Where Vampyr sets itself apart is in its excellent recreation of London during the first World War and in the throes of the Spanish Flu epidemic. It’s a gloomy, somber city, explorable through snaking alleyways, cobblestone courtyards, dingy sewers, and expansive buildings that combine with the moody string-heavy soundtrack to create a dense, sad atmosphere of a city on the edge.
The great sense of contrast throughout Vampyr is a focused theme. You’ll see the posh and proper etiquette of early 1900s English aristocracy juxtaposed with the ugly, seedy underbelly of the city. Even our protagonist, physician and newly turned vampire Dr. Jonathan Reid himself, reflects this conflict, as his modern-man-of-science persona clashes with the mysticism of his newfound supernatural world. It all complicates the experience in ways I found refreshing.
That setting is reinforced through the many, many authentic characters. And there are dozens of them spread throughout the distinct districts of London, each with so much to say that if you’re looking to investigate each person and solve all their problems and side quests, you’ll be wandering through forests of branching dialog trees with hours of voiced conversation.
And if, like me, you find it easy to soak in this melting pot of society, science, and the supernatural, you’ll be glad to know that each of these characters are generally well-written and performed and that they only occasionally cross the line into hokey. Which is both a surprise and a relief, considering Vampyr leans hard into its heady vampire lore that without appropriate delivery it could’ve come off as downright goofy. It doesn’t stop at the accepted tropes of the subject like wooden stakes and garlic but instead aims for the moon, pulling inspiration from landmark moments of history, mythology, famous figures, and much more to weave a vampire conspiracy theory with its tendrils burrowed throughout history.
Vampyr’s story is generally engaging thanks to its grounded approach, setting the stage with modest, understandable stakes before going off the deep end. It starts small as our reluctant hero, Dr. Reid, grapples with his new vampiric condition. As a man of science, he’s a walking mockery of his own beliefs, and he only gradually begins to accept the gravity of his situation. Much of the early game mirrors that journey, with quests built around using your vampire senses to locate characters and resolving pedestrian issues like infidelity, a lost heirloom, or a gang war, and peppering it with the ugly racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia of the time period. The only blemish on these citizens is the obvious discrepancy in animation qualities between the lead characters and the minor ones, with poor mouth syncing being the most obvious sign.
Feast and Famine
The citizen system that binds all these characters together is a highlight of Vampyr. Because you can choose to mesmerize and feed on just about everyone you meet, characters are more than just side quest givers and information pinatas. As you talk with them you’ll uncover their secrets and, in the process, improve the quality of their blood, giving you more experience when you finally decide to sink your teeth in. If you choose to at all, that is. The choice to abstain from fresh blood is there, and I found myself avoiding it because Dr. Reid seems so opposed to giving in to the temptation that I felt I owed it to his character.
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But in a deliciously morbid way, talking with people and solving their problems is kind of like preparing your meals. The idea is that when you’re not strong enough and need a quick boost, you consume someone to quickly gain a healthy chunk of experience at the cost of permanently losing any information or quests they’ve yet to give you – and taking on more of a monstrous appearance yourself. That decision is given even more weight by the fact that Vampyr’s save system doesn’t allow you to reload to a previous save to undo a choice – something the load screen tips make clear is a conscious decision by the developers.
In a deliciously morbid way, talking with people is like preparing your meals.
The problem with this in practice is that I never found combat difficult enough to make me want to suffer the consequences of feeding on a citizen. Despite the fact that there are some top-shelf garbage-people all over London that the world would probably be better off without, feeding on a citizen damages the stability rating of their district. If that stability drops too low, other citizens living there will start suffering and go missing, and feral monsters will start roaming the streets where they didn’t before. It’s a selfish dilemma: eat for personal power, or abstain for the good of the city. This is Vampyr’s version of a difficulty setting, and you can see how it’s supposed to force you into making a hard decision. But developer Dontnot didn’t balance it aggressively enough, and so I was able to complete my approximately 30-hour playthrough without taking a life, and only died a handful of times.
Low Stakes
The loop of Vampyr’s combat boils down to locking on, dodging around an enemy, and smacking it over and over with a club or sword that you’ve upgraded through a very simple crafting system. Such crude methods are strange for a vampire power fantasy, but in a way, it actually plays back into that theme of duality all over Vampyr.
What’s more interesting is the health, stamina, and blood resources that you’ll want to manage during combat. You expend blood to power your vampiric abilities and stamina to dodge, attack, and stun enemies, so it becomes this interesting dance of dodging, striking, and using blood-based abilities, then stunning and enemy so you can bite it and refill some of your blood, which then recharges your supernatural abilities like healing, turning invisible, or conjuring pools of shadow. There’s a good level of micromanaging these resources during combat, and it works because enemies aren’t just your obstacles, but also your health packs.
Progression in Vampyr is all about being a vampire. As you cobble together the paltry amounts of experience you get for killing enemies and the more respectable amount you get for uncovering dialog hints and solving side missions and quests, you can choose to sleep and evolve your vampire abilities. There’s enough here to branch out into the kind of vampire you want to be, casting bloody spears and freezing an enemies’ blood in place, lunging over great distances and pouncing with devastating claw attacks, or any combination of the dozen-or-so skills you can learn. But experience is scarce if you’re not regularly feeding on citizens, so I found the best investment for my hard-earned experience was to bump up my passive health, stamina, and blood reserves rather than dumping it into those expensive, flashier abilities.
Unfortunately, even with all those unique vampire-afforded abilities – including some devastating ultimate powers that pack a horrific punch – the simple combat loop does start to feel stale sooner than I’d hoped. Fairly early on I found a two-handed club and enough materials to upgrade it through the barebones crafting system, to the point where clubbing things to death was overwhelmingly the most efficient and reliable strategy. I did experiment with all manner of weapons, firearms, and abilities, and while there are some cool combos you can employ, dodging and counter-striking with a heavy weapon remained the best option.
This means most fights boil down to the same experience, and that goes double for the dozen-or-so boss-arena fights throughout the campaign. While they add some interesting mechanics like environmental dangers and otherworldly abilities and certainly ratchet up the pageantry, they lack enough variety to require anything more than just quickly learning their attack patterns before the dodge/counter-striking resumes.
There’s a welcome variety in the enemies of Vampyr, at least. The militaristic vampire hunters, called the Guard of Priwen, send shock troopers and sharpshooters after you, while the feral subsets of vampires, werewolf-like monsters, and full-fledged children of the night begin to appear regularly as the city succumbs to the epidemic.
But the most frustrating obstacles are the frame rate dips, the spontaneous loading screens, and the occasional bugs. Vampyr runs acceptably on the PS4, but dips below the 30-frames-per-second mark regularly when you turn a corner or enter a new area too quickly. While I didn’t find anything game breaking, a few issues with quest markers not updating made progression more difficult than it needed to be, costing me an hour or two of scouring the city for something that should have been made much clearer. These hiccups seem to get worse in the later stages, but they never become more than minor annoyances.
The Verdict
Vampyr is a slow burn of an RPG, taking its time to ramp up its intriguing blend of science and the supernatural in an elaborately gloomy version of London. When it gets going you can see the potential of the way it offers you more power if you consume its interesting citizens. But Vampyr never commits to this idea to the point where I felt I needed to make that sacrifice to succeed in its relatively simple combat, which leaves it feeling toothless and vulnerable to having a lot of its fun sucked away by technical issues, despite its genuinely engaging story.
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