London, 1918. You are newly-turned Vampyr Dr. Jonathan Reid. As a doctor, you must find a cure to save the city’s flu-ravaged citizens. As a Vampyr, you are cursed to feed on those you vowed to heal. Will you embrace the monster within? Survive and fight against Vampyr hunters, undead skals, and other supernatural creatures. Use your unholy powers to manipulate and delve into the lives of those around you, to decide who will be your next victim. Struggle to live with your decisions… your actions will save or doom London.


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When I think of this game, I think of one thing above all: wasted potential. In the first few hours of the game, Vampyr certainly knows how to delight players with its dense and dark atmosphere. I was quite interested in the fate of the protagonist and wanted to find out more about this world of vampires in early 20th century England. Unfortunately, my initial enthusiasm was dampened after just a few hours.

There are several reasons for this. The most important point of criticism for me is clearly the combat system. Combat in this game is neither well thought out, nor interesting or challenging, but at best unintentionally amusing and at worst simply frustrating due to the absolutely disastrous AI of the enemies. The developers have failed on several fronts here. Firstly, it doesn't make much sense in terms of internal coherence why humanoid enemies simply shrug off attacks with an axe (or a fucking two-handed scythe) as if it were nothing. Sure, for enemies with supernatural abilities this can make sense but with human enemies I find it very questionable when they flinch slightly after I've shot them in the face with a shotgun.
Furthermore, the game fails completely as soon as more than 1 opponent wants to take part in the combat. Here you are constantly attacked from behind, above, from the side or simply from the shadows and struck down without being able to react adequately. What I find "best", however, is how you can dodge enemy attacks and still get hit, as the hitboxes in this game are either too large or are not updated often enough.
It was very common for an opponent to attack me with a flamethrower or something, which I dodged and still got hit while standing far away from any fire that could have hit me. I also really "enjoyed" the various jump attacks from enemies. While the aggressive jumpers simply became invulnerable, I usually got the short end of the stick despite dodging them in time.

Overall, I also felt very underleveled in most of the fights, even though I completed every single side quest. How can that be? Well, some players would say that you can suck the townspeople dry to get experience points. But what happens if the player (as in my case) has decided to take a more pacifist approach, meaning not to make a single NPC the victim of my own bloodlust throughout the game? Well, the game is not prepared for this.
Although the game constantly tells you that you can decide for yourself if you want to sacrifice characters in the town for the sake of your own level advancement, it actively punishes you if you decide against it. So it happened to me that in later sections of the game I had a whole 10 levels less than my opponents and therefore bit the dust quite quickly. A good game would have found an elegant solution to this, so that if players choose not to sacrifice the NPCs, they have an alternative way of gaining experience. Here, however, the player's decision actively hinders the character's development. How such a system made it into the final version of the game is beyond me.

Unfortunately, the game is not convincing outside of the battles either. Things happen all the time in the game's plot that had me shaking my head constantly. I don't want to go into detail here for spoiler reasons, but it should be said that logical connections in the quests and storylines are sometimes difficult to recognize. This is also where the serious decisions that the player can make in the course of the story come into play. It is sometimes impossible to deduce the consequences of a decision from the UI commands alone. I don't mean that the long-term effects of some decisions are unpredictable (that could be considered a strength of the game), but that the direct consequences of the decision are not always clear. This reminded me of the worst dialogues from Fallout 4, where you could only give a rough type of answer and the character would say something completely inappropriate or undesirable, which is roughly how it feels here with the main character's decisions.

So what is left to say? Vampyr remains a disappointment on many levels. What the game does really well is to capture the dark and oppressive atmosphere of the early 20th century. The Spanish Flu and the consequences of the First World War are reflected very well in the design of the world, the characters and the plot. The music can also contribute to this, although it too quickly becomes very monotonous. Some of the dialogue with the inhabitants of the town is also very well written and impressively convey who these people are, what their backgrounds are, what they believe in, etc.
However, the absolutely lousy combat system and the plot full of holes make it really hard to like the game. I had been looking forward to a dark role-playing game with a vampire twist, of which we have unfortunately seen far too little (or none at all) since Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, and unfortunately all I got was a mediocrely written narrative game with a frustrating combat system and non-functional balancing, which is a shame.

I thought this game looked cool, and I'd heard good things about it, but I honestly went into this game more or less blind. Given how that could very much be setting myself up for failure, I enjoyed the hell outta this game. I played the game on a PS4 Slim, and I beat it without killing any NPC characters and it took me about 35-40 hours.

