Vampyr - vampire action-RPG from Life Is Strange devs

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/vampyr/vampyr-combat-story

Vampyr is a game torn between character and combat

Dontnod are best known for Life is Strange - a game that shows off the studio’s strength as storytellers. But their first game was Remember Me, a third-person combat-focused action game set in a dirty sci-fi world. At a distance, Vampyr looks like a combination of these two sides of the studio, offering rich stories of down-and-outs in London as well as frantic combat to get your blood pumping.

Unfortunately, from the two hours I played at a recent preview event, it appears Vampyr doesn’t live up to either of Dontnod’s previous efforts.

Set in the wake of the First World War, Vampyr has you play soldier-turned-doctor Jonathan Reid. That career switch is only the first of Reid’s transformations, though, as just before the game begins he is turned from a human into a vampire. Confused by the new thirst for blood, you help Reid to understand what he has become and how the change took place.

Vampyr is unsatisfying from the start. For a game that has been pitched as one of choice and consequence, where you interact with a whole city of people, choosing who lives and dies to sate your thirst, it is disappointingly linear. You are hunted through dark, empty streets that may as well be enclosed corridors for the lack of opportunities for expression and interactivity they offer.

Granted, there are narrative reasons for the streets to be so empty - London is heavy with Spanish flu and there is a murderer on the loose who is draining his victims of blood - but that doesn’t make the hollowness of the capital city any less noticeable.

The only people you encounter in the smog-filled streets are characterless vampire hunters and blood-starved vampiric creatures who exist only to be killed by you. There is no talking to them or avoiding them. This wouldn’t be such an obvious blemish if it weren’t for the shallow combat.

Fighting is straightforward: you can have a main-hand weapon and an off-hand weapon or a single, large double-handed weapon. I mostly found crude melee weapons - machetes, axes, and knives - but one useful off-hand weapon that came to hand was a stake - a few punches with that would knock my enemies to the floor, stunning them. Once an enemy is on their back you can tap a button to hoist them up and drink their blood. That does a little damage but it also fills your blood bar, which you can expend as more powerful vampiric abilities, such as throwing a harpoon of blood at a nearby foe.

I found Vampyr’s combat too rough to be much fun. My attacks didn’t appear to combo, so the animations repeated without flow, becoming awkward and dull. The stake stun was useful and introduced nuance to fights but even that is a matter of repeatedly hitting your enemies with the same attack until they fall down.

Combat is clearly a core part of the game because all of the skills you can level up related to it. Though, even the skill tree lacks thrill: besides a few new attacks, like the blood harpoon and a sweeping claw attack, they are all made up of invisible numbers - a 5% increase to your blood bar, a 20% buff to your health, and so on. Doubtless those increases are useful, but it looks like you will be able to unlock all the combat abilities relatively quickly, and then everything after that is simply numerical improvements.

Again, I only played the first two hours of Vampyr, so there may be some radical change to how combat works later in the game, but if it continues in the same vein it will pale in comparison to other combat-focused games, including Dontnod’s own Remember Me.

After fighting through a number of London districts filled with vampire hunters, I finally came to a hospital where the game Vampyr was promised to be when first announced started to reveal itself. The hospital hub is full of people you can talk with, learning about their lives and - depending on your proclivities - letting you get to easing their pains or draining their blood.

So long as your level is high enough, you can drink the blood of any character in the hub area, killing them off in return for a healthy dose of XP. The option to mesmerise a character sits temptingly in the top left of the screen whenever you talk to them, tapping that lets you lead them away into a dark corner where you can turn them into a plasma smoothie.

However, while you can kill anyone you want at the first opportunity, if you talk to them and better their lives then they will give you a greater XP bonus when you drain them. In a previous demo, Dontnod used the example of a father who had fallen out with his son since returning from the war. If you can heal their relationship then you will better their lives and, as a result, get a juicier glug of XP when you kill him.

You don’t need to kill anyone if you don’t want to, but you will be left weaker as a result, making the game’s combat harder. So, if you are struggling to get through an area stuffed with vampire hunters or deranged beasts then the pressure on you to kill off a couple of tasty humans increases.

Killing off other characters won’t just hurt your conscience, though: it will destabilise the district, attracting the attention of vampire hunters and making the place less safe for you. Something to keep in mind when you are eyeing up that patient’s tasty throat.

