Despite the enduring allure of vampires, only a handful of quality vampire video games have ever been made. Of these, most have been action games with limited depth and meager stories. In fact, the case could be made that 2004’s cult classic Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is the only video game to truly let players become a vampire, with all the power and responsibility that entails.
Hence, some 14 years after Bloodlines the stage is set for Dontnod Entertainment (Remember Me, Life is Strange) to release Vampyr, an intelligent role-playing game claiming to offer a true vampire experience built around choices and consequences and set in a fantastically bleak 1918 London. For vampire devotees the thirst is there, but can Vampyr deliver?
Happily, Vampyr does indeed immerse the player in its despairing plague-ridden night-world, wherein you interact with truly interesting and varied characters each with lives and motivations. This is a world worth investigating, in large part thanks to the absolutely top-notch voice acting and believable dialogue. As you converse with various individuals you will try to collect hints to piece together each character’s true story and motives, in an attempt to help and heal. Which brings us to who you are.
“What have I done? This horror; it’s a nightmare.” – Dr. Reid
Vampyr begins by placing you into the role of Dr. Jonathan Reid, a medical doctor or some renown turned vampire by an unknown power. Dr. Reid’s truly phenomenal performance deserves special mention. He is an astoundingly brilliant main character, transporting you, nay mesmerizing you into the role of good doctor turned vampire. As he speaks, one feels his burning desire to help and heal and learn and grow. And this melding of vampire and healer is a truly unique angle previously unexplored in gaming.
“Nothing good can come of fighting who we are.” – L. Ashbury
Beyond the medical aspect, Vampyr’s main appeal is in Dr. Reid’s internal struggle between the humanity he cherishes and inner-monstrosity threatening to consume him. The game clearly understands this struggle, even labeling it “Blood Temptation” and explaining you must choose whether to give into the urge to kill for blood (experience points!) or to be true to your beliefs as a doctor. Vampyr is at its best when grappling with these issues!
There are other various gameplay mechanics like a simple but effective crafting and upgrading system mainly fueled by looting corpses and scrounging around in the environment. The skills system is also very basic, but gives you a few choices regarding upgrades. It’s all effective enough.
Visually speaking, the game has a painterly style with a dark brown and black tone. The environments do a fantastic job conveying the bleak mood, and the overall art style will be appreciated and applauded by most. The music and sound sets the mood quite wonderfully, with somber strings and haunting chants as you feed on NPCs for example. So kudos to the art and sound teams.
So far, so good, but we haven’t discussed the other half of the game. When not role-playing, solving medical issues, reading notes, and conversing with fantastic characters, Vampyr devolves into lackluster exploration and borderline horrible combat. And then there’s the issues, so many issues. Bleh!
“What is life but death pending?” – Mystery Vampire
Let’s talk about the dreaded combat. To the developer’s credit, it’s clear they wanted a sort of Dark Souls or Witcher 3 system of deadly encounters requiring precise timing and stamina and item management. What they delivered is clumsy and awkward, laden down by janky animations, poor targeting, bad hit detection, and very floaty movement.
To summarize the combat, instead of a foundation of depth and balance, the whole affair is built upon whether you or the AI can better exploit the game’s issues. The bosses in particular are obnoxious. It’s a huge mess, but at least the combat gets fairly easy (exploitable) after the first few hours. No doubt the game could be appreciated by so many more players if the combat was solid and reliable, but sadly the combat is more of an unskippable tedium that breaks up the truly enjoyable role-playing and storytelling.
“Superstition and magic is just fact awaiting
the lens of science.” – L. Ashbury
The other issues pertain to interface issues, incomplete/broken keyboard and mouse implementation, text readability issues, and various quest logic and narrative inconsistencies. Update: I experienced crashes to desktop and hard locks and black screens every few hours on my Intel/nVidia setup, but several AMD users seem to have had no trouble. Still, stability may be an issue for some.
Regarding the mouse, you cannot move the camera around during dialogue like you can using the right analog stick on a controller, so often you are stuck with a bad view. During dialogue the actual subtitles are inexplicably broken up into multiple segments, so you can’t read ahead properly to save time, which is more frustrating than it seems. There are no keyboard shortcuts for dialogue options, which is also needlessly obnoxious.
Being a choices and consequences game, Vampyr needs to be replayed to appreciate its narrative complexities, but at the same time the game just isn’t paced well enough to allow for enjoyable replays. If only all the terrible combat and backtracking could be removed after finishing the game once…but alas, if you wish to explore different choices you also have to endure the tedium all over again on a new save slot (yes, you only get one save slot per playthrough).
Overall, Vampyr is such a well-planned role-playing game…if only the execution didn’t go so astray. What we have here is a great intellectual story experience married to a fairly poor and often unfun video game experience. The floaty movement, winding pathways with no mini-map, broken combat, and dull backtracking will simply be too much for many players. Still, considering the only comparable game came out in 2004, this is a must-play for those who desire a truly immersive vampire game full of night creatures, moral dilemmas, secret societies, and vampire medical doctors!
