he's the gumshoe from Fallout. He's Nick Valentine - the robot who thinks he is a P.I.
Nick decided to wake you from torpor, and you diablerized him. And now he's stuck in your head, so you two can find out why he did it.
(he did it so you would kill the other guy he was with, because he did him some wrong so he chose suicide-by-elder for both him and the other guy)
.. idk, this Fire guy is such a non-VTM character. You were not much of a VTM character in B1 either, but that guy had just been sired - you were exactly 0 days old when you start the game. At least the dialogue around you matched this, which the dialogue in B2 matches what should be an actually powerful elder, which you're totally not.
So ..
If you want to hear the story of this VTM elder vampire that through some weird circumstance lost every aspect of being a VTM vampire, and play a game that ends *exactly* the moment that you finally get rid of this condition of being a not-a-VTM-vampire, then this game is 100% for you.
For me, it didn't do it. I got about six hours in, then watched a playthrough.
would not recommend.
5/10
Last edited:
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