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gamingDamn that title is a mouthful. One of many things that could have used a lot more work in this game. In VTMB2, you play as the Nomad, an Elder vampire recently awoken with a mysterious mark. For regrettable reasons, the Nomad chooses to go by the laughable name "Phyre" (pronounced "fire") in-game.
I went into this without any familiarity with the first game, which released in 2004, or the tabletop RPG on which the series is based. I first heard about VTMB2 years ago when it was just a flicker in the developers' eyes in Game Informer. It looked very cool! A customizable vampire character to run around Seattle and ally with various factions in a political fight? Sign me up!
Unfortunately the game is a real disappointment. I can't imagine how it must feel for fans of the original game to wait more than 20 years for this.
First, the game sells itself as an RPG, but there's very little of that, either on the combat or the narrative end. Your ability to customize Phyre is very limited--you can choose their gender, change up their hair a little, put some make-up and piercings on them, and change their outfits (the outfits, admittedly, are fun), but otherwise, Phyre is Phyre.
In terms of combat, you unlock the five powers associated with Phyre's clan pretty early in the game; you have the ability to unlock the other clans' powers too, but you can only ever equip four at a time, and none of them upgrade from where they start. Aside from one power I swapped, I kept my Phyre's original Brujah set equipped for the entire game.
You get various popups about how an NPC feels about what Phyre just said or did, but these ultimately have no impact. There are only a couple of late-game decisions that have any influence on the ending, and your relationships don't matter at all.
The characters are flat and static. I wanted badly to like Ryong, the vampire prince of Seattle, but she just gives us so little to bite into. Other characters are similarly unengaging. Lou was the only character with anything interesting going on. Worst, Phyre is stuck with a secondary presence in her head--a deceased vampire named Fabien, former police detective, who's trapped in Phyre's head for some reason. Fabien embodies all I hate most about video game helper protagonists. He's constantly piping up to nag Phyre to get back to some quest, making commentary about the painfully obvious, and reminding the player of things we already know. Hearing Fabien tell me I needed to go do a task I was already on my way to do made me immediately want to change focus. He turns what was my choice to prioritize and pursue game elements for fun into a chore list to tick off for the grating voice in my head. By the end, I hated this character and would have done anything just to make him shut up.
Not that the game ever presents itself as much else. Excluding the portions where you're forced to take control of Fabien--which were dull, gave me nothing more to care about Fabien, and left me desperate to get back to Phyre--the main quest could be wrapped up in a few hours. The game is blatantly padded out with fetch and collectible quests from the other clan primogens. You have a "contact" with each clan, and every night three of them will have a task for you--go here, kill this person or pick up this package, return and report. The other three have collection quests. These don't connect to the main quest in any way--or to anything else. They exist to take up time.
The story is predictable. I called the secret big bad hours before the end of the game. Not because there were signs, but just because it felt like the most obvious spot for a plot twist. I think this could have hit harder if The Chinese Room had been willing to take a little more control from players. As it is, Phyre suffers from being a miserable split of an actual original character which the player can develop at will, and a set character whose shoes we step into. Splitting the baby gave us the worst of both worlds here. Because The Chinese Room wanted Phyre to be somewhat customizable, they can't lock her into any particular backstory or role. However, because they aren't truly customizable, the player is also severely limited in what choices they can actually make for Phyre in-game. It leaves us with an ill-defined character who is as shapeless at the end as they were at the start. Outside a one-time mention of where Phyre spent time in the past, we never learn anything about their backstory, because there isn't a backstory.
For example, Safia. Safia is an NPC you interact with as part of the vampire court, and she's quite taken with the Nomad from the start. Phyre can either indulge her curiosity and her little crush, or not. My Phyre brushed her off at every opportunity, was irritated with her fawning, and generally kept her distance from Safia. But Safia's attachment to Phyre continues to grow. By the time she started dropping "my love" into our conversations, Phyre was already hooking up with two other NPCs, and it gave me a little whiplash to have it insinuated that there was some special relationship between Safia and Phyre. If the game had cut off my other romance options and pushed Phyre towards Safia instead of giving me the chance to ignore her or even be mean to her instead, it could have created a more compelling narrative between them. Yet it clings to its illusion of player choice, which weakened the story and added very little.
The vibes of the game are fun, although I'm not sure why they were so insistent on setting the game in Seattle when it's so not Seattle. Outside the totem pole in Pioneer Square, there are no recognizable Seattle landmarks, not even the Space Needle, and the various places Phyre hangs out are not real. I gave a little chuckle over "A Mart" and "Red Water Taco Grill" but otherwise, this city is Seattle in vibes only (and the game is very insistent on this being Seattle--it's not a location that's mentioned once on the case jacket, it gets talked about all the time). Okay--and we do venture into the Seattle Underground at one point. I'll add an extra point for that.
But the amusement of the winter storm-locked city draped in a not-true-to-life amount of neon lost its luster quickly after the umpteenth effort of chasing repetitive NPCs down alleyways to gnaw on. The performance began suffering past the midway point of the game too, despite the fact that I had it on the "performance" setting. Lag was at times so severe as to impact combat, and on one occasion crashed the game entirely. It's by no means unplayable, but it was a minor irritation that added to the general sense of let-down.
There deserves to be at least one mention of how cringe-inducing the sex scenes are too, I think. You can hook up with the various clan contacts around Seattle, and get treated to a blackout scene with breathlessly awful porno dialogue. I had to laugh when Phyre got it on with Niko because both the dialogue and the delivery were so terrible, particularly in contract with their relatively cute flirting beforehand. Truly a mystery why this passed muster; a simple fade-to-black with no dialogue would have been far superior. Some credit to Onda's voice actress for making her scenes sound less like a comedy act.
