After nearly 10 years, Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2’s long and convoluted development is finally approaching its end. Its second and final DLC—The Flower and the Flame, releases next week, concluding one of the more dramatic industry sagas witnessed in the last few years.
Announced in 2019 after several years of development, Bloodlines 2 promised to be a full-blooded sequel to Troika’s beautiful, if broken 2004 RPG. But a challenging initial development led to original developers Hardsuit Labs being booted off the project in 2021. The baton was picked up by The Chinese Room, which rebuilt the game from the ground up and released it last year.
The result offered an enjoyable enough slice of gothic detective fiction, as Fraser Brown explained in his Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 review. But it didn’t really deliver on the whole ‘RPG’ of it all, lacking many of the systems and ideas featured in Troika’s original.
The subsequent expansions have been adding some of that stuff back in—sort of. April’s Loose Cannon DLC reintroduced the ability for players to wield guns and melee weapons by hand, albeit only for the DLC and within the constraints of playing as a specific character—the base game’s rogue sheriff Benny.
The Flower and the Flame adopts a similar approach, only this time you play as Ysabella, the glamorous Toreador who runs the Atrium nightclub. The DLC’s story is difficult to summarise without spoiling it, but the four quests it adds explore Ysabella’s relationships with some other key characters in the base game, while revealing the reasons why she, uh, does the things she does in the main story.
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As for how it plays, Ysabella’s combat is based around the Toreador abilities in vanilla Bloodlines 2, but with a few DLC-specific flourishes. For starters, Ysabella gets a new gizmo called Razor Wire. This is a hook attack a-la Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, with Ysabella lassoing enemies with barbed wire before yanking them toward her, stunning them in the process. She also fights with a rapier in melee combat rather than using her fists, and can dual-wield any guns she picks up in a fight, from pistols to sniper rifles.
It certainly sounds more involved than the base game. It is worth pointing out, however, that the first DLC didn’t go down all that well. Loose Cannon has a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam with just 43% positive reviews. It certainly sounds more involved than the base game. It is worth pointing out, however, that the first DLC didn’t go down all that well. Loose Cannon has a Mixed rating on Steam with just 43% positive reviews. I haven’t played the DLC myself, but PC Gamer’s news editor Andy Chalk has, and as someone who enjoyed the base game, he described the DLC to me as “pure garbola”, elaborating thusly:
Half of it is just a replay of the boring endgame level, there’s no real insight into the character or why he went nuts, the implementation of guns is extremely clumsy to the point that they’re not worth the effort, the awful crossover from Bloodlines 1 is back and somehow even more pointless and annoying, and wow, it turns out that Bloodlines 2 was actually heavily dependent on its characters and when you strip them out there’s not a hell of a lot left.
It doesn’t exactly sound riveting. I’ll also say that, while I didn’t particularly like Benny as a character, he was more interesting than Ysabella, and I’m not especially convinced by Paradox’s summary of the latest DLC’s plot.
Bloodlines 2: The Flower and The Flame launches on June 10. There’s no price listed for it yet, but since Loose Cannon cost $15 (£13), I imagine you’ll pay the same for Bloodlines 2’s swansong.
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