VAMPYR Review
In the year 1918 a well educated doctor, Dr. Jonathan Reid, returned home to London from the war. News had reached him that his mother’s health had taken a turn for the worse. It is evening when he steps off the boat and as he walks down a dark street an event happens that changes the course of his life. Dr. Reid was attacked by a Vampyr and survived the transformation. In VAMPYR you will play the role of the recently turned Dr. Reid. You will learn about an ancient evil that seems to be rotting London from within, and it is your actions/decisions that will decide the city’s fate.
This game truly makes you pay for every decision you make. You may not immediately feel the repercussions of sparing one NPC, or perhaps killing them, but it makes a hell of a difference in the end. I want to emphasize that point because I know that my actions created the ending I received. You are going to deal with several NPCs scattered into different areas of the city. Each NPC’s life will be held in your hands. Most NPCs are your side-quest givers, and in many cases how you decide to wrap up that quest has lasting effects. As the game continues, the wellbeing of these NPCs will affect the areas that they live in and can cause conditions to worsen.
Basically there is a delicate balance that needs to be maintained in each area. If the area becomes too unstable more monsters will be seen, and with more monsters come more fanatical monster hunters trying to purge those areas of all its wickedness. In each area you’ll also find merchants and their prices will be affected by the state of the area as well. In each area there are safe houses that you can use to craft items, improve upon your weapons, and level up your character.
Leveling up in this game is something that I find really interesting. As you move around the city and you defeat enemies and complete quests you’re going to gain experience points. You can also gain huge chunks of experience points if you decide to drain an NPC of all their blood. In most games those points immediately go against your current level and so the more you play the higher your level gets. In this game you just amass those points until you decide to “sleep” (when you rest and advance the day). There are many different things that you can apply your points towards, health, stamina, blood (think of this as mana points), attack skills, passive skills, defensive skills, and more. Each choice has an assigned value and there’s no such thing as adding a partial number of points to something, it’s all or nothing. When you lock in those points, that’s when the leveling takes effect. I know that there are probably those out there that immediately think that if that’s the case it will be easier if I don’t level up, sadly the further into the story you go the rougher and tougher your enemies get so you’re going to need every point you can get.
The combat in this game both infuriated me and made me understand that there’s got to be some strategy employed. If you are going to try to go all “Rambo”/berserker in this game you’re going to die a lot. You have to pay attention to the attack patterns of your enemies, and know when to retreat to catch your breath. As you play through the game your attacks might be stronger and you might have more HP, stamina, and blood, but one thing is universal and that is you’re still going to take some serious hits and if you’re not careful you’ll find death quickly. If there was one thing that I would have LOVED to have in this game it would have been some sort of armor. I definitely needed some additional protection from attacks, but that was never an option and so I had to really dig into the battle mechanics to scratch out wins. However, if you are not able to win a battle when the game isn’t over, you will return to the last “checkpoint” resurrected. So if you had to use some items or bullets, those will still be gone, but at least you can live another day.
I ended up putting around 35 hours into the game, and sure there were a couple of times during the game where I wanted to throw in the towel because I couldn’t get past one point, usually due to my lack of strategy, but I kept with it, and I found a solid game throughout. There’s definitely a lot of depth to this game, and I believe that if this sounds even slightly like a game you’re interested in you need to get it immediately.