Vampyr follows the story of Doctor Johnathan Reid, a combat medic just returning to London from the French front in the final days of the first World War. He wakes up after being thrown in a mass grave with an unquenchable thirst for blood, and ends up feasting on the first human he sees, which is unfortunately his sister Mary. With barely any time to grieve for the sister he just unwittingly murdered, he is chased from the scene by vicious vampire hunters. This begins his quest to not only learn about who made him a vampire and why, but also how to bring relief to London from the horrible plague of the Spanish Flu. Vampyr really goes out of its way to take its own twist on the concept of a secret society of vampires, and I really enjoyed the world building and overall narrative. The guilt Dr. Reid feels for murdering his sister gives him a very good grounding point as a character, and is a very clever narrative conceit for why he isn't just some mass-murdering maniac now that he has such powers of unlife.

The main narrative/gameplay gimmick that sets Vampyr apart from something like Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (other than the better performance and combat) is how you gain XP. While, like VtMB, you only really gain XP from doing quests (you do gain XP from combat in this, but barely any at all), the other main way to gain XP is by drinking blood from (and killing) NPC characters. As you go through the game, your "mesmerize" level goes up, and once it hits the level of a certain NPC, you can mesmerize them, take them into a shadowy corner, and drain them like a juice can for a BIG boost of extra XP.

You also get far more XP from them if you take time to talk to them and learn about them through dialogue choices, eavesdropping, and asking other characters about them. You can honestly spend a good few hours JUST talking to people once you hit a new area if you're so inclined, as there are plenty of people to talk to, and it's all voice acted quite well. You don't have to if you don't want to (you can just mash square to skip the dialogue if you so please), but the amount of XP you get for learning the extra facts about characters really starts to add up, as does the XP you get from their quests, so interacting with them on some level, while optional, is highly recommended even if you're just gonna eat 'em all eventually XD. The game's combat isn't the most difficult thing in the world, and you can make up for low levels by upgrading your weapons a bunch, but the combat is certainly involved enough that it can be veeery tempting to take out a few NPC's to get your levels up to a point where they perhaps should be. The game also has a Bloodborne-style auto-saving system, so you only have one save file and you cannot go back on any decisions you make.

And letting NPC's live for story reasons (like because you don't wanna kill anyone, like I did) isn't the only reason to let them live. Districts have an overall health rating that goes off of how many people in it are still alive as well as how well they are (characters can get sick and you can give them medicines you make to make them well again). The higher the rating, the lower prices are in that region's stores. However, should a district get below 50% health, that district is fallen to the plague. A fallen district loses ALL it's remaining NPC's (they go "missing"), so their quests effectively disappear if you haven't done them yet, and the district gets filled with lots of more dangerous enemies as well. A district can also fall if no one is killed but everyone gets too sick with serious illnesses. Illnesses develop every time you go to bed, and you need to go to bed to level up (think of it like leveling at a bonfire in Dark Souls), and an illness will slowly get worse over several days until it reaches level 3. If a lot of characters in a district have level 3 illnesses, the district can also fall, but it takes quite a while to get to this point, so you don't actually NEED to be constantly going back and forth, playing doctor and delivering medicine every time you go to sleep. You have time to wait until it gets bad-bad-bad if you really care that much.

The combat is like if Yakuza borrowed Bloodborne's combat (but not the difficulty) and aesthetic but swapped the Victorian Lovecraft for 1918 London Vampires. The combat is far more like Bloodborne in the sense that you have a primary melee weapon, an offhand weapon you can use for stabbing to collect blood (mana) or stun enemies that can also be a firearm, and a dodge move all connected to a stamina bar that you gotta let refill before doing tons of stuff again. The enemy variety is more like Yakuza in the sense that there aren't a ton of really crazy and outlandish bosses like Bloodborne has. A lot of the enemies you're fighting have fairly recognizable abilities and while they are usually quite a danger to you, there isn't a ton of enemy variety. More or less all of the sub-bosses are just very strong versions of existing enemies, but the big bosses thankfully do have more unique elements to them that make them stand out a bit more.