After my time with Vampyr I left with the sensation that the game is divided. While your interactions with London’s citizens have an affect on combat - in that you can raise your level by killing people and drinking their blood - the two parties don’t weave together well. Many games create a dichotomy between the characters you interact with and the mindless enemies you kill. But in Vampyr that dichotomy is not so comfortable.

This is a game that puts stock in a story of a man becoming a monster; it asks you to see both sides of him and the conflict between them. Having a black-and-white system that depicts characters who possess humanity on one side, and street thugs who do not on the other, is jarring. Reid considers his murder of one of the supposed innocents a monstrous act but he is left unconflicted by killing a string of human vampire hunters only moments before.

While Vampyr is a game about internal struggle it seems too much of that tension lies between its systems.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/120321-vampyr-previews-4.html

Rock, Paper, Shotgun calls it a confused game:

Being a moody, handsome morgue-dodger isn’t all red wine and roses though. Reid was a doctor in life and he’s going to be a doctor in death. That’s the game’s central conceit – you are a healer but also, by necessity, a killer. A preserver of life whose own life is a grotesque parody, lived out in shadows and filth. And once you arrive at the hospital, which is the central hub for at least the early portion of the game, things start to get interesting, with social webs of potential victims forming, and decisions about who to spare and who to feast on distracting from the combat.

Oh, the combat. Perhaps I’d have more patience for it if I hadn’t been trying to cram as much interesting play-time as possible into my two hours with the game. The prologue seemed to last forever, taking up precious time before I even reached the hospital, and managing to be both an enthusiastic but ineffective exposition dump and a series of unhelpful combat tutorials. Everything happens at once, but very slowly.

You wake up, realise you’re a vampire, then within half an hour you’ve discovered a clan of monster hunters that apparently know all about your kind and are defending London from an infestation of vampires. They seem to own the streets and are, in fact, the only people you’ll see as you make your way across the city, searching for the creature that created you.

Reid shouts things like “don’t make me do this” as you sneak up behind them and chomp on their necks, slurping their arteries like cheese strings. They, in turn, call him a “parasite” and try to set him on fire.​

PCGamesN thinks it's torn between its character and its combat:

Set in the wake of the First World War, Vampyr has you play soldier-turned-doctor Jonathan Reid. That career switch is only the first of Reid’s transformations, though, as just before the game begins he is turned from a human into a vampire. Confused by the new thirst for blood, you help Reid to understand what he has become and how the change took place.

Vampyr is unsatisfying from the start. For a game that has been pitched as one of choice and consequence, where you interact with a whole city of people, choosing who lives and dies to sate your thirst, it is disappointingly linear. You are hunted through dark, empty streets that may as well be enclosed corridors for the lack of opportunities for expression and interactivity they offer.

Granted, there are narrative reasons for the streets to be so empty - London is heavy with Spanish flu and there is a murderer on the loose who is draining his victims of blood - but that doesn’t make the hollowness of the capital city any less noticeable.

The only people you encounter in the smog-filled streets are characterless vampire hunters and blood-starved vampiric creatures who exist only to be killed by you. There is no talking to them or avoiding them. This wouldn’t be such an obvious blemish if it weren’t for the shallow combat.​

And Daily Star thinks the game has potential but is not quite there yet:

Vampyr looks like it might be a great game.

We played a version that's still a few months out from release, and the core gameplay conceit (discover more about the people in the Districts) seems really well-realised and captures the tonic of a traditional gothic tale superbly well.

The main part of the game feels like Bram Stoker's Life if Strange (which is a very good thing indeed), but when you're taken away from the social interactions of some nicely written, believably acted characters and forced to fight other vampires in a morgue, then go kill some unnamed humans, there's a jarring contrast.

Vampyr feels like two different games fighting against each other for dominance - and that feels fantastically apt, mimicking Reid's own battle with his literal demons. We just hope that in the final game, DONTNOD establishes a good balance and leverages the amazing art team, narrative expertise and experience of the studio to deliver something as captivating as its main character's thrall.​

And if you're looking for something slightly more positive, you can check out this Gameractor video interview with a couple of developers. An excerpt from the transcript:

In Vampyr you'll be going up against a mix of both supernatural enemies and human vampire hunters, and the decisions you make with regards to how you treat the people living around you will determine what sort of adversaries you come up against. Speaking about the deadly vampire hunters, Beauverger mentioned that "if you do not fight this kind of enemies, you will have to face supernatural creatures who for different reasons can also be very deadly to you."

