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.
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.