Vampyr

I got this one from another store. Wish it was here when i decided to buy since i prefer here. Very elaborated story with a heavy focus on dialogue cutscenes and also being teeming with choices and their consequences chiefly in the main quests. Graphics are decent and the scenarios really give the feeling of a early twenty century London with all its buildings and old cars, however some npcs seems to suffer from low details in their models when compared to others. The only downside is the gameplay mechanics. Combat is clumsy, the target lock camera sometimes hinders more than help, stealth is way to simplified and the stamina bar is way to low (this last one may be a nitpick on my part). I give the game a 8/10. Definitelly worth it.

The gameplay want to mimic dark souls. It's pretty difficult on normal difficulty, almost good under 3 enemies. But over this number, which happens a lot after a few hours of gameplay, it becomes a real pain, it becomes almost impossible to avoid enemy attack long enough not to get killed after a 5 minutes fight, where you basically spent your time dashing away from attacks and trying to get blood from enemies. The aiming system is aweful, it would have been way better to aim like in a normal third person shooter (at least with keyboard and mouse) and even with a gamepad, it's a pain to switch focus from an enemy to another, as they dash constantly as much as yourself. I'm not against difficulty when the gameplay is rich and interesting, and when you can pratice your skills, but here it's not the case. The controls and cameras are clumsy. The loading screens are extremely long, then you don't want to try to many times the same fight. And you can't really level up somewhere and come back to a difficult fight later because fights almost doesn't grant xp. The only way to get xp is to drink blood from victims, but you don't want to do that too early because it could prevent you from getting the most interesting part of the game : the story. And not only the story, because when you don't have enough infos you get less xp from the victims. All this, in the end, made me drop the game, after 14-15 hours while I was really hooked by the story. Maybe I'll try again at a later date, begin from a new game, on story mode. But not right now.

I wanted to like it, but I can tell when a game will catch me from the beginning, and this is not one of them. It tries to force on you a pseudo romanticism that one may accept, but it fails from the ground up with the anachronism of your character who is looks like a Millenial lumberjack type with a modern voice. It lacks substance, I definitely don't feel that Victorian vibe. The environment is somewhat simplistic and the progress too scripted for my taste. It is completely arbitrary what ways you can access and what objects you can interact with. Movement is terrible, the controls and the in-game menus are a mess - to me, it looks like someone wanted to add many features to a game, not having a vision in mind that they wanted to make a game from. The sound and visuals are good, though.

This is a pretty good game overall, but it's plagued by minor inconviniences and inconsistencies that make it frustrating. Usually I try to avoid walkthroughs of story rich games, but Vampyr virtually demands one or it will punish you for not reading the minds of the devs. The combat is servicable, if not very inspired, but it's the writing that shines here. It almost might have been better simply as a virtual novel.

Truly a hidden gem. Combat can be clunky, but the story makes it worth playing for sure.