A few moments after you start playing Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, you’ll already be thrown into the fray against various enemies. After the game quickly teaches you the basic mechanics, you’ll constantly start finding yourself in rooms with ghouls and other enemies, making combat an important factor.
While the combat might look simple at the start, it has a lot more layers than you’d expect. If you simply try to defeat enemies with normal attacks, you’ll start having a hard time as the difficulty of the game increases, but these tips will help you keep up with it and have a better experience.
Learn Your Attack Distance
One of the earliest and most important things you’ll have to get used to when it comes to the combat of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is the attack distance. When you press the attack button in the first-person mode, you’ll see your character simply slashing her hand in front, which might make it seem like your melee distance is short.
However, as you try to attack enemies that are farther away from you, it’ll become obvious that your attacks have a much larger hitbox than they seem. Most enemies usually have a smaller hitbox than your attacks, and you can use this distance to prevent yourself from taking damage. This also gives you more time to react if the enemy dashes at you.
Don’t Fight In The Open
After completing the prologue, you’ll enter the open world of the game, which comprises the city of Seattle. This area will have a bunch of buildings you can enter and some that you can’t. You’ll also see a special bar on the top of your screen when you’re outside, which essentially represents your cover as a vampire.
If you perform vampire activities like double jumping, climbing up on buildings, or attacking humans in any way, this bar will build up in this order: green, yellow, and red. When the bar reaches red, it’s considered a masquerade breach, and you’ll start having police officers swarming you and constantly shooting you during it.
The red bar builds up if you’re visible by a human, but it slowly goes away a few seconds after you go out of sight.
It becomes quite difficult to survive if you trigger this masquerade breach, so it’s important not to take any fights in the open world when you’re visible. If you find a special human who can give you specific blood points, it’s recommended to talk to them, which lets you trigger a specific dialogue that makes them follow you.
As they’re following, you can take them to a secluded area and then feast on them.
Stealth Is Key
Whenever the game asks you to enter a building during the main or side quests, you can expect a battle almost every time. The enemies you face in these battles increase as you progress through the game and they also get tougher. One way for the game to increase the difficulty of these battles is by introducing more elite enemies in each compound.
While you might be able to get away with brute force during the early combats, it’ll lead you to your death after a few hours, even if you choose the Brujah clan. Hence, it’s important to stealth and get ambush kills as much as possible. Thankfully, the game has various mechanics that can make this easier.
You can use your special sight to detect different objects that you can use during stealth.
If you see a secluded enemy, you can simply walk up behind them and attack them. On the other hand, if the enemies are grouped up, you can try to separate them by using throwables around the area.
Scout The Area Before Attacking
As you’re going through a certain building during the main story, you’ll usually find it divided into multiple rooms. Usually, enemies from one room don’t hear the sounds of you attacking enemies in another, as long as these rooms have enough distance between them. It’s important to divide enemies into groups based on this.
You can easily do that by using the vampire sight and looking at all the yellow hearts around you. You’ll usually see a group of enemies close to you and then another farther away. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the sight can be a little misleading as it only shows the enemy’s heart. Sometimes, the enemy can be much closer than it seems, and you can’t tell where they’re looking.
Keep Staggering Your Enemies
As you progress through the story of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, you’ll start getting more elites while the enemies themselves also get more dangerous. After a few quests, you’ll start finding elites that can perform their own abilities like teleporting near you or slamming the ground with a hammer.
These elites are also very robust, and you can’t simply stop their attacks by attacking them. Instead, you have to either perform a run or a hold attack to stagger them for a moment. It’s important to do this if you’re trying to attack them in melee range, especially if they have a shotgun, since they can remove your HP before you realize.
Keep Track Of Your Abilities
After exploring a bunch of the open world and completing some main and side quests, you’ll already be able to have a decent amount of abilities in your arsenal. In the early hours, your abilities will likely revolve around the clan you chose at the start. However, you can have much more variety as you get affinity with various clans.
These abilities are key to winning your combat scenarios. For example, the ability that lets you control an enemy like a puppet can be extremely useful if you use it on an elite, since it’ll help you get rid of the elite while also removing a bunch of smaller enemies from the area. Similarly, you can group up smaller enemies and defeat them in one beheading skill.
Abilities automatically get recharged as you defeat more enemies, but you can make this faster with certain perks.
Lookout For Potions
If you’ve been paying attention to the tutorials, you might already know that the crosshair in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is special since it gets bigger if there’s a secret around. This secret includes hidden pathways, interactables that you can read, and potions that get added to your wheel on the bottom left.
You only have four combat potions in the game, and they have straightforward effects like healing, reducing the damage you take, or increasing the damage you deal. While they have simple effects, these potions can still be highly useful, especially if you’re attacking enemies head-on with the Brujah clan passive.
Avoid Cornering Yourself
As you enter different combat scenarios in the game, you’ll constantly have unique situations. Some of these require you to stealth, while others might force you to take head-on battles by automatically aggroing the enemies onto you. However, one thing that remains common among all these scenarios is your positioning.
When you’re being attacked by enemies, it’s highly important not to stay in one place and corner yourself. This game’s combat rewards agility and constant movement over just standing still and slashing at your enemies. Not only can you pull off cool attacks with this mobility, but also use cover to avoid different attacks and find items that can help you.