"This is how the game will incite you to take a life, because you are a new vampire. You have been created as a vampire at the beginning of the game; you are not some very old vampire who has a lot of power, no, you will have to gain that power through the blood of the people you choose to kill. So this is how we reflect in the game the idea that a vampire is compelled to drink blood."

"So the game will not tell you that you have to take a life every night, that's not how it works. If you try to restrain yourself from killing innocents (or not so innocents) you have the right to do so, but it's so much easier to face dangerous situations when you have killed a few people before. That's how the game lures you into darkness."​

​

 

[Abu Antar]

As I feared. I stopped playing Remember Me because I didn't find combat to be fun.

 

[Zombra]

Hmm, a vampire RPG with a good story and interesting decisions irrevocably marred by shitty, unavoidable action sequences? Why does that sound familiar?

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

I'm convinced making good vampire games is the most difficult thing known to mankind.

 

[Ash]

Hmm, a vampire RPG with a good story and interesting decisions irrevocably marred by shitty, unavoidable action sequences? Why does that sound familiar?

There's a difference between popamole shit and VTM:B shit though. VTM:B shit is an unintentional failure of ambitious design while popamole crap is typically intentionally handholdey, easy, linear, simplistic, automated, cinematic etc. This looks like it is attempting to emulate a Ubisoft, Square Enix or Warner Bros abomination of shit. VTM:B gameplay may be not very good but it still has its moments, still can be engaging, still is somewhat diverse and so on.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Okay I just watched this video. I got that uncanny feeling its gonna turn into a train wreck.

They should stick with pot gals and trailerpark boiz.

 

[unfairlight]

Hmm, a vampire RPG with a good story and interesting decisions irrevocably marred by shitty, unavoidable action sequences? Why does that sound familiar?

There's a difference between popamole shit and VTM:B shit though. VTM:B shit is an unintentional failure of ambitious design while popamole crap is typically intentionally handholdey, easy, linear, simplistic, automated, cinematic etc. This looks like it is attempting to emulate a Ubisoft, Square Enix or Warner Bros abomination of shit. VTM:B gameplay may be not very good but it still has its moments, still can be engaging, still is somewhat diverse and so on.

hold down m1 with uzi
spam m1 with fists/katana
woah supar engaging combutt

 

[Ash]

Gameplay is exclusively combat now? Hush soyboy.

VTM:B's gameplay merits are in building your character, exploring the world (though the exploration is sadly not too rewarding and lacking challenges somewhat), managing your resources, the occassional puzzle element or deviation from the combat norm. Seeing how quests can turn out a little differently based on your gameplay choices. Hacking into computers by being observant and finding the password in the environment. Stuff like that, even though much of it isn't particularly good at least compared to better games. Combat while shit is also still better than piss easy automated brainless modern popamole trash.

 

[unfairlight]

No but considering that the latter part of the game is almost entirely combat where you just slog through bullet sponge enemies in 30 minute setpieces to a boss fight I'd say combat is a pretty large portion of the game. If the "puzzle elements" were in any other game that wasn't Troika it'd be called total shit. It's fucking toddler-grade, match the animal with the pillar, woah, 800 IQ minimum required to understand, truly Troika innovated once more. Managing your resources? What fucking resources? There's blood, and there's ammo. You go get some money and you buy some more if you run out or suck on some rats in the sewers.
Even Bethesda did hacking into computers better since there was some minimal amount of activity instead of just pressing Control-C and waiting for the time to run out. Shit, Bethesda did both lockpicking AND hacking better since I don't have to pointlessly wait for 5 seconds to find out if I could even lockpick or hack something the first place.

 

[Ash]

again, none of VTM:B gameplay is top tier, even the better parts, but it is still way more engaging than modern popamole.

 

[Storyfag]

Hmm, a vampire RPG with a good story and interesting decisions irrevocably marred by shitty, unavoidable action sequences? Why does that sound familiar?

It still remains to be ascertained whether this thing will have a good story and interesting decisions.

