Vampyr

I have 16 hours on the game as of the moment of this review. I admit that I didn't go further than the 2nd chapter of the game, but I have 2 reasons that made me uninstall this without a shred of remorse. The first reason is that the game has 3 save slots, but has an autosave function, without disclosing when those saves happen, removing control over choices and setting an immense pressure on the player if they want to get the best ending. In a single moment, I didn't read thoroughly what I was selecting as a dialog option on a secondary character, and a hint of his story was permanently locked, forever. I find the inability to backtrack and do things differently, especially when your choices have impact, extremely annoying. Some will say that that is the way the game is supposed to be played, I just feel that I dislike such playstyle and I'm not going to put in hours in a game that is designed like that. Secondly, the combat is atrocious, the target lock changes between targets all the time, regardless if the player presses the keybinds or not, enemies start animation and then pivot 180 degrees mid-animation because they are tracking you like a Javelin missile, same goes for bolts from crossbowmen by the way, and attacks that shouldn't connect, either because you parry or dodge, do damage or take priority over your own attacks, which are faster and should stagger the opponent. In a game where, if you want to go the pacifist route and not kill most named NPC's, you have to be on your toes every minute with guides open in a browser to not miss a choice and your main source of materials and xp is the mobs that respawn in the zone, they have done a terrible job on the combat experience. If I had known what this was about before buying I would have never touched this game. I certainly will not play it again.

Well, when you play this game story is pretty nice, you just follow and enjoy the script. Thats all. It's not game for everyone, it's very linear, AI is very poor and your freedom of movements is limited (these 2 negative moments cost 2 solid stars). If you like the games where you follow the story like a movie and have enigmas to resolve, this game is for you. If you like games where you can make step left, right or in any direction you want (skyrim, gta, rdr), this game isn't for you.

It's not a true immersive sim, nor a true soulslike, but it has elements of both and seems indecisive as to which it wants to be. Because it can be difficult to understand what this game really is, let me explain. Vampyr is a dark, open world RPG with soulslite combat and a very deep web of NPC relationships. You can freely explore a decent chunk of 1918 London, which is populated with challenging enemies along with dozens of civilians. All of these civilians have very deep conversation trees, and most offer sidequests. You are also free to feed on these civilians for a large XP boost. Alternatively, you can keep them healthy by offering them medicine, which makes the streets safer, and you can do their sidequests for a smaller, but still useful XP boost. During the story, you will be asked to make decisions that have wide-ranging effects on the game world, and can even cause districts to fall into chaos (quite literally) overnight. Great care was taken by the developers to immerse the player in this world, but it is not an immersive sim. There is no true stealth system, nor any way to meaningfully interact with the environment. As you explore London, you will be forced to fight the same enemies time and time again; and the combat, to put it generously, is not for everyone. I don't enjoy Soulslikes. It's a subgenre built on frustration and mechanical precision. It's immersive and satisfying to some players, but most just find it annoying. Vampyr's combat borrows the mechanical precision of soulslikes, but also includes several anti-frustration features that would make an actual souls fan winge: XP is not dropped upon death, feeding on civilians will make you stupidly OP, and it even has an easy mode. Vampyr feels trapped in two different worlds, and can't really satisfy fans of either genre. Can't really recommend it unless the premise really sticks out to you as brilliant. I would have preferred a focused immersive sim without the soulslite combat.

The game truly is the definition of a 5/10. Everything that is positive, will have a negative to weigh against it in equal measure. - The vampire worldbuilding I absolutely enjoy, while the story itself was incredibly middling. - Some of the side-quests I definitely enjoyed, but at the same time the main story was lacking. - The action is fun at the beginning, but once you realise how incredibly repetitive it is, it sours the experience, which goes for the powers as well as the base combat. - The moral choices are fun and interesting, but the moral choices lack any form of context, and so the experience feels very hollow (killing key people, regardless of whether they are good or bad, is seen as evil), not to mention that you're killing many people outside of the morality choices that are simply ignored.

There is no scenario in which the lack of the option to save at arbitrary points benefits a game. If one desires an extra challenge, one can refrain from using a manual save feature. However, being kicked back to an arbitrary checkpoint, and losing an often unknown degree of progress, for exploring the game's systems or attempting and failing a challenge is just tedium for it's own sake. Lack of any included out-of-game documentation is also a profoundly annoying feature.