Vampyr

Ive played this game long enough and I can honestly say im done. Like others have said (and I made the mistake of shrugging off). You are a stupidly underpowered charicter if you want to try and "be good" or not get a horrible ending. This verges more on a stealth "avoid the baddies" game rather than a action drama. If you are trying to do the right thing you will eventually find yourself just skulking cowardly around trash NPCs (because they can beat you into the ground easaly) rather than actually engaging the enemy. Or you eat every person you find, get OP as hell and actually enjoy the gameplay. Catch is, now the story is horrible and everything goes wrong for your charicter. For a "choose your own path Action/consiquence" game its very boxed in and linear for the story, telling you who to love, who to hate, who to ally with and who to fight. Simply said there is a reason it on sale this soon after release. Buy at your own blinding frustration/risk.

Some basic info: * Finished the game (31h) * I like vampire mythos in general * played as the "good guy" (no killing) * Used keyboard + mouse * Bought the game on discount (69 PLN -> ~16 EUR) The good: + atmosphere of London by night + decent music, sound effects, ambience and voice recording + overall decent story + dialogues and text found in the game is quite well-written and fit the language of the era + interesting difficulty curve, although frustrating at times + keeping districts safe is quite engaging + combat is OK if you learn how to play (and disable autolock because it's tedious) The "not so good": - irritating difficulty spikes in story-oriented game e.g. boss fights. There is no easy mode for people who don't enjoy technical and quick-death combat. This can be mitigated by preparing for the fights properly with serums and ammo - crafting is lackluster. You can improve a couple of weapons, but you cannot create them yourself. - the story definietely could be more interesting, gripping, with more twists and drama - apart from main story, there's not much to do unfortunately - the game tries to make a hard political statement and sometimes it's so blunt that you're rolling your eyes What could be improved: ~ fast travel could be there, at least optional for the players that want to use it ~ a regular save system wouldn't hurt. The game has an autosave feature only which doesn't suit "RPG-like" games in my opinion ~ dialogs feel forced at times and a bit too structured; the don't add too much to the gamplay ~ more activities between main story chapters wouldn't hurt In general: Don't treat this game as a RPG because it is definietely not. You have a predefined character and you live through his story which feels quite linear. There are some interesting choices though. The game suffers from cutting corners and reduced scope - it could be great game, but if feels "just OK" and it's a pity. Still enjoyed it! Overall: 7/10

I finished this game a few months ago on Steam and feel like it definitely deserves some love and attention in the GOG community. It's a hard game to describe because it defies convention to a certain extent. The combat seems to be the primary focus in other reviews, which makes sense because for a lot of the game you will be fighting- the areas without combat are few and far between (though you spend a lot of time in there as well.) I enjoyed the combat, but it is very action focused, and can be difficult, and could be a turn-off for some gamers. It is tied to a very interesting game-play concept- the more citizens you kill, the more experience you gain, the easier the combat will be. So it's a difficulty scale that's not only built into the game-play, but into your approach to the character's morality as well, and a comment on the nature of evil characters- evil is easier. The one weakness here is that the more characters you kill, the more guarantee you have of a negative ending, which is an unfair restriction on the player's enjoyment of the game, if you ask me (you can get away with a few kills, especially if they really deserve it...) But what should be the focus here is the atmosphere. The shadowy streets of Victorian London, the music, the great voice-acting, the great character design, the thoughtful pacing and conversation will all pull you in and make you feel like you're in the world of Dracula. Vampyr uses every element of its game-play and design not as an end in itself, but as another tool used to immerse you in another world. It takes the functions of the RPG, the adventure game, the action game, and brings them together to pull you into the perspective of your character, in a way that few games are able to do this successfully. It's not perfect, it has moments of clunkiness, and the ending is bit unfair, but its close to perfect!

Here's The Example of a fairly good idea which was poorly executed. Despite the graphics, especially the poor facial expressions that tried to kill my immersion like an annoying bug flying across the room, the idea of a vampire slowly discovering his powers felt appealing and I really liked it in my first session. Then I went to sleep and came back the next day ready to spend hours playing it and I did, but not exactly doing interesting stuff but talking to EVERY SINGLE NPC trying to discover why the bartender doesn't talk about his friend or that the ambulance driver has an affair with a nurse, aaaaaaand that's it. (a pause here: am I getting too old for this? Does anybody REALLY like to wander around talking to uninteresting people? Seriously, aren't your real lives full enough of it?) It felt shallow and I totally lost my interest after 3 or 4 hours of gossip, small-talks and some occasional dodge-and-counter fights (hi, Dark Souls! I love you but I hate you for narrowing down hard games to dodge-hit-dodge-hit-rinse-repeat) against zombie-like, souless (literally and artistically) vampires. Oh, did I mention it takes FOREVER to load map transitions? I really mean it, I'm talking about a minute or so evey time you travel to another discrict or sewer and it's simply unacceptable for a game with these graphics. But wait, there's more! Do you know those screens presenting the producers, studio and distribution offices at the very beginning of the game? You can't skip that - at least I couldn't in an intuitive way like, say, pressing enter, esc or the buttons on my gamepad?!) and it's another minute of your life you'll never get back, If only we were vampires with an eternity to toss at these kind of things...

I'm about 9 hours in so far and whilst I really like the visuals, story and heavy use of dialogue in the game I have had to make several critical choices that affect individual characters as well as large areas of the game world. My issue with these choices is that the game presents them as short abbreviated options where you are effectively never 100% sure what your character is going to actually say. This has been common in many modern RPGs like Mass Effect, Fallout 4 and any other RPG that uses a dialogue wheel. For example as part of the main quest I am given the option to Spare, Charm or Embrace a character. I don't want to kill them so I am left with either Spare or Charm. Charm is highlighted in blue and along with the abbreviated text, indicates I am using my vampiric abilities to convince the character to forget about the problem I am trying to solve, so I choose this option. This actually ends up wiping the character's whole memory where they eventually die and the area they are in charge of falls in to dismay. The exact opposite of what I wanted to happen. I am not against unintended consequences, but I am strongly against not knowing what my immediate choices and dialogue options actually are. This type of modern dialogue / choice system infuriates me and unfortunately is quite common in modern RPGs.