hmm.
IGN said:
RPG Site said:
Gaming "journalism"
So ACG has attention span of 25 hours per RPG? Impressive, very nice.
oh I wonder what those dying thoughts will be like
Vampyr review - a beautiful premise wasted in this bland action RPG
Dontnod takes a thrillingly Gothic perspective on early 19th century London, but squanders it in a dreary and indecisive adventure.
Great Gothic horror is all about colour, or lack thereof. The black of night, the white of bone, the monochrome of a gloomy cobblestoned street illuminated dimly by a single paraffin lamp. When colour is used, it's to highlight scenes of the macabre and the morbid so beloved by penny dreadfuls - the yellowing of a lonely mouldering corpse, the fetid green bile of a plague victim, or a single bright glob of crimson gore. Where it should never exist is within the realms of beige.
Vampyr is an action RPG that attempts to get right back to the roots of great Gothic horror in a medium that is often criminally lacking. Jonathan Reid is a renowned doctor specialising in blood transfusions - what else? - and serves as a military doctor in the Great War before being attacked on a London street one night by an unknown assailant and transformed into a newborn vampire. Who his Maker is, no-one can say, but soon Reid is embroiled in a plot to find the source of the sickness and figure out why a bunch of secret mystical orders are suddenly making a reappearance.
The set-up is rushed through in an angst-ridden prologue that places you in the aftermath of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which at its height claimed millions of lives. In the midst of all that, when bodies lined the streets and fear and chaos gripped the nation's capital, who'd notice the absence of a lonely Whitechapel shopkeeper, a vicious Dockland gang-leader, a friendly West End grave-robber? It's buffet season for the immortal undead, but as a man once sworn to do no harm, will you partake?
Well, as Vampyr itself loudly claims in its opening seconds, "What is life but death pending?" Ouch. The writing can get rather embarrassing, with the game's intro springing clangers like "what is glass but tortured sand?" and "what is darkness but setting sun?" Every line is delivered with an earnestness that the basic facial animations often fail to sell. That's not entirely Vampyr's fault though - tortured navel-gazing goes hand-in-hand with the genre - and as a former doctor thrust into this vamp-eat-vamp world without any explanation, Reid has equal reasons to lash out in anger or to try and claw his way back to a normal life.
This is the game's central conceit - will you heal or will you hurt? Will you uphold your hippocratic oath or will you succumb to your bloodlust? Unfortunately, it never feels like the dramatic conflict the game makes it out to be. Essentially, NPCs grant a certain amount of XP when bitten, but you can maximise this boost before you bite by healing that NPC of any illnesses that may be sapping their strength, and by unlocking hints as to the complexity of their character, which apparently makes them taste all the sweeter. There's rarely any skill involved, save for rummaging through houses for letters and documents and exhausting all possible options on the dialogue wheel of that individual and those of anyone close to them, but sometimes, if you observe people while your vampire sense is active, you'll see them glow bright. Standing in a specific location marked on the ground while this happens will unlock a short cutscene in which you typically observe them doing something strange or illicit, which will in turn unlock another hint you can confront them with. Occasionally you can fail hints by picking the wrong dialogue response, but it's all a little bit moot unless you plan on 'embracing' (biting) that individual eventually anyway.
And therein lies the rub. Vampyr insists the fewer lives you take the harder it will be, so following the righteous path and not killing anyone (humans that you bite and kill in combat apparently don't count) is essentially playing the game on hard mode. And yet, there's never really any reward for doing this, save for a couple of appreciative mentions from specific NPCs and very hasty, blink-and-you-miss-it lip service during the ending cutscene. As someone who likes a challenge and who usually tries to attempt the virtuous route in narrative games, it's difficult not to feel short-changed, especially since it doesn't take long for the story to spiral away from the genuinely interesting lives of mortals trying to survive a very dark chapter in London's history to some over-the-top apocalyptic battle between three ancient warring factions.
