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^
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^