Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 Pre-Gamescom 2025 Hands-on: A Tasty Morsel

It is official now: the development odyssey of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is nearly at an end, with the launch date set for October 21. Fans of Troika's 2004 cult classic roleplaying game have been yearning for a sequel for over two decades, and they had been told they would get it in 2021. Back then, the game was in development at Hardsuit Labs with the original game's writer, Brian Mitsoda, heavily involved. Unfortunately, publisher Paradox was not satisfied with the quality of their work and removed them from the project. There was a serious risk of cancellation for a while, but developer The Chinese Room came up with a convincing pitch, and the project continued, albeit with some key differences.

Ahead of the Gamescom 2025 demo, Paradox Interactive gave Wccftech access to the game's first opening missions as Phyre awakens from the hundred-year-long torpor in Seattle. It isn't just a new place and time for the main character, either, because they've also got a voice in their head: the Malkavian vampire called Fabien. This was already known, but the big reveal is that Fabien is actually playable in flashbacks where we get to investigate what happened before Phyre's awakening.

In an excellent choice from the development team, Fabien and Phyre are a complete contrast in both how they are written as characters and how they play. Whereas Phyre is a powerful (albeit initially diminished) Elder vampire from the old world with a penchant for action, Fabien is a much younger (though not thinblood) local vampire who makes his living as a detective for the Seattle Police Department. As a Malkavian (which is not selectable as a clan for the main character Phyre), Fabien has access to a series of powerful abilities that allow him to gain insight into the surrounding world and its people. For example, he can scramble someone's mind to make them forget about certain events, or he can appear as someone else, although that will subsequently require the player to engage in dialogue in a way befitting that illusory person, else the disguise fails. Furthermore, Fabien can look into inanimate objects (or corpses) and search live humans' minds to discover what they might be hiding.

His ability tree appears to be fully unlocked from the start, although during this Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 demo, Fabien's segments still showed the nearby blood resonance events. Blood resonance is a mechanics that allows Phyre to feed on specific blood types (Choleric, Melancholic, and Sanguine), which largely depend on the human's state of mind: angry, anxious, or aroused. Phyre needs a certain amount of Choleric, Melancholic, and/or Sanguine blood to unlock specific clan abilities. That Fabien also has access to the mechanics suggests he may be able to unlock additional abilities later on, but I'll have to ask The Chinese Room for confirmation.

There is another noticeable difference between the two playable characters: when controlling Fabien, you can freely zip around Seattle without any repercussions, because it is a memory and what you're really doing is akin to pressing fast-forward like on a remote. It is not so with Phyre, who must always be wary of not breaking the titular masquerade. Actions like sprinting or climbing at superhuman speed or, worse, feeding on a human will quickly fill the masquerade-breaking bar if witnessed by any of the many pedestrians roaming Seattle.

This system is absolutely core to what VtM is all about. The vampires largely agree, with few exceptions, that they must remain hidden from the mortals. As such, I am glad it is in the game, though I have to add that I'm not very fond of how the developers handled the penalty. When the bar is filled at the highest level, someone (presumably an assassin of the Camarilla court) pops behind Phyre to stake them through their heart, and it's simply game over. It would have been a great deal more interesting if there had been some sort of manhunt instead, GTA-style perhaps, with a small chance to evade the pursuit and possibly go to the local Prince to petition for atonement in some capacity. Alas, I can also see how that would have been fairly complex to actually implement.

Compared to Fabien, Phyre is much more customizable. In the Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 demo, you can change the gender and later their clothing, but the full version should also enable players to select between different faces and hairstyles. More importantly, you can pick the Elder's vampire clan between Brujah, Tremere, Banu Haqim, Ventrue, Lasombra, and Toreador (though the last two are locked behind the purchase of the Premium Edition or the add-on DLC). Each clan has a 'mastery rating' that suggests how hard they'll be to play. They also come with 'clan affinities'. Phyre uses these throughout the game to unlock abilities from another clan more easily: regular abilities from another clan might cost up to 10 skill points, but if that ability falls under a category that the chosen clan has an affinity for, the cost might be halved.

Some clans have two affinities while others (Lasombra, Banu Haqim, and Brujah) have three, making them potentially more versatile. Of course, that's if the playstyle suits you. I played through the demo twice, once as a Banu Haqim and then as a Toreador after Paradox provided access to the DLC. The Banu Haqim, a clan of swift, deadly executioners, can take down foes both stealthily and with sorcery. They have affinities for Celerity, Blood Sorcery, and Obfuscate abilities. But I admit I preferred my time playing with the Toreador, who are considered to be artists and seducers.

With the Toreador, you get a Blink ability that is great for quick repositioning as you're being stealthy, and you also have a powerful skill called Entrancing Kiss, which charms an opponent to your side for a while. Beckon can be used to lure humans away from public enemies to feed without any fear of breaking the masquerade. The clan's mastery ability, Blurred Momentum, boosts your character's reflexes for a time, and finally, the clan perk, Fleetness, automatically recharges all Relocate abilities (like Blink) over time; otherwise, you'd have to wait before you have regained enough of a combat resource to use them again.

The melee combat in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 feels solid and punchy enough. You can charge your basic attack to deal more damage and, of course, dash to avoid being hit, but at Hard difficulty, when multiple enemies close in at once, it's hard to avoid everything. If you get hit, you can use an elixir (provided you looted one somewhere) to regain health or simply create an opportunity to feed yourself. Beware, though, as feeding during combat does not make Phyre invulnerable to damage. In so many other games, triggering such an animation would somehow cause all other enemies to stand there in pure stupidity, waiting for the player character to end. Not so in this game, which means you have to play smart and separate foes (such as with the aforementioned Entrancing Kiss ability) to feed in combat without risking your health even further.

The elixirs are just about the only kind of 'loot' I have seen in the demo. Other than that, you can search the environments to find documents and other stuff that awards experience, but this is not really a game about getting better gear. This makes perfect sense: vampires need no armor or weapon to be powerful; they are both armor and weapon at once. However, the RPG elements show up in dialogues, with characters occasionally getting irritated, annoyed, amused, or excited depending on Phyre's responses to them. The developers promised this would have consequences later on, ultimately leading to 'a dozen' different endings, but those were obviously impossible to witness during the opening missions.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is not an open world game, but it does let you explore a bit of the city with plenty of civilian NPCs around to feed on. There weren't any proper side missions in this build, but that does not mean there won't be in the full game. As for Seattle, it looks good enough in Unreal Engine 5, although the game does not utilize ray tracing (despite the original announcement made for the project's first iteration). The game already supports NVIDIA DLSS with Frame Generation (up to 4x for GeForce RTX 50 owners) and AMD FSR 3.1 with Frame Generation. However, even with FG set to 4x and a high-end PC (9800X3D, RTX 5090), the demo suffered from regular stuttering. It's too early to worry too much now; the build might be old at this point, and performance will surely be something they'll work on until the last minute, but I will be sure to highlight this to the developers when I meet them in Cologne.

Closing Thoughts

There was much cause to worry about Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, especially after such a highly anticipated RPG sequel was given to a developer with no prior experience crafting roleplaying games. From the little taste I played, though, I think the folks at The Chinese Room have done well in most regards. It may not turn out to be a spectacular masterpiece like The Witcher 3 or Elden Ring, but I reckon it is likely to be a solid and fun action RPG with a great neo-noir story, at least based on the intriguing premise seen in this demo.

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