That's the real disappointment with Vampyr - it doesn't say or do anything new with the genre (already sadly under-utilised in video games) or the interesting premise it sets up for itself. Instead it retreads old tropes with no flair or wit of its own. It borrows from the greats - and name-checks a fair few of them too - but these are all stories we've heard before. There's the tortured vampire reluctant to take a life, the family heartbreak, the secret orders pulling strings from the shadows, the mortal thralls waiting for their chance at immortality, the vampire hunters protecting the not-always-innocent civilians while resolutely refusing to acknowledge your remaining humanity - these are all very familiar stories to any fans of Gothic horror. There are a couple of NPC hints that lead to minor asides involving LGBT relationships, racism and female suffrage, but like every other side quest, these stories are never expanded upon or explored with anything more than a line or two of vaguely sympathetic dialogue, particularly if they aren't drawn to a conclusion involving a dark alley and some pointy teeth.
When you aren't chatting with or patching up potential snacks, you're fighting them. Basic combat consists of wielding either a two-handed weapon or favouring one in each hand - one melee weapon like a hacksaw or a sabre and one off-hand weapon such as a shotgun or a stake. Then you have your special abilities that must be unlocked over time, which range from defensive to offensive to passive; razor sharp claws that can damage enemies and give you a blood boost, blood barriers that can absorb damage, health regeneration, and ultimate attacks which include the ability to go full-on beast mode for a few seconds, striking out at any enemies in your vicinity.
The most important element of combat that Vampyr doesn't do a great job of teaching you about is Blood (separate to the blood you harvest in search of XP boosts), which acts a bit like vampiric mana. Off-hand weapons like the stake inflict an amount of stun damage to an enemy, shown as a gauge below their overall health. Stunning them completely will knock them to the ground, allowing you to bite them and replenish your Blood meter, which you can then use to pull off more special attacks. Battles therefore become a balance of alternating regular and special attacks, dodging, healing aggravated damage (that is, damage by fire or by holy relics that chip away your overall health bar and don't allow for gradual regeneration outside of battle) and biting enemies so you can refill your Blood meter and do it all again.
There's fun in finding the right rhythm, but all too often it can boil down to a frustrating war of attrition as you work through mobs of tanks, fire-wielders and long-range threats. Boss fights - particularly if you are playing virtuously and so are likely under-levelled - last far too long and test your patience long before they test your skill, with foes sporting bloated health bars and the same two or three lines of dialogue that they will repeat constantly until you're slowly losing the will to live. Vampires might have all the time in the world, but that doesn't mean the same can be expected of players.
It all comes off as a missed opportunity, and you feel that if Vampyr had focused solely on either combat or narrative design it could have done something truly interesting, and more importantly satisfying, with either of them, instead of stretching itself thin. As it stands it feels more like a Jack of all trades, and though it talks a big talk about the consequences of taking and sparing lives, it does seem to prioritise combat over story, especially since the former is an unavoidable fact of afterlife and the only reason for unlocking hints and taking lives for XP is to bulk up your arsenal of spooky skills with which you'll take even more lives, but the kind that don't actually matter in the grand scheme of the narrative.
Added to this, there's a general lack of polish that tends to stack up. The loading times are painfully long (run too quickly from one open area to another and the game will forcefully pause mid-action to load everything in) and bugs like framerate lag occasionally crop up in combat. In one instance my game crashed to the console, and in another a fairly monumental boss fight suffered from some serious audio stuttering throughout, until I quit the game completely and reloaded. These are issues that will no doubt be fixed in time, but it all suggests Vampyr could have done with a little longer in development to improve the initial experience for early adopters.
It's also unclear how much individual player choices actually matter. One sequence fairly early on involves Reid working with a nurse to try and save a man on the operating table, asking questions and making demands as he cuts the patient from root to stem and fought against his urge to take a bite, but despite loading and reloading and tackling the scenario from a variety of different angles, every one ended the same way.
It's not all doom and gloom though. There's a satisfaction in being able to craft medicines and tonics to heal your favourite civilians (though it is jarring not to have the 'formula' to cure a simple headache when your pockets are overflowing with codeine) and to monitor their reactions as events unfold around the neighbourhood, with relationships and social circles between NPCs evolving and entangling. The Pembroke Hospital, the first main hub of the game, offers up a delightful wealth of weirdos and ne'er-do-wells to investigate, some of which you end up feeling oddly protective over. And Vampyr knows its setting, too, bringing Victorian London's grimy backstreets to life beneath an appropriately maudlin soundtrack. It's a well-crafted world, small but perfectly formed, which makes it more of a pity your interactions there are so limited.
