"Vampire: The Masquerade 2" has received mixed reviews. Foreign media: one-fifth of the time is stuck.

2025-11-01 22:34:51|Myriagame |source：minecraft skins

"Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2" is now available on Steam, priced at 238 yuan in China. There are currently 1,250 reviews on Steam, and only 53% of players have given favorable reviews.The overall evaluation is "mixed".

In the Chinese section, there are quite a few negative reviews, showing the players’ disappointment and anger.Some players said that after waiting for 6 years, they were very disappointed. The combat part of the second generation was not even as good as the first version.Some players also said that the second generation is nothing compared to the first generation. "There is no equipment system, you can't choose a race, the protagonist is too ugly, the action system is very poor, the stealth system is the same, it's basically group fights, and the map is very small. In short, unless you like the first generation very much, I really don't recommend buying the second generation."

Player: "The price is 3A for a product with specifications made 10 years ago. There is no inventory, very few enemy model materials for unlimited reuse, meaningless options, optimization and span, only the atmosphere shaping and superhuman feeling are a bit fun, and the bones can be broken."

Player: "This is the first time I saw a game that showed me a static screenshot of the opening animation and then it stopped responding."

At the same time, foreign media WCCF issued an article severely criticizing the lagging problem of "Vampire: The Masquerade 2".The game is developed using the Unreal Engine 5, so it is inevitable that there will be lagging issues, but I didn’t expect it to be so serious.

Foreign media WCCF reported:

Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 is finally officially released on all platforms.21 years have passed since the previous game, and this sequel, which was almost canceled, is finally available.Strictly speaking, it's more of a spiritual sequel.

In my review, I wrote that the game, despite its flaws, was worth a try if you liked the world and genre - but it's best to wait until it's on sale.Another reason to put off buying is that maybe, just maybe the development team can improve the optimization issues in the future - because the current performance of the PC version is abysmal.

"Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2" was produced using Unreal 5, but its functional performance is quite basic.There is no ray tracing in the game, and it is far from a showcase of Epic engine technology.Even the texture quality isn't always great.The game's Seattle open world is very small by today's standards.All in all, there's nothing special about this game on a technical level.

Unfortunately, while we often hear about various problems with Unreal Engine 5 games, this situation is simply "next level."It can be seen from the game video that the game is almost "constantly stuck" in the open world. In previous games, most stuck situations often only occurred when loading new areas.Once indoors, the stuttering is slightly lessened, but still not gone.

I analyzed the same open world scene from the video using NVIDIA FrameView and FLAT tools.The results are shocking.The frame time graph shows a peak of up to 175 milliseconds. Even excluding this abnormal point, there are many frame time spikes exceeding 40 milliseconds during the custom benchmark test, which means that the frame rate instantly drops to 25 frames per second.Although it was only short-lived, it was enough to make people feel extremely abrupt.

Average frame rate itself isn't the issue.Under the configuration of Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, the average frame rate of the game can reach 220 frames in full "Ultra" image quality, NVIDIA DLAA and DLSS multi-frame generation 4x mode.However, the problem is that the frame rate keeps plummeting and then rising rapidly, and this cycle leads to an extremely unsmooth experience.

By the way, this isn't like the situation in Dying Light: Trapped - Techland later fixed a DLSS frame generation issue that caused lag.I actually turned off frame generation for most of the game because it did nothing to alleviate the game's stuttering, which still persists.

According to FLAT, the game stuttered 20.29% of the time throughout the entire benchmark—the worst result I've ever seen.Typically, even the most stuttery games are only around 9% or 10%.This analysis validates the subjective experience: this is perhaps one of the worst cases of stuttering in PC gaming in recent years, and we've seen too many of them.

To make matters worse, as I mentioned in my full review, Vampire: The Masquerade 2 doesn't support HDR (High Dynamic Range) displays at all.This is completely unacceptable for a game of the same level released at the end of 2025.As early as eight years ago, the first batch of 3A masterpieces already supported HDR, and now most monitors have HDR capabilities.According to the developers, it is actually very easy to achieve HDR through Unreal Engine.

Overseas players complain about "Vampire: The Masquerade 2" on X

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  "Battlefield 6" movement mec

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  Little ingenuity!Players dis

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  "Resident Evil 2: Remake" re

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  "V.E.D.A: Awakening Soul" St

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  Former “Call of Duty” dire

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  "First Descendant" new skin