I'm so convinced I'll never want to play this again that I will be handing it over to my local second-hand video game store at my earliest convenience. What a bummer.
I went into this without any familiarity with the first game, which released in 2004, or the tabletop RPG on which the series is based. I first heard about VTMB2 years ago when it was just a flicker in the developers' eyes in Game Informer. It looked very cool! A customizable vampire character to run around Seattle and ally with various factions in a political fight? Sign me up!
Unfortunately the game is a real disappointment. I can't imagine how it must feel for fans of the original game to wait more than 20 years for this.
First, the game sells itself as an RPG, but there's very little of that, either on the combat or the narrative end. Your ability to customize Phyre is very limited--you can choose their gender, change up their hair a little, put some make-up and piercings on them, and change their outfits (the outfits, admittedly, are fun), but otherwise, Phyre is Phyre.
In terms of combat, you unlock the five powers associated with Phyre's clan pretty early in the game; you have the ability to unlock the other clans' powers too, but you can only ever equip four at a time, and none of them upgrade from where they start. Aside from one power I swapped, I kept my Phyre's original Brujah set equipped for the entire game.
You get various popups about how an NPC feels about what Phyre just said or did, but these ultimately have no impact. There are only a couple of late-game decisions that have any influence on the ending, and your relationships don't matter at all.
The characters are flat and static. I wanted badly to like Ryong, the vampire prince of Seattle, but she just gives us so little to bite into. Other characters are similarly unengaging. Lou was the only character with anything interesting going on. Worst, Phyre is stuck with a secondary presence in her head--a deceased vampire named Fabien, former police detective, who's trapped in Phyre's head for some reason. Fabien embodies all I hate most about video game helper protagonists. He's constantly piping up to nag Phyre to get back to some quest, making commentary about the painfully obvious, and reminding the player of things we already know. Hearing Fabien tell me I needed to go do a task I was already on my way to do made me immediately want to change focus. He turns what was my choice to prioritize and pursue game elements for fun into a chore list to tick off for the grating voice in my head. By the end, I hated this character and would have done anything just to make him shut up.
Not that the game ever presents itself as much else. Excluding the portions where you're forced to take control of Fabien--which were dull, gave me nothing more to care about Fabien, and left me desperate to get back to Phyre--the main quest could be wrapped up in a few hours. The game is blatantly padded out with fetch and collectible quests from the other clan primogens. You have a "contact" with each clan, and every night three of them will have a task for you--go here, kill this person or pick up this package, return and report. The other three have collection quests. These don't connect to the main quest in any way--or to anything else. They exist to take up time.
The story is predictable. I called the secret big bad hours before the end of the game. Not because there were signs, but just because it felt like the most obvious spot for a plot twist. I think this could have hit harder if The Chinese Room had been willing to take a little more control from players. As it is, Phyre suffers from being a miserable split of an actual original character which the player can develop at will, and a set character whose shoes we step into. Splitting the baby gave us the worst of both worlds here. Because The Chinese Room wanted Phyre to be somewhat customizable, they can't lock her into any particular backstory or role. However, because they aren't truly customizable, the player is also severely limited in what choices they can actually make for Phyre in-game. It leaves us with an ill-defined character who is as shapeless at the end as they were at the start. Outside a one-time mention of where Phyre spent time in the past, we never learn anything about their backstory, because there isn't a backstory.
For example, Safia. Safia is an NPC you interact with as part of the vampire court, and she's quite taken with the Nomad from the start. Phyre can either indulge her curiosity and her little crush, or not. My Phyre brushed her off at every opportunity, was irritated with her fawning, and generally kept her distance from Safia. But Safia's attachment to Phyre continues to grow. By the time she started dropping "my love" into our conversations, Phyre was already hooking up with two other NPCs, and it gave me a little whiplash to have it insinuated that there was some special relationship between Safia and Phyre. If the game had cut off my other romance options and pushed Phyre towards Safia instead of giving me the chance to ignore her or even be mean to her instead, it could have created a more compelling narrative between them. Yet it clings to its illusion of player choice, which weakened the story and added very little.
The vibes of the game are fun, although I'm not sure why they were so insistent on setting the game in Seattle when it's so not Seattle. Outside the totem pole in Pioneer Square, there are no recognizable Seattle landmarks, not even the Space Needle, and the various places Phyre hangs out are not real. I gave a little chuckle over "A Mart" and "Red Water Taco Grill" but otherwise, this city is Seattle in vibes only (and the game is very insistent on this being Seattle--it's not a location that's mentioned once on the case jacket, it gets talked about all the time). Okay--and we do venture into the Seattle Underground at one point. I'll add an extra point for that.
But the amusement of the winter storm-locked city draped in a not-true-to-life amount of neon lost its luster quickly after the umpteenth effort of chasing repetitive NPCs down alleyways to gnaw on. The performance began suffering past the midway point of the game too, despite the fact that I had it on the "performance" setting. Lag was at times so severe as to impact combat, and on one occasion crashed the game entirely. It's by no means unplayable, but it was a minor irritation that added to the general sense of let-down.
There deserves to be at least one mention of how cringe-inducing the sex scenes are too, I think. You can hook up with the various clan contacts around Seattle, and get treated to a blackout scene with breathlessly awful porno dialogue. I had to laugh when Phyre got it on with Niko because both the dialogue and the delivery were so terrible, particularly in contract with their relatively cute flirting beforehand. Truly a mystery why this passed muster; a simple fade-to-black with no dialogue would have been far superior. Some credit to Onda's voice actress for making her scenes sound less like a comedy act.
I'm so convinced I'll never want to play this again that I will be handing it over to my local second-hand video game store at my earliest convenience. What a bummer.