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.
Thronebreaker has an incredible captiviating story with amazing characters and the fantastic writing we've come to expect from CDPR. Unfortunately the gameplay is just boring. This is hampered in large part due to that fact that the game is incredibly easy. Some of the puzzles present a challenge in the fashion of a simple math problem that can only be solved in one specific way, but the battles just aren't challenging at all at any point in the game. It's unfortunate that the story of this game has to be hidden away in such a dull package. I feel the standard difficulty level that was presented would have been great for an easy mode, but the game does not have difficulty levels, so you're forced through the tedium of this gameplay loop that ends up feeling like so much busy work to get back to the story you'd rather be experiencing. I'd rather just watch a short animated film honestly.
First of all if you liked Pillars of Eternity this game is a great upgrade. They took all the things bad about PoE, stats, no party ai, party size, wonky combat, and improved them. The game is pretty great, the story is original and the setting is super cool. The combat isn't amazing, but it works about as expected for a cRPG. Overall I'd say this is one of the best party based RPGs to come out in a long while. But there's a downside, your main character the fatebinder, is dull as dishwater, mechanically speaking. There are no classes and you gain powers from a list of generic power trees, none of them are terribly inspiring or fit any kind of theme other than being as generic as possible. Meanwhile every ally you get has an amazing and super cool list of skill trees that are wonderfully thematic and mechanically diverse. This could have been easily solved with classes, but the game doesn't have those for... some reason I couldn't begin to fathom. The ability trees have clear class themes, but they're bare bones and uninspired. Thankfully the magic system is straight up AMAZING. The magic system in this game really shines, and really pushes you to play a mage to take advantage of this games most unique and interesting system that a cRPG has ever had. tl;dr play a mage.