 

[Sykar]

No but considering that the latter part of the game is almost entirely combat where you just slog through bullet sponge enemies in 30 minute setpieces to a boss fight I'd say combat is a pretty large portion of the game. If the "puzzle elements" were in any other game that wasn't Troika it'd be called total shit. It's fucking toddler-grade, match the animal with the pillar, woah, 800 IQ minimum required to understand, truly Troika innovated once more. Managing your resources? What fucking resources? There's blood, and there's ammo. You go get some money and you buy some more if you run out or suck on some rats in the sewers.
Even Bethesda did hacking into computers better since there was some minimal amount of activity instead of just pressing Control-C and waiting for the time to run out. Shit, Bethesda did both lockpicking AND hacking better since I don't have to pointlessly wait for 5 seconds to find out if I could even lockpick or hack something the first place.

Only a few bosses are "bullet sponges" and they are incredibly powerful supernatural beings. Everyone will use disciplines but most disciplines cost quite a bit of blood and you have to chose wisely when to use them since you won't find enough of them and money to buy an endless supply and get all the good armors and weapons with sufficient ammunition and feeding is not always an option during combat. You make it sound like you can easily stock up on everything easily. You cannot. Also always going in the sewers and sucking rat blood is ineffective as hell. They give you 1 blood point and your pool is 15. Good luck doing that all the time without getting bored out of your mind and more importantly good luck doing that during combat.

Also no Bethesda did not do lock picking and hacking better. The mini games were boring as hell. What's more they undermined character building since they were reliant on player skill, not character skill which is what you want in an RPG. As rpgs Bethesda games since Oblivion are utter failures.

 

[Zombra]

There's a difference between popamole shit and VTM:B shit. This looks like it is attempting to emulate a Ubisoft, Square Enix or Warner Bros abomination.

I hope you don't think I meant that this will be indistinguishable from Bloodlines! It's just an amusing parallel.

As for this title ... good story with good C&C (and this looks at least worth checking out for that) with decently done popamole sequences (if such a thing can exist) can still be a great game. I wouldn't buy a game just for Arkham combat, but for me it's not a dealbreaker either. In this case though it sounds like the combat is actively crap (why would we expect better from Dontnod?), and more damningly it ruins the atmosphere and wrecks the pacing instead of adding texture and dimension like combat in a story-focused RPG should.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I'm convinced making good vampire games is the most difficult thing known to mankind.

After all, Blood Omen's p cool among Zelda clones. Soooooo...

https://youtu.be/CQZarDGRH1Q?t=22s

Only a few bosses are "bullet sponges" and they are incredibly powerful supernatural beings. Everyone will use disciplines but most disciplines cost quite a bit of blood and you have to chose wisely when to use them since you won't find enough of them and money to buy an endless supply and get all the good armors and weapons with sufficient ammunition and feeding is not always an option during combat. You make it sound like you can easily stock up on everything easily. You cannot. Also always going in the sewers and sucking rat blood is ineffective as hell. They give you 1 blood point and your pool is 15. Good luck doing that all the time without getting bored out of your mind and more importantly good luck doing that during combat.

I do have to point out that yes you will have far more than enough cash (multiple times over) than you need to buy all the armors and all the best guns (and you don't really need to buy the shitty ones but you basically could easily, it's just not worth it).

And there's never really a genuine point where you'd be short on blood (and by the end of the game you'll have a huge pile of bags to restock with, even if you'll probably only need them against Ming Xiao), vast majority of disciplines don't really require more than 1 point at a time and even then we run into one of Bloodlines' notable problems which is that Discipline balance is non-existance. The only ones that truly matter are Obfuscate 2, and Celerity as high as you can get. Celerity 5 is basically godmode and makes the endrun of the game considerably more pleasant to go through.

See the thing with Bloodlines is that its primary strength is in atmosphere and presentation (even in quest design it has that problem that there's always the perfect way to do things and then a bunch of bad ways to do things, the way Persuasion prints XP being a pretty notorious example for me in regards to overinflated value of a specific skill; security and computers are similar but not quite to the extent Persuasion could, see for example the Chinese retired hitmen quest), which are enough to make for the distinctly subpar-to-totalfuckingshit gameplay. It has that escape hatch in place that it managed to minimize the negative effects of its bad combat by making it essentially effortless.


