Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

The pitch, and the road to get here

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is a sequel to 2004's cult-classic RPG, set in Seattle's vampire underworld. Its road to release was unusually public and turbulent: announced by Hardsuit Labs in March 2019 with original Bloodlines writer Brian Mitsoda attached, the project was delayed repeatedly, and in July 2020 Paradox Interactive fired Mitsoda and creative director Ka'ai Cluney. Hardsuit Labs was removed from the project entirely by 2021, and Paradox handed development to The Chinese Room (Dear Esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture) in 2023, with the game finally launching on 21 October 2025 — six years after its first announcement.

The verdict, in the corpus's own most-upvoted words

That history is not background trivia to this game's reviewers — it's the frame nearly every critical review is written through. The single most-upvoted review on the entire page, with over 10,000 votes, states it directly: "Brian Mitsoda, HSL, and quite frankly all of us, deserved better than this. This is not Bloodlines 2, this is Vampire: Seattle preying upon the Bloodlines name." That framing — a good-or-bad-but-not-Bloodlines game wearing a beloved name — repeats across dozens of the most detailed reviews.

What specifically changed, according to the reviews

The complaints are concrete rather than vague nostalgia. The second-most-upvoted review (5,677 votes) lists the missing systems bluntly: "No weapons? NO STATS? NO INVENTORY?" Another compares the skill system directly to the original: "Skill tree? Nah, it's a skill stick." "Inventory" appears in 24 of the 100 most-helpful negative reviews, "weapons" in 22, and "clan" — referring to the game's roster of playable vampire clans, missing some iconic ones like Nosferatu at launch — in

87. Several reviewers argue the Masquerade itself, the core tension of hiding your vampire nature

from mortals, has little real mechanical consequence in this version, undermining the series' own namesake concept.

Even the defenders frame it as a different game

What's notable is that this reframing isn't only coming from critics. Several of the most-upvoted positive reviews explicitly recommend the game on the condition that you stop expecting Bloodlines: "They really, really, really should have saved Bloodlines 2 as a title for something else, because this game isn't that. It's infinitely closer to Zeno Clash and Dishonored," reads one 589-vote positive review. Another: "I went in expecting a full RPG because of the Vampire: The Masquerade/Bloodlines name. This one isn't focused on be[ing that]." When a game's own fans have to first talk you out of what its title promises before recommending it, that's a real signal about the gap between expectation and delivery.

Launch technical gaps, since patched

At release, reviewers flagged basic missing PC options: "No FOV slider, no way to disable the vomit-inducing motion blur. Recommend waiting to play until these basic game features get added," reads a 1,891-vote review from launch day. Checking Steam's own news feed against that complaint, a December 2025 patch — nearly two months later — finally added a motion blur toggle and custom difficulty settings, alongside continued updates through June 2026 including two paid DLC expansions and a published 2026 content roadmap. This has been an actively supported release, not an abandoned one.

Where sentiment sits now

Despite that ongoing support, recent English sentiment — the 100 most recent reviews, spanning July to August 2026 — sits at 55% positive, essentially unchanged from the 55.9% lifetime score. Ten months of patches and new content have stabilised the game without meaningfully shifting opinion on its core design direction, which several reviewers frame as a values disagreement rather than a bug list — no patch adds back an inventory system a studio deliberately chose to cut.

Value

At NZ$95.99, price is a consistent secondary complaint even from reviewers who recommend the game: "do not get it unless it's on sale. This is a $30-40 game at best," reads one representative 587-vote positive review. Achievement data supports a shorter, more linear experience than the original promised: the median across 102 achievements is 5.9%, with deep completionist achievements under 0.2%, consistent with an action-adventure pace rather than a sprawling RPG.

Verdict

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is a competently made action-adventure trapped inside the expectations of a beloved RPG's name, shipped after one of the more publicly troubled AAA developments in recent memory. Its own most-upvoted review speaks for a large share of the corpus when it says the original creative team deserved better. Judge it purely as a Dishonored-adjacent action game and some will find real value here — at full price, though, this review's honest advice matches the corpus's own: wait.