- Fantastic protagonist
- Excellent acting and dialogue
- Engrossing story
- Choices and consequences
- Beautiful art style
- Unique premise and settings
- Very flawed combat
- Cumbersome exploration
- Tedious backtracking
- Limited environments
- Keyboard and mouse issues
- Stability issues for some
Playtime: 30 hours total. Nick completed one playthrough in about 25 hours, leaving a third or so of the side investigations undone since the main story has a point of no return. He put another 5 hours into a new character and he’d like to play more, but a new playthrough is so tedious.
Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit computer using an Intel i7-3930k CPU, 32GB of memory, and a nVidia GTX 980 Ti graphics card.
Also read the Vampyr PC Performance Analysis.
Nick’s been a PC gamer for over 20 years, having grown up on first-person shooter games (he’s very proud of his Quake 2 tournament trophy). Nick also loves deep, engrossing role-playing games, and he’s also more famously known as Brumbek, the creator of Static Mesh Improvement Mod for Skyrim. Nick believes the essence of enjoyment is to play and ponder video games.
Contact: Email
focus interactive company are like the gods of mediocre games..they really don’t know how to get the combat right in a video game…and they are suffering from this.
And yet, they never reached the conclusion that they could nail it by focusing on their strengh and taking action out of the equation 🙂
THIS is a very good review! Good job there Nick.
On another note, stopped playing the game after 14hours. Boring repetitive stuff. Sad because it had a story i was curious for but the gameplay killed it for me.
Kinda agreed, although i didn’t find the story THAT interesting, just ok i guess.
The story takes quite a bit to build up with a lot of the revelations coming very late in the game. I do agree that the story isn’t earth-shattering, but I enjoyed it mostly because I cared about the characters.
I think you’re probably right, since i’m not that far into the game, i recently passed the funeral scene, so yeah…
Thanks Maxim for the great feedback. Yep, I don’t blame you for
quitting…very sad that they did such a poor job on the gameplay. Maybe someday you’ll come back to it…the game does grow on you as you learn to accept it’s bad gameplay…
Excellent question. To me the basics of gameplay revolve around how you actually move and interact with the game world. If a game has solid movement of your character combined with reliable enemy movement, then the gameplay has a strong foundation. If movement feels floating and imprecise like Vampyr…then I can never truly enjoy the moment to moment gameplay.
For an example of a game I think nails the gameplay, consider Nioh by Team Ninja. The movement is so precise. I felt my character was an extension of myself. I could impose my will on my character to move, jump, and sprint without frustration.
In Vampyr I would die countless times because of a disconnect between my inputs and the controls and game engine, not because I was a bad player.
I agree most games play a bit poorly, but that’s because most games aren’t made well. However, there still are plenty of very well made games out there. Does that make sense? What more can I help explain? Thanks!
” If a game has solid movement of your character combined with reliable enemy movement, then the gameplay has a strong foundation. If movement feels floating and imprecise like Vampyr…then I can never truly enjoy the moment to moment gameplay.”
Remnds me of Elex.
“Dark Souls”
Wait, what?
From Software’s games, if anything, is all about the gameplay.
Yea maybe but in my rage quitting i decided to « embrace » everyone possible so now all zones are hostile to me and i have these scary eyes !! 🙂
“Examples for especially poor gameplay IMO are Senua’s Sacrifice, Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed (before Origins), Dark Souls etc.”
This man enjoyed wolfenstein 2 which is a walking sim with decent shooting mechanics and too many cutscnes but hates games that have good shooting mechanics and a better story and lots of sidequests like fc4, while also trashing dark souls while liking origins which is inspired by it.
I dont know what to say to this man, he is clarly insane, he has blocked me, but i would like someone here to ask him how on earth fc4 has bad gameplay?
A) Durka is a moron nick, never listen to anything he says.
B) FC4 did not have poor gameplay. Senua, yes, AC1, yes. Dark souls, yes.
This review is pretty much spot on. Though I have yet to have any black screens, but I am only 6 hours in so will update when I get back to it later in the week. For what ever reason I decided to go back and play some older games I have not played in my game catalog. Started playing, Enslaved :Odyssey to the west. So far like the game. Camera is clunky, and had one lock up.
Thanks for reading the review Eternal Cowboy! I really want to go back and played Enslaved as well! I love Ninja Theory’s work, and that’s a game I’ve been meaning to play for years. Anyway, I hope you can come back to Vampyr and enjoy it. I do love Vampyr…kinda like how you love a troubled friend.
I enjoyed the Enslaved demo on the PS3 and eventually bought the game for PC.
How old are you? Are you a millennial?
Nice job Nick. I can tell that you put some time into this review.
VTMB had many issues when it came out. Thanks to the dedication of Wesp it’s a much better experience. If Dontnod will patch out some of the flaws then the game will go on my Buy List but certainly not for $50. jmo
Hi 64K, yes, you make an excellent point (and quite ironic that a new Bloodlines unofficial patch came out a few days ago). However, I greatly fear Dontnod will abandon this game and never fix or rework the issues…and since it uses the semi-closed Unreal engine, modders won’t ever be able to fix it. Dontnod just doesn’t have the budget to support their games post-release…which stinks.