I played this game on a normal PS4, and it REALLY shows. The game is quite a bit like Bloodborne again (at least how it originally was) in that this game has some feckin' LONG load times. There aren't that many, thankfully, but when you're going into a new map (i.e. inside a building) or going back outside a building, the loading times can approach like 20 or 30 seconds. Also, if you're running from area to area without really stopping, the game will stop to load in the new area. The framerate also has some problems, especially when lots of NPC's are on screen, but it honestly never really affects the gameplay. I would normally totally expect a game like this to have the combat really suffer from the framerate, but the combat sections were always really well optimized for me and I never had any problems. It's more-so when you're running around crowded safe-NPC areas that it will jump and hiccup a bit, but even then it's never to a really annoying effect, just a noticeable one.

The presentation is good, but a bit affected by the hardware. This is definitely more of a "AA game" compared to a AAA game. Like, if this were a higher budget title, it'd probably have several outfits for Dr. Reid to wear, the character animations during dialogue would probably be a bit more extensive, there'd probably be more voice actors. That said, what's here is still very well done. It's far from something like Red Dead 2 as far as production value is concerned, but it's still a game that looks and sounds nice.

EDIT: Bogus reminded me of something very important: the difficulty modes! I played through the game on normal mode, but the game got patched a few months after its Summer launch to add in two new modes: story mode and hard mode. Hard mode REALLY emphasizes the sacrificing NPC's for XP mechanic. Enemies gave barely any XP before, and now they give even less as well as hit far harder, so you really need to carefully consider whom you're going to eat and when, because you're almost certainly going to need to. On the other hand, Story mode takes a very Nintendo approach of letting you basically turn off the combat (and make story fights super easy), letting you enjoy the story and decision making even if you don't like action games. I love it when games do stuff like this <3

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is probably one of my favorite games I've played this year. It's almost certainly my favorite game I've played that released this year (granted I've played like, 5 of them including this XD ). The combat is super fun, the story is well told and engaging, the world is familiar but new. It's all around an excellent game, and it's left me super excited for the next project this team will take on ^w^

It's tempting to open this review by saying 'this game sucks' but it actually didn't so I won't.

Vampyr is Don't Nod's post-Life is Strange project that takes a decidedly different approach gameplay-wise while still keeping their trademark decisions-and-consequences narrative framework. Although I acknowledge that the limitations and norms that are consistent across vampire literature—no sunlight, burned by crosses, etc.—make them thematically interesting, I've never personally been a fan.

Despite that, though, I cannot deny that Vampyr is a well-told tale with some interesting takes on vampire mythos, complimented by truly stellar voice-acting work across the board (in particular from Anthony Howell as the lead).

Jonathan Reid has just woken up in the backstreets of London as a newly-born vampire with a fresh thirst for blood. As the Spanish Flu rips through the city and indeed the world at large, he must now grapple with his work as a doctor and his new life as a vampire to find a solution that benefits both of his worlds.

The narrative then takes the form of a detective mystery of sorts as you visit the boroughs of London and assist its various denizens in this crisis. Of course, along the way, you will be expected to make decisions and take actions that will decide the fate of both London and vampirekind. It's familiar territory for fans of Life is Strange and much like it, your choices have tangible, visible effects on the world around you that decide the outcome of both the main quest and side quests.

It's enthralling stuff, and the scope and size of the game feel reasonable along with it, although it could definitely do with a fast travel system. When you're cleaning up side quests or even travelling between boroughs in the back half of the game, it can become tedious running between them, especially when you keep running into enemies.

Speaking of which, combat is maybe the most controversial aspect of Vampyr's gameplay. Generally, the consensus surrounding Vampyr's combat is that it's a mixed bag, and I can see why that's the case. For the most part, I found it decent. It does its job well enough with some appropriate skills and a few different options for dealing with enemies; however, I'd say it's somewhat in abundance. It can be tiring to get caught by a cheap hit from an enemy that takes a few seconds to recover and react to and given that there's at least 3 enemies (with one strong enemy type) around literally every corner, the combat can seem as though it's overstaying its welcome the more you play Vampyr.

Some of the time, it's as though Vampyr's combat is there mostly to fill a quota or pad out playtime rather than an exciting detour from the core dialogue and investigation-focused gameplay. It's decent enough but it does serve to trip the game up when it's getting where it needs to go in the narrative.

Regardless, Vampyr is a good AA B-game adventure with a good narrative, a great soundtrack, excellent voice acting, and decent characters across the board. In the age of AAA games that take several years to produce, it'd be great to see other studios tackle smaller, focused titles with tangible passion behind it such as this one.

7/10

très très cool, ambiance tip top