REVIEW

Vampyr Review

by Luke Walsh, June 10th, 2018

Vampyr is centred around the London streets of the early 1900’s where flu has gripped the winding streets and alleyways to create a great crisis in the heart of the capital. Life is Strange developer DontNod clearly take their strengths into the title with impressive narrative and decision lines to take you on a journey into the gritty and the gruesome. It’s just a shame that outside the storytelling, combat lacks polish and feels like a battle itself.

You play as Dr Jonathan Reid who has recently returned from the battlefields of World War I and not long after is attacked by an unknown Vampire where he is then thrown into a mass grave of the recently deceased. Jonathan reawakens a different man out for blood which has sent him into a frenzy that ends with him attacking the first person he sees, someone who happens to be his sister. From here he is hunted by a group of vampire hunters and the game begins as you take the journey to find the one who turned him and piece parts of your life and London back together.

The first moments of the game you have the sense of being very alone hunted and without a place to go. You wander the streets of London to try and find sanctuary but you don’t stay a solo act for very long as you meet a couple of NPCs one being another vampire who is hiding under the noses of mortal humans and begin working at a hospital on the night shift. It’s here when you start to process being one of the undead and see if you can find a cure for the disease you’ve been afflicted with.

At the beginning of starting to understand your new bloodlust, the quests are centred around learning more about your vampire powers, such as you’re heightened senses to locate characters or solving issues for the locals like lost items, gang wars and the odd affair. It’s a nice way of learning the mechanics while progressing with the storyline, it’s just a shame that the game has some obvious budget issues as non-important NPCs are bland looking and badly animated compared to the main cast.

The NPCs do have another purpose though and a system which is intertwined with the rest of the game. Nearly all the character you meet you can start a dialogue with, finding out more about them makes their blood tastier. Your quest givers and information mules are also midnight snacks and building better relationships with them allow you to have a more satisfying meal. That is if you choose to take the bite.

Your choices will impact the future of the game and the information and quests that you are able to receive. If you are not strong enough, you can give into the thirst and in return awarded health and experience but you’ll lose the ability to get quests from that character and start to take on a more sinister look. As with most games, I usually play the good role as opposed to the evil protagonist which worked more for the narrative as Dr Reid is quite against the bloodsucking.

The system forces you to make sure your decision is considered, do you need a power boost and you’ve been priming a character so there XP is at the limit? As Vampyr does not allow you to reload previous saves, your choice is final and seeds through to the rest of the game. No reloading and undoing the previous choice you made, something the developers do make pretty clear as you boot the game. This has been done before but within Vampyr, the decisions feel heavier than in other titles, as you learn about your meals before you mesmerise them, knowing that you could lose an important piece is not to be taken lightly.

The stability of a district is also tied to your citizens and how they are fairing. If they’re all unwell with diseases then it disrupts the area making it a tougher place to live. The same is also said if you start to feed on a lot of the locals, the stability falls. If it goes to low i.e. critical then others can go missing, monsters will show up in the streets and will give you a harder time to navigate. The reverse is also true, curing them and choosing the path of abstaining from blood will keep the area healthy making life easier for you but harder in others when you do have to go into combat.

Combat is meant to be hard if your a vampire running on fumes, meaning your XP collection is slow and low limiting your access to vampire skills like solidifying your enemies blood or throwing a spear of your own. Passive buffs are also harder to obtain like having a higher blood or health gauge or doing more damage when you bite.

The issue I found is that combat overall is not really challenging partly because it’s a little stale. Looping through combat means locking onto enemies, dodging like a black cloud of mist and hitting someone with whatever weapon you have.

The balance between your three resources health, stamina and blood can add to the complexity of combat. You use up stamina to dodge and attack but blood, on the other hand, is used for your vampire abilities and unlike stamina which comes back after a few seconds, blood must be acquired. You can bite enemies dealing damage and taking their blood in the process but have to stun them first. Usually requiring an off-hand weapon that inflicts stun damage but there’s also others that drain blood directly on every hit.

The fights do become a micro-management of your resources which does make the combat a little more interesting but the fun wears off a lot of the time before they all feel like the same fight. It’s cool to be able to turn invisible, recover your own wounds through blood and coagulating an enemies blood but it’s just not as fluid as it should be.

Even after building up your XP from unlocking hints, defeating enemies and solving missions and side quests to gain ultimate abilities, the combat never continues to evolve along with your night-stalking character. This makes it become more of the same as you roam the streets fighting the same enemies with the same weapons. I found a decent scythe, upgraded it and used it in most of my fights as it took a shed load of the enemies health. There was play with other weapons but nothing felt as powerful or useful which means going back to what worked best in combat.

Even within the boss fights, the combat is still much of the same attacking, dodging, biting and repeat. There are some extra things included like environmental damage and their magical abilities which add a little twist but nothing that rocks the boat too much. When you learn their attack patterns the fights become even more regulated, making it too easy to anticipate their next move.

Combat aside, however, the most annoying part of the game is the performance. For a title on the PS4, there were far too many long loading screens to go from one area to the next, you’d be waiting 30 seconds to a minute in some cases. The occasional bugs and frame-rate dips I can understand but there was a constant feeling of slow down in most areas which stilted the game a little bit. Nothing was game breaking but it felt like Vampyr just lacked the polish other bigger titles have with their performance.

In the end, Vampyr world and characters are what make it such a living world and the story of a journey and struggle of a doctor turned bloodsucker in a Lovecraftian-esqe London. It’s a slow starter but once you get past the first few hours the game opens up to offer you interesting moral choices about the cities inhabitants. Unfortunately, the same amount of care did not make it into the combat which ends up being repetitive and sluggish that brings down the truly fantastic story.