Pressing in the left stick on consoles triggers Jonathan Reid's Vampire Sense, which renders the world as he sees it, in black and white save for the liberal splashings of blood that line London's darkened streets, and the bright beating hearts of the everyday folk he has promised to protect. But had Vampyr taken time to fully flesh out all those moral grey areas for the rich narrative vein they presented, rather than treat them as a resource to prop up an unremarkable combat system, it could have been a pretty special game. As it is, even with lashings of the red stuff, Vampyr ends up decidedly beige.
Wot I Think: Vampyr
“Forget everything you think you know about vampires,” the noblewoman in period dress tells me, in her straight-out-of-Hammer cut-glass accent. This was during our latest night-time meeting (for we cannot walk in sunlight), shortly after I’d caught her secretly sinking her teeth into the necks of the dispossessed, and shortly before I’d been beset by agony upon trying to enter a church. I don’t know what foolish notions her ladyship thought I had about my new status as a fellow vamp – maybe that they all have Welsh accents, or drink blood via their toenails – but ambitious, atmospheric fangs ‘n’ conversation game Vampyr doesn’t often veer far from the current neck-biter hymn sheet.
It sure does veer in almost every other respect, mind you. I’m not sure that 2018 will yield many games quite as expansive as Vampyr, but what I wouldn’t give for a director’s cut that oiled its creakiest coffin hinges.
Vampyr comes from the folks behind delightful narrative adventure Life Is Strange. That game’s big decision-making and casual sleuthing pumps clearly through Vampyr’s veins, though its hefty combat element shares a bloodline with LIS predecessor Remember Me. The other major DNA strand, as quite a few of us have prayed for, is revered 2004 undead-noir RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Vampyr similarly explores the uncomfortable realities of mortals and immortals secretly sharing a world, but very rarely is it either so playful or harrowing about it.
Vampyr plays out in a sickness ‘n’ monster-plagued London, just after the Great War. Dr Jonathan Reid is stricken with an aversion to sunlight and a thirst for the red stuff, and in turn must investigate supernatural conspiracy while upholding his medical duties during a city-wide epidemic. Whether he becomes a wanton killer, a needs-must brutal hero or a combat-avoidant investigator is up to you.
In theory. Many of Vampyr’s main plot beats are surprisingly inflexible, but offset by occasional big moral dilemmas expressed with all the clarity of someone singing Mahna Manha into a blocked drain pipe. Imagine playing Dishonored, being careful to never kill or be caught. All that hard work of sneaking and silent throttling, but then, at the end of the mission, you have to play a round of Find The Lady to determine whether the district you so cautiously moved through embraces peace and liberty or becomes a wasteland of corpses and plague. (Or vice-versa – malevolent play, happy outcome).
In Vampyr, all your conversations, all your dealings with the petty concerns of mortals, all your hours spent scouring an ever-twilight and labyrinthine London and engaging in tricky fights that play out a little like a baby Bloodborne come down to a conversational lottery at the end of each ‘act.’ Choose unluckily and you’ll incite almost comically melodramatic outcomes not remotely implied by the vague dialogue choices offered. The main plot does at least march on, broadly keeping this carnage off to one side of it, but it’s nonetheless a gut-punch to, say, instantly lose major NPCs.
Vampyr’s checkpoints-only, single savefile system (i.e. you cannot load an older save) means I’m unable to experience less ludicrous outcomes without a total do-over. I respect the integrity of this, in a ‘you break it, you bought it’ sort of way, but I don’t think I’d rush to do it all again. This is not, like LIS, an episodic game you can revisit in fenced-off chunks. There will be clamouring for a full-fat save system soon after Vampyr’s release, and it should be heeded, whether or not it involves diluting the purity of its creative blood.
Maybe Vampyr consciously embraces the butterfly effect here, despite spelling most everything else out at great length, or maybe its writing needs another pass. Certainly, smaller things have been lost in translation. While the dialogue as a whole is solid (if overly dour), the subtitles are gently peppered with errors, the occasional line sounds mangled, and too often an excess of bone-dry exposition takes precedence over personality.
