Vampyr

The good: I love the setting of a vampire story in 1918 London, at the collision between poverty, disease, war, privilege, faith and science. Looks good, the main character is personable, and the core gimmick - the ability to get more powerful by eating people you know best - is cool. The story is interesting until you get to the final act, which didn't resonate for me. Unfortunately, combat has some issues - every death feels cheap, as enemies can typically kill you in 2 or 3 hits while being able to take a lot more damage from you, so it always felt like the dodge button didn't work, rather than I made a mistake. While the intent is undoubtedly to persuade you eat some people to get XP, most of the abilities you could buy with it don't feel like they would make a difference to what killed you. Worse, after installing a Windows update, it started to take ridiculously long - 3-5 minutes - to load a save game, which made dying much more frustrating.

- still a stutter-y mess. Most of the map is streets and small plazas, so generally short draw-distances. But even then, just walking the streets will induce a brief stutter / hitch. - you'll spend most of your time talking w/ npcs. Fine in itself, but there's too much conversation here. - combat is a mess. If you DON'T lock on, you'll frequently find yourself slashing air. If you DO lock on, the game auto-targets based on where you point the camera with the mouse, frequently locking onto an enemy half-way across the plaza instead of the one in front of you. - there a a ton of vampire skills available, but only 4 can be equipped at any one time. - Vampyr hypes "you are responsible for your actions." If you DON'T drink the blood of citizens, you won't level up as quickly and you'll be under-leveled for the entire game (making the combat even more of a chore). If you DO drink the blood of citizens, you'll hurt the city district leading to its collapse. If you don't level up your health, you'll die in 1 or 2 hits from very early on. I spent $15 on this garbage during a sale and I feel ripped off. $5 is all Vampyr is worth - if you're prepared to deal with the frustration.

I have encountered two seperate game breaking bugs in my combined 5 hours of play. Two KNOWN gamebreaking bugs that the developers have desided to forgoe. Combine that with autosave only and it's not worth wasting your time on. Combat that works terribly on PC, it seemingly offers a lot of choice but very few of those choices have actual effects. Bad choices for the game such as requiring you to Sleep and fast forward time to upgrade can easily end up with story consequences and can destroy entire districts if you are not careful, combined with autosave only makes this game more tedious then enjoyable

I want to like this game. It reminds me of a post-Victorian Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. I enjoy the game - when I can. It crashes incessantly. Looking it up across the net, many people have the same issue and it is apparently related to a flawed version of the Unreal engine.

Game seems to be bugged. I've played for almost 5 hours and i'm stuck at level 1. I have read in some forums that there is a bug and sometimes you need to restart the game. Apparently the developers put some code in the game that if you try to use a cheat/trainer it locks your level to 1, and apparently that "lock" is flawed. Regardless, I think its dumb that the developers put this in place. The end user has purchased the game, the developers shouldnt care what the end user does as long as they are enjoying the game. Other then that your character seems to be horribly under-powered... Your main super power is getting beat down and then coming back to life.