As for Vampyr, like said before I really just don't care enough to even care that much about things beforehand. So I'll just chill and relax, and if it turns out to be decent fine by me, if it's bad I don't really care. Though I will not chill and relax about the fact this game too uses "vampirism as pathogen" trope because I fucking hate it. I do like when stories flip conventions upside down by positing implications of realism but there's a way to do it and there's when to do it, and I really don't like explaining something so explicitly supernatural as vampires in science fiction mumbo jumbo. Even if Alan Moore himself used it in one line in Still Waters which was a really awesome story in American Gothic arc of Swamp Thing!

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Yeah, I'll agree to that. Blood Omen 1 was pretty good, probably the best overall example of a vampire game done justice.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Even if does have its weaksides, for example by the time you make it past the demons and instead start fighting Nemesis' legions and vampire hunters you'll probably just spam magic because it's just much less of a hassle without the mace.

But it gets quite a bit of extra points for the sheer variety of magic and special abilities, and the large variety of enemies and hazards to navigate and the amount of Nosgoth to explore. And I already mentioned the way gameplay ties in with vampirism integrally by making predation on peasants delicious health pack hunting, something Bloodlines due to using White Wolf's pre-Requiem 2E morality meter (Requiem 2E has the best morality meter White Wolf has ever done, because Humanity is not a morality meter in it) has no choice but to pussy out of in contrast to Kain's glee for slaughter. I suppose it also helps that as the main character Kain is very very distinctly vampiric, and delightfully cynical and bitingly commentative of his vampirism and the overall shitholeness of the world around him which makes Simon Templeman's top-notch narration of Kain's endless internal monologue absolute pleasure to listen because of the charisma and wit of the antihero character and the performance of the voice actor.


And while Soul Reaver is better, it's not really a vampire game in the same sense as Blood Omen (or more like at all like Blood Omen, aside from the killing vampires part) is very much a Vampire game to the point of it being the second-most-important subgenre for it after Zelda-clone.

 

[Valtiel]

Goddamn Soul Reaver lore is great, if those games were not so tiring to play today I would replay the entire series, never played blood omen 1 though, just watched some long play. Vampires needs clans!

Anyway, whoever thought that Vampyr could be something else apart from Life Is Strange kind of interactivity, is delusional, the thing this kind of games tries to bring to the table is C&C and most of all atmosphere/mood/nice setting, in this case they added some light action gameplay (which honestly feels to me the worst possibile decision, stick with narrative and branching paths instead of putting boring and bad developed action sequences). It should not be compared to VtM:BL (which of course will remain a better game, I'll tell you even before Vampyr release), Vampyr is barely an RPG, it isn't meant to let you role play, just stick with this character and explore the story. One should onyl hope the C&C will be solid

 

[Cross]

What do you know, my prediction from a few pages back that Vampyr will suffer from a massive disconnect between story and gameplay (and crappy gameplay and story, at that) turned out to be accurate:

I got involved in a mission to retrieve some medical supplies from an abandoned building, over-run with skal. It involved lots of repetitive fighting and following objective markers through dingy rooms.

This is the confusion of Vampyr. It’s a game that tells me that taking a life matters, but then finds ways to throw disposable enemies at me whenever I leave the safety of the hospital. It’s a game that wants me to consider my choice of victim, but I’m only killing them so that I can unlock awesome new murdery vampire abilities. And I was shocked by how quickly it moves from being the story of a freshly turned vampire to being a game in which the existence of vampires, in various forms, and the presence of a vampire-killing cult in central London is entirely ordinary. Some of the mystery of the myth is waved aside far too quickly.

After my time with Vampyr I left with the sensation that the game is divided. While your interactions with London’s citizens have an affect on combat - in that you can raise your level by killing people and drinking their blood - the two parties don’t weave together well. Many games create a dichotomy between the characters you interact with and the mindless enemies you kill. But in Vampyr that dichotomy is not so comfortable.

This is a game that puts stock in a story of a man becoming a monster; it asks you to see both sides of him and the conflict between them. Having a black-and-white system that depicts characters who possess humanity on one side, and street thugs who do not on the other, is jarring. Reid considers his murder of one of the supposed innocents a monstrous act but he is left unconflicted by killing a string of human vampire hunters only moments before.