All the same, Vampyr has glamoured me enough to persist past a few rage-quits spurred by these absurd outcomes. This is a huge and agreeably grim world, full of dark corners to investigate, soaking up the hours with a frothy mix of exploration, tense fights and slow-burn clue-hunting. I mentioned Dark Souls offshoot Bloodborne earlier, and Vampyr sups from its holy veins in a way beyond vaguely shared (though infinitely less imaginative here) Gothic aesthetics. This London is a dark maze of danger spots and safezones, mentally-mapped and short-cutted by repeat exploration and growing strength.
Though the combat isn’t anything like as unforgiving, it’s satisfyingly tactical, complex and requires careful specialisation. You could be a pure, stamina-rich brawler, or someone deft at dazing foes so they can move in for uninterrupted neck-bites, someone whose every attack gains them Blood that can be used to activate special, monstrous attacks, someone who’s constantly self-healing and shrouding themselves in mystic barriers…
A strong spec and growing familiarity with how to combo your various skills and weapons means you can take down foes far tougher than you. I’ve snarled in fury at my umpteenth death to an overpowered boss, but I’ve done so knowing that this was a genuine test of skill, rather than thinking it unfair. I suspect anyone picking up Vampyr because of LIS is most anticipating the choice ‘n’ consequence side of things, as I was, but I came away most enraptured by the combat. You’ll want a gamepad, however – mouse and keyboard don’t feel good here.
Despite all the killing, I have striven to be good. In my mind, I’m roleplaying as a noble vamp who only kills when attacked, and once in a while secretly slays those who inflict suffering upon others (a racist slum landlord, for instance). There are some consequences, but it’s to Vampyr’s credit that it doesn’t have anything as overt as a ‘humanity meter’: this is a more internal kind of character-building, being the person I want to be, as opposed to one who tries to game the system. Being good is a state of mind, rather than a path to obvious rewards, while being bad results in eerily depopulated areas: a more powerful consequence than a lurid cutscene or a cancelled mission objective. Still, I sometimes felt that my choices what manner of man/beast I am were met with barely a shrug, at least until late denouements, because Vampyr was too busy telling a fixed tale.
This is not full the personality-shaping of Bloodlines’ conversations, but rather the main character is akin to LIS’ Max or a Telltale hero: fixed but with some flexibility. I’d be more on board with this if vamptagonist Jonathan was more interesting: his persistent formality might reflect the stiff-upper-lip era, but he’s a bit of a wet blanket, plus the game frequently makes him (me) say and do things I never would have chosen to myself. I could not, for instance, object to a secret cartel of society-manipulating jingoists, because the plot demanded that I join them for a while. So often in Vampyr I wanted to tell someone they were being a colossal penis, or to mediate between entrenched, extreme positions, but the story is the story.
More appealing is the uncomfortable paradox of Jonathan being both a blood-supping terror and a dedicated medical professional, though the more fascinating elements of this are lost in the ongoing din of exposition. A further layer to the game has you regularly dashing around disease-ridden London boroughs, offering remedies to put-upon NPCs for their fatigue, cold and migraine, which in theory affects shop prices and XP opportunities, but too often feels like tacked-on busywork that’s a repetitive alternative to meatier reputation-building missions. Whenever you ‘rest’ to spend XP on skill upgrades, the boroughs’ denizens gain new afflictions, necessitating mixing up more meds and another long-winded sprint through oft-trodden streets. Between this schlepp and my exasperation at the moral dilemma lottery, I increasingly let boroughs slide into chaos – the dark side is easier and with its own rewards, though it isn’t where I wanted to be.
The supporting cast left few puncture marks upon my neck either – anyone hoping for a Chloe is going to be disappointed here, let alone a Jeanette or Heather. More impressively (and appropriate to the setting) it does engage with the issues of the in-game day – medical ethics, war trauma, the nascent women’s rights movement, the class and race divide (much of which has painful relevance in 2018). Like so much else in Vampyr’s tale, most of this involves grim faces telling rather than showing via deed or force of personality, so I’m not sure how many blows are landed, but I appreciate the attempt to be more than a grisly supernatural saga.
