'Vampyr' video game review

London is in distress. Bodies are piling up. Hospitals are full. People are killing each other. Vampires are running rampant and drinking peoples' blood.

And I really, reallydon't care.

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In Vampyr, you play as Jonathan Reid, a doctor who has just been brought back to life as a vampire in 1918 London as the city is being decimated by the Spanish flu and an infestation of vampires. Right from the start, the game assumes you care about the lead character, whom you don't know anything about, as it sends him into a dizzying series of events that kicks off with him blindly killing his own sister.

It sounds like a cool idea at its core, but it's difficult to find anything positive to say about this boring mess of a game.

Endless monotony

Racked with guilt and riddled with confusion about why he's alive and why he just did that, Jonathan races through London and away from an amalgam of night watch patrollers and vampire hunters who somehow know he's vampire. Here, the combat unfolds: dodging attacks and hitting people with melee weapons until they die. Over and over and over again.

Vampyr's London is an unending maze of drab. Because Jonathan's a vampire and the sun burns his skin, the game takes place almost exclusively at night, which really doesn't help the overall aesthetic of dark brown, dark gray, and black.

This is pretty much it..Credit: dontnod

Although there are several "unique" districts, they are very difficult to tell apart from each other because the landscape never varies beyond the above color palette. The enemies are all basically the same (even the bosses) with just a few notable exceptions that I can count on one hand. The combat never really changes. The story never stops being uninspired.

Jonathan seems to understand pretty quickly that he's a vampire, feeding off the necks of enemies to regain health and build up a blood meter used for special attacks and abilities. Despite that, in dialogues with the citizens he meets soon after (basically all of whom lack the patrollers' uncanny ability to tell if you're a vampire), he seems to have a hard time grasping he's a vampire.

Eventually Jonathan ends up at Pembroke Hospital where he is employed by a sympathetic physician named Dr. Swansea, who not only knows that Dr. Reid a vampire but seems to condone him feeding on patients. What a doctor.

Here is where the central tenant of gameplay reveals itself: dialogue with citizens of London. And it is not good.

Credit: dontnod

Stop talking

Vampyrleans in hard on dialogue, which is a shame considering how shoddy it is. The English in this game is a bit off, as if it's written by someone who has a decent but not quite perfect grasp on the language.

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On top of that, all of the conversations are laborious and many of them turn out to be absolutely pointless.

The citizens populate random sections of London's districts and, while they do occasionally give hints about what to do next in the story, they primarily serve as meat puppets that Jonathan can either try to cure of their ailments with various medicines, or lure into dark corners to suck their blood and/or kill them.

If you help the citizens, the district they're in "thrives." If you kill or neglect them, the district becomes unstable and filled with more and more mindless vampires (a lesser subset of vampires called skal, for some reason). Either way, it doesn't really impact anything that much.

Credit: dontnod

Each citizen has tons of dialogue Jonathan can listen to, some of which is blocked off until he finds a specific hint about it, but it's all so thoroughly uninteresting that at one point I gave up talking to new people unless I absolutely had to.

The people that Jonathan doeshave to talk to are equally as uninteresting as those he doesn't. More and more characters are introduced throughout the game, and almost every new person is surprisingly forgettable outside of a couple key characters.

Dialogues like these make up about 90% of the game. Just hours and hours and hours of explaining. But that's not the only problem with the game.

Little things add up

There are so many small problems with Vampyrthat would be ignorable by themselves, but together create a very frustrating experience that oftentimes feels like it was rushed in development.

Right off the bat, the game is visually unappealing and looks like it belongs in an earlier era of video games. Textures are low-res, characters' faces look unnatural, and there's almost no variance in environments. Additionally, characters' hands and bodies will sometimes clip through the objects they're holding or even the clothes they're wearing.

As for the story, there are numerous contradictions. If Jonathan kills a single citizen, it can have numerous consequences and send a whole district into instability. Meanwhile he can kill as many nameless patrollers as he wants without so much as making a dent in the larger world, despite the fact that they probably live in the area.

Credit: dontnod

In making vampires, Vampyrestablishes specific rules for whether the vampire turns into a mindless, violent skal, or a more traditional ekon (which is what Jonathan is). But then halfway through the game there are skal that aren'tmindless, and the rules for creating ekon are thrown out the window for a twist that amounts to nothing.

There's also the contradiction in Jonathan himself. As a doctor he's trying to save people, but at the same time he's forced to murder tons of vampire hunters who are presumably upstanding citizens. Also, if you decide to feed on any of the named citizens, that's the most hypocritical thing imaginable.

One of the most annoying things about Vampyris how it runs. All games require some time to load a new area or scenario but Vampyr's loading times and frequencies are mind-boggling. Loading screens can last as long as two minutes when you enter a building or die, and then there are also random moments when the game needs to slow down (or stop completely) to load an area.

If you want to move quickly through an area and run past enemies, expect the game to freeze if you cover too much ground in a short amount of time. It will sometimes freeze anywhere from five seconds to a whole minute when you open a door or start a conversation, or sometimes even freeze in the middle of combat.

At one point, Vampyrfroze while I was in the middle of a conversation and I had to hard reset the game.

The idea of being a vampire stalking the streets of early 20th century London seemed like such a cool idea, but the game's poor execution on almost all fronts is egregious. Vampyrhas almost no good qualities, and any that you can squeeze out of it are faroutweighed by the negative qualities.

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