While Vampyr is a game about internal struggle it seems too much of that tension lies between its systems.

 

[DeepOcean]

Hmm, a vampire RPG with a good story and interesting decisions irrevocably marred by shitty, unavoidable action sequences? Why does that sound familiar?

Keep in mind that for all its flaws, Bloodlines drawn alot of inspiration from Deus Ex and the PnP system, yes the "story" was the main focus but Troika tried implementing a RPG, with social skills, characters builds, different races, options for character development and all that shit, you could hack computers, persuade people, lockpick doors, had fire arms and melee skills, all that.

This game looks alot more like the Mass Effect series, shitty popamole easy combat with token character development system and "social" interaction system that will probably boil down to cosmetic choices like Mass Effect did and Life is Strange too.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-02-20-vampyr-gameplay-hands-on

Vampyr's parasitic promise is plagued by conflict
Ludonarrative dissofangs.

By Edwin Evans-Thirlwell Published 22/02/2018

Disease has always been joined at the hip to superstition and fantasy - the term "influenza" once referred to the influence of unfriendly stars - but there's something especially, horribly otherworldly about the flu epidemic of 1918-1920, which claimed over 50 million lives. Invisible to the microscopes of the era, the Spanish flu was a phantom terror, its spread censored to shore up morale in the closing stages of the Great War. Where other outbreaks had ravaged children and the elderly, this one bizarrely reserved its worst excesses for hearty young adults: its effects included "cytokine storms" that turned stronger immune systems against themselves, drowning the afflicted in their own bodily fluids. With no cure forthcoming, many sufferers fell back on folk remedies and occult treatments, lining their nostrils with salt, tying ribbons to their arms and burning brown sugar or sulfur to chase away evil miasmas. It's from this tangle of science and myth, monsters of the imagination versus the monsters of the laboratory, that Dontnod's long-in-development Vampyr takes its cue.

Vampyr is an odd beast, the kind of cheesy yet high-concept fare Dontnod seems to specialise in, but its appeal and potential shortcomings are easy to summarise: it's one kind of game eating another kind of game alive, a third-person RPG-brawler with its fangs sunk into the neck of an open-ended, dialogue-driven adventure game. Brooding, hirsute protagonist Jonathan Reid is boss doctor at a London hospital in 1918, charged with the well-being of 60 fully fleshed-out civilian characters, from flu patients and recovering soldiers to the crooks, shopkeepers, scholars and charlatans in the pubs and alleyways beyond. He's also, however, a closet vampire who spends his leisure hours duffing up would-be Van Helsings and other, less sociable varieties of undead, and he needs plenty of blood to unlock and improve his abilities.

You'll steal a few mouthfuls of gore from opponents in combat, all of whom appear to be generic characters that can be slain with impunity, but the most bountiful sources are the civilians in your care. It creates a rather dramatic conflict of interest - and a potent balance of player priorities, with the consequences writ large both in the number of plot threads available and the ambience of this region-based open world. Are you just another mindless plague in a plagued city, reducing hard-up districts to flame-licked wastelands devoid of friendly presences, tearing the very narrative fabric of the game apart as you thin out London's ailing society? Or will you try to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving, or even do without those precious level-ups entirely?

A bit of strategy is necessary in either case, because Reid can't just barge in everywhere like a disagreeable toddler, biting and kicking - he needs to maintain his cover as a doctor. He also, ideally, needs to ensure that his victims are in peak condition, and it's here that the game's exploration of vampirism as an allegory for real-life disease gets very intriguing. Healthier people yield a more bountiful harvest, so even if you're minded to chug down the entire cast, you'll still want to play the healer, crafting remedies at Reid's various unlockable hideaways for ailments like colds. This echoes the way the most pernicious and enduring real-life virus strains are, in fact, the least aggressive. Viruses can't prosper, after all, if they kill off every host before that host has a chance to infect others.


Keeping your prey in the pink aside, you'll also be able to drink deeper for bonus XP if you know each character well. This entails a bit of detective work, like tracking down a journalist who's written about the object of your appetites, or sifting rooms for documents. In the process, you'll fetch up against a few of vampirism's celebrated disadvantages. Reid can't enter a dwelling without permission, for example, so you'll need to either persuade the occupant to let you in or use your supernatural charm to overcome their doubts.