Perhaps fittingly, people are ultimately resources. Uncovering their secrets (broadly via dialogue with the characters around them) boosts the XP granted if you decide to drink their blood, or you can rack up a smaller amount of points by completing various fetch or rescue quests for some of them. You don’t have to drink blood, but you’ll be about as fearsome as Milhouse going trick or treating if you don’t. Vampyr’s most compelling aspect, for me, was straddling the line between being strong enough to survive and not becoming a wanton murderer. Diligent looting, side-questing and tactical monster-battling can see you through without having to turn to open psychopathy, if you’re willing to put the hours in.
You can avoid most combat, though you need to know you’re doing this from the start if you want certain endings. It’s a fiendishly tricky business, as anywhere other than conversation and quest hubs is patrolled by a mix of instantly-aggressive vampire hunters and ‘skal’, a low-grade, bestial vampternative. You can eventually spec out your character with invisibility and self-protection skills in order to dash past these guys without dying every time, but the stealth systems are rudimentary and clunky, making this hard and repetitive graft that I would say is best left to achievement hunters. Playing like this also means gaining minimal XP, leaving you in a tricky spot for the mandatory boss fights.
I do love that there’s this profoundly different way of playing, but, unusually for me, the open fisticuffs playstyle thrilled me in a way the hiding and running one did not – and in any case, the boss fights mean you cannot remain a pure pacifist.
My surprise with Vampyr is that I’ve enjoyed it as a combat game much more than I have a chat ‘n’ choice one – the exact opposite of what I’d have expected from the makers of Life Is Strange. The characters rarely sparkle, the biggest choices are too much of a lottery, and there’s little tension around the vampiric conceit – blood-drinking is a nonchalant option, not a desperate thirst as it is repeatedly described. And, despite that noblewoman’s bold assertion that we should not expect the befanged expected, there is very little freshness to this exploration of the undead condition. Although I do enjoy the griminess, the filth and the viscera of its world. An exaggerated squalor, perhaps, but there is a real sense that this London is only moments away from total collapse.
I’m frustrated that Vampyr falls just short of truly combining a smart choose-your-own-adventure game with a meaty action one. It’ll never happen, but a director’s cut that thins the sombre exposition and eases the medical busywork, injects more pep, and makes decisions decisions, rather than often either a roulette wheel or a railroaded path, would create a dream combination of darkness and light. Nonetheless, as a sprawling midnight world of tight fights and atmospheric exploration, this is a fat vein I keep returning to.
ruh ro. sounds like we have a case of gaming is teh hard
Vampyr PC review
The horror stories embedded in our culture have mostly grown out of ancient folk wisdom. They’re used to warn us against taboo behaviour and to scare the young away from danger. Don’t go into the woods alone, they say, for scary creatures with sharp teeth live there. Vampire fiction has always been a precaution about the seductive side of evil and the corrupting influence of power. Vampyr is a fresh story in this vein but one that is held back by a tendency to reach beyond its grasp.
You are Doctor Jonathan Reid, a brilliant surgeon and transfusion researcher who has just returned home after serving as a medical officer on the frontlines in the First World War. Reid, along with many of Vampyr’s large cast of characters, is deeply affected by the war, but his concerns are secondary to the devastating outbreak of Spanish Flu that is ravaging the poorer districts of London in 1918. Corpses pile up faster than they can be buried; the medical community is helpless against the rotting tide.
As the game opens, Reid returns from an unexpected bout of unconsciousness to find himself in a mass grave, surrounded by the dead. He hallucinates the world as crumbling ash while voices echo in his head, barely understood. All Reid knows for sure is that he is very, very thirsty. The opening few minutes do an excellent job of setting the stage for the story that’s to come.
Reid winds up working at the Pembroke Hospital in the East End after being rescued by fellow physician, Edgar Swansea, who knows that the flu epidemic is hiding an outbreak of vampirism. As a member of the Brotherhood of Saint Paul’s Stole, Swansea wants to learn what or who is responsible for the surge in undead activity.
