Vampyr

I decided to play the game as a "good" ekon on normal difficulty; here's my experience: Good + The story was captivating enough to ecourage me to finish the game. + The choice system is good, and it impacted my world and playthrough meaningfully. + Sound and voice are acting excellently done. + Combat is challenging and tactical (if you are doing a "good" playthrough like me), and there are a variety of enemy types, with great boss fights that will have you thinking about your every move. + The vampire movement and abilites are so awesome to use. + The setting is great for this type of game. Bad - The mouse and keyboard controls for combat can be annoying at times, especially when locking on a target. - Performance was bad for me even at the lowest settings at 1440p, especially loading; took more than 1 mintue most of the time. It could be my dated hardware: 980Ti, i7 5620k, 32 GB DDR4, and 950 PRO NVMe drive. - Sometimes the sound from enemies and the environment would stop working and all hear is my characters movements; restarting the game was the only way to fix it. - No GoG achievements, sigh... I'm happy with this purchase, and recommend Vampyr to patient gamer looking for a good vampire story with a great setting!

Overall graphics and environments are quite good. Voice acting and environment music are also very good. I didn't experience any technical issues with a Ryzen 7 5800X / RTX 3060 / 16 GB RAM / Win11 64bit machine. One nuisance are the somewhat long loading times, that seemed to get longer by the end of my playthrough for some reason. In terms of gameplay, this game could have used a few more elements in terms of freedom to explore. I mean, I can't break a lock even when I carry an axe? Beyond the silliness of locked doors, this game could have used more alternate paths to traverse via teleporting, a mini map and the greatest omission of all: fast travel. Fights were a bit of a slog as there isn't much variety of enemies and the few enemy types around don't have a lot of attack variety. You can use many weapon types but they are all fairly similar. When I noticed you can parry with some weapons I got my hopes up. However, I didn't find them very effective as some attacks still go through your parry. I played with a keyboard and mouse and locking onto an enemy seemed counter productive, so I mostly aimed at the enemy I wanted to attack. My last gripe is the healing the NPCs mechanic. To me, if an area is "sanitized" people shouldn't fall sick the next night. Also, hunting down NPCs to heal them without map pointers is kinda lame in this day and age. Towards the end of my playthrough, I was fighting enemies 10 levels above me, but besides being patient and careful with the dodges, there isn't too much to worry about. I struggled more with a few bosses than against the end bosses. The game doesn't throw large mobs at you, but on a few indoor areas, again towards the end, it does and it was slightly aggravating. Overall, I enjoyed my time with Vampyr, but more for the story and the narrative than the gameplay itself.

It's great fun. I play it every few years.

The story and characters of Vampyr are amazing. The choices are really difficult to make and as the game says, you have to take responsibility for your actions. If you can get past an imperfect and messy combat system (the game's biggest weakness), play it! It was an adventure I'll remember for a long time.

If I could give half-stars, this review would be a 3.5 stars. The game is first of all very entertaining and visually appealing. The music is good, controls of the character are just on point and smooth, and combat is fun and opens a lot of possibilities. The story is also well told (even though the ending takes a turn into the paranormal that I did not fully appreciate and felt quite a letdown-but still was ok). My main critique to this game is that it's just way, way too easy. I played in normal difficulty in a NO-embrace run and never used either serums or guns, I only used a melee mace, but I always felt overpowered respect to the enemies. I killed the lvl 18 Skal in Whitechapel being only lvl 6. I defeated the lvl 33 Priwen boss toward the end of the game while being lvl 22 myself. The fight has been challenging, don't get me wrong, but this boss and the boss you face in the graveyard (you know which one I am talking about) are the only two real challenges in the whole game. Even though I purposefully crippled myself doing no embraces and not using serums or weapons, I never felt the pressure to kill a citizen for the XP. The whole moral dilemma the game seems to advertise so much simply never existed. Perhaps one has to play in hard mode to get to that point? Norrmal mode is described as "the way Vampys is meant to be played", but a vampire that never felt the slightest need for blood seems not the right way to me. The other main critique is that many things in the game just don't work well. Many times a character openly tells you something, and way later in the dialogue you ask again the very same thing, or you end up "re-descovering" that same thing as a hint for the NPC, even though it was already told to you. Dr. Reid probably has bad memory. Another example is how inconsequential the Y choices in dialogues are; maybe 1% of all the choices makes a difference (i.e., gives you a hint for the NPC or not). Overall good game anyway and I am happy I played it.