Each character has a numerical mental resilience: lower it enough by uncovering "hints" about the other person, and Reid can force them to reveal things or do his bidding, ultimately leading the poor soul off to a quiet corner where he can gorge unnoticed. Traits and relationships between characters can be studied in menus, and a crimson X-ray vision mode lets you appraise passers-by much as Ubisoft's Watch Dogs let you scan their phone histories. Strolling through a smoggy and downtrodden Whitechapel, eyeing up the circulatory systems and secrets of unsuspecting pedestrians, I felt very much the parasite, probing the city's moribund flesh for weaknesses.

It's a fascinating setup in a medium that is sadly anaemic when it comes to vampire stories. Where it might fall over is in the actual writing and more seriously, the combat. Vampyr's opener is a bit of a dog's dinner: Reid wakes up on a pile of corpses, realises that he is undead and promptly gets into a murderous brawl (read: series of tutorials) with a bunch of rag-tag vampire hunters, all while bellowing things like "this horror - it's a nightmare!" and "you leave me no choice!" There's a capital-T Tragic Event that makes zero impression because you obviously have no history with the people concerned, and a lot of winceworthy, theatrical asides such as "what is darkness but setting sun?"

Thankfully, an episode I was shown from much later suggests that the script does find its feet. At this stage, Reid had become a personable blend of steely compassion and quiet menace, and there are some powerful sequences and decisions in store - trying to revive a rapidly fading patient, for example, while a nurse you're investigating for criminal behaviour alternately helps out and questions your decisions. The broad thrust of the plot sees Reid tracking down the vampire who turned him, and I'm hoping it will really dig into the tension between his hard-nosed professional rationalism and the supernatural events that ensue.

I'm much less hopeful about the fighting, which is a bit of a dirty great hammer to the rest of the game's gleaming scalpel. You've got three-hit combos, a choice of double-handed weapons or a knife and pistol, dodge rolls, parries and a parade of slightly flaccid special moves. The latter draw upon a blood gauge (not to be confused with blood-as-XP) that is replenished by nibbling on opponents after softening them up with an elbow-stun. Reid can sculpt the red stuff into spears and mist bombs, turn invisible, maul people with vaporous claws, pounce on them from afar and coagulate the blood in their veins to sabotage their defences. Human opponents will retaliate with fire and blade, other vampires with tooth and claw; both categories of foe are split straightforwardly between grunts, ranged threats and lumbering meatshields who must be whittled down.

It's serviceable enough as third-person fisticuffs go, and there's longevity in the form of ability mods that let you, for example, toss three blood-spears in one or absorb enemy health using those mist bombs. But all of it feels on loan from a less ambitious game, which makes the thought of a parasitic/symbiotic relationship with Vampyr's narrative sandbox as troubling as it is enticing. It's not like you can avoid the fighting, as some encounters are woven into the story; indeed, those difficult decisions about whether to feed and level up rely on you occasionally being thrust into battle. The idea of narratives and systems that prey upon one another is delightfully vicious, but it also speaks to the gulf between the Dontnod of a few years ago, known for smart but unremarkable action games like Remember Me, and the Dontnod propelled to fame by the Life Is Strange adventure series. It's as though the studio's past were trying to take a sneaky bite out of its present.

The 1918 flu strain vanished of its own accord, but it has been recovered and synthesised from corpse tissue preserved by Alaskan permafrost. The virus is currently being kept in a research facility in Atlanta, a prospect best not pondered late at night. Influenza at large, of course, is an on-going problem, and for all the march of science many superstitions about it persist. Last month I was laid up with the flu and found myself maniacally repeating the old mantra "feed a cold and starve a fever". On Googling this today I find out that it is largely make-believe, if not quite as silly as shoving salt up your nose. There's certainly a place, then, for a game like Vampyr, which sheds light on the mythologisation of disease while entwining genres to brilliantly virulent effect. So far, though, it's not quite as infectious as I'd like it to be.

 

[frajaq]

I hope this game is actually decent, I'm not asking for much man

Just don't play with my heart devs

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Zombra]

Ugh. For all the garbage and filler this game apparently has, teasing and experimenting with the C&C web sounds like it might be too good not to try.