Vampyr sets out to do a lot for one game: it’s a third-person action adventure with lock-on combat that has you managing a stamina meter, which you mostly use up to avoid attacks. It’s also a narrative adventure that urges you to explore a sprawling and labyrinthine map of London’s East End in search of citizens to interview and problems to resolve. There’s even a management layer introduced as Reid keeps tabs on the health of the citizens and concocts medicines to help the ill.
There’s a lot of fighting to be done as you make your way through London’s seedy dockyards and neighbourhoods. Swansea isn’t the only one who’s cottoned on to the recent undead outbreak - there’s a gang of militant vampire hunters called Priwen’s Guard who prowl the streets looking for “leeches,” armed with clubs, shotguns, and crucifixes. And then there’s the skal: the discarded offspring of careless vampires who have become ravenous and feral in their thirst.
With these threats around it’s a big shame that the combat underwhelms. It’s functional and can be challenging, sure, but it cannot escape comparison to Bloodborne, to which it pales dramatically. There aren’t enough enemy types and most don’t push you to change up your tactics. Boss fights in particular are disappointing as they typically involve circling your foe, dodging a string of attacks, and then dashing in for a few quick strikes. Rinse, lather, repeat. The upgradeable weapons fare a little better, as they include two-handed polearms, axes, surgical hacksaws, and firearms. But they don’t have the character of Bloodborne’s trick weapons.
The one area Vampyr does hold up against its superior is Reid’s vampiric blink ability, which he uses to dart out of danger, with most of the grace of Bloodborne’s birdlike dash. It’s one of Reid’s vampire abilities - which you can expand upon and improve by cashing in experience in a hideout - each of which are powered by the blood you drain from stunned enemies, or the vials you craft at workbenches.
Vampyr treads on firmer ground with its story, which is filled with strange, suspicious, and sympathetic people who are caught up in the carnage on the streets. Between the flu, the war, and debilitating poverty, the East End’s citizens are largely oblivious to the vampire activity in their midst. There are tons of side stories about broken dreams, tragedy, and love scattered around Vampyr’s maze-like streets.
All are fully voiced, with some terrific performances turned in for key characters, particularly Reid. The worst of them step in time with the stereotypes you’d expect, cursing at you in cockney accents that belong in a staging of Sweeney Todd. The character models are dated too, but the attention given to the textures and details of costumes and the environments go a long way to make up for this.
Surprisingly, it’s the management layer that puts Vampyr in better stead against its peers in the genre. Each of the four districts has its own chart of citizens who are all grouped around that particular community’s pillar. If too many citizens in a district fall ill then it’ll descend into chaos, which means tougher enemies will emerge on the streets. It’s important to work against this as Vampyr doesn’t have fast-travel, and so the treks from one side of Whitechapel to the other can become a slog if the path is crawling with werewolves. You won’t necessarily miss fast-travel, though, as there’s value in prowling the streets of London, fangs at the ready.
Most of Vampyr’s cast of characters can be fed upon for tasty bursts of XP. You simply need to engage them in conversation, use your mesmerise ability, and lead the hypnotised quarry to a quiet spot where you can sink your teeth into their neck, draining them of their blood. However, some characters are more resistant to your mesmerism, so you’ll need to be a high enough level to overpower their will. It’s an ingenious device, simultaneously a compelling game system - it’s far and away the most effective method for levelling your abilities - and one that ties neatly into the classic image of the seductive creature of the night.
The upshot of this system is that you actually begin to think like a vampire. Your interest in healing the sick may begin with a noble urge to keep a district from falling into ruin, but eventually you’ll run into a boss who gives you a drubbing, and suddenly the neighbourhoods appear as if a farm full of animals to fatten up. I was about to make another trip to an early boss encounter but found myself thinking, ‘I should go bite someone. That would make this easier.’ And it did.
What’s struck me most about my time with Vampyr is that it manages to turn you into a predator through its mechanics as much as it does with its storytelling. It does collapse under its own weight by the end, but the fact that it so effectively seduces you, almost trance-like, into roleplaying a villain makes it worth biting into.
Verdict: 7/10
Disappointing, that.
Did you only play the first hour of Bloodlines or what?
Nah they will be all positive memories,because all then niggers and feminists will be nobles and scientists. If they are slaves i will not bother to drink from their hobo necks,will leave them to become rotting zombies or what ever is that plague .