Story is pretty good and gameplay is alright. But this has to be one of the worst PC ports I’ve ever played. Constant frame drops when I’m only using 50% of my GPU and 20-30% of my CPU. Makes no sense.
Its unreal engine 4 and too many dynamic lights. Its what happens You aren’t supposed to have more than 5.
I’m sorry to hear about the bad performance. On my i7 CPU and GeForce 980 the game ran quite well, besides the crashes and lockups. But yes, I’m sure Dontnod didn’t optimize the game well for all hardware.
Nice review indeed, but in my opinion you were a bit too soft, i didn’t think i’d be this disappointed, i had great hope for this, and unfortunately it remained that.
Oh and the pricing is a bit too cocky, regardless of how good or bad the game came out.
I agree the game’s price is pretty high for the quality. I’m sorry you were so disappointed. Maybe you’ll try it again down the road. Thanks for taking the time to read the review!
Yeah, maybe. Thank you for the review!
Well, it is the game from DONTNOD that features more gameplay than others from their catalog. But there are sports games out there that could be considered more an RPG than ‘Vampyr’.
Why don’t you think Vampyr is much of an RPG? To me an RPG is about shaping your character and the world. It’s about becoming a character instead of just going on a trip with them like an Uncharted or Tomb Raider game.
Vampyr allowed me to feel like I was Dr. Reid, shaping my choices. But that’s just my opinion. Thanks for reading the review!
I could forgive the problems if this game has role playing it int, like fallout, alpha protocol and the last torment game, most “rpgs” nowdays are like borderlands, they dont have actual roleplay.
Can I design a new pro and con image for you guys? That was… something…
Ha, sure! Just let us know! I made those Pro and Con images in about 15 minutes last night, trying to get the review ready for release. I’d actually like a more appealing layout, but that would require coding…and I’m an artist, not a coder. 🙂
I’m both, but very mediocre at website programming. I’ll set up some new images tomorrow sometime.
So what style of pro and con icons would you like? Match the website theme?
Sorry for the late reply! I didn’t see your post until now. I actually updated the Pros and Cons myself, see above. If they look good enough for you, then don’t worry about it! I appreciate your offer to help very much though!
wellcome NICK MCCASKEY
Thanks Tomas! Glad to be here!
Thanks so much Johann! My goal is to build DSOGaming into a source of reliable, no-nonsense reviews. Far too many of the big-name sites have forgotten to focus on the games themselves, not other agendas. A reviewer must have a love for games, a balanced mindset, and a dedication to sharing that love of games with others. That’s my opinion, anyway. Thanks again for being part of DSOGaming!
I loved Voodoo Extreme. Wicked Wilson was quite a character.
so u blame other websites/reviewers, and their work/opinion, and u think you r one of the BEST pc reviewer we ever got ? okay, i get it.
don’t take it personally though.
Lets hope for more reviews from you guys, given how pcgamer is pushing destiny 2 and black ops 4 so hard, I can hardly trust them any more.
Keep up the good work, very nice review!
Thanks much Raizen3. I promise to you and everyone to always be totally honest as a real PC gamer. I simply love games, and I hate how so many games like Destiny and Call of Duty are about extracting as much money from gullible gamers instead of being about delivering pure creative experiences for players.
Great job Bratan’ 😀
Good game, enjoying it now..
Boring game, stale dull review, LOL..nothing to see here guys, move on…
why you here?
Fantastic game. Can’t agree with the cons other than keyboard issues, which really are not an issue. Well unless you need auto targeting, which with a keyboard and mouse you don’t.
Nick shouldn’t have rushed it.
however, imho playing a title like this with the keyboard is stupid…
Auto targeting wasn’t the issue. How many hours did you play the game? Did you never notice you couldn’t properly manually target enemies? I didn’t rush anything. I took my time and loved playing the game…except for the combat and control issues.
76 hours so far. I didn’t find the issue with manual targeting to be a problem, as it does work when using ‘vampire vision’ allowing you to fire off an ultimate on your chosen. Thereafter, targeting is best used to select closest. Combat for me is fast and responsive, perhaps the weapons did not suit your chosen skills set.
BTW. zero stability issues for me.
Completed the entire game a few days ago and didn’t run into any of those issues, so it’s probably an NVidia issue or some overlay you’re using..
Fair enough for the info. Reporting crashes is always tricky in reviews since you never know how many other users will be affected. But considering I have a mainstream CPU and GPU, I figure others will have issues, too (as Google seems to indicate). I never run any special overlays or software, only the Steam Overlay and nVidia GeForce Experience Overlay. Thank you for the feedback though, and I’m glad you didn’t have crashes!
Can’t say I agree with the writing style but okay maybe you chose some decent reviewers.