It’s been not that long since I’ve played Remember me, the first project of Dontnod Entertainment, and was utterly disappointed. Since then, they have impressed the public with their episodic Life is Strange, which I did like in the end and the sequel to that game seems to be getting positive reviews as well. But before LiS 2 they’ve decided to try their hand in action adventure again, except this time going more into action RPG direction, with Vampyr. Have they learned from their first experience in Remember Me?.. Nope. No, they kinda got worse, really. But at least they have more good things to combat the bad things this time.
So, what is Vampyr? It’s an action RPG adventure title in an open world (though not the huge sandbox open world, more like Yakuza or Pathologic open world), set in late-Great War era London ravaged by a Spanish Flu outbreak. The main character of the game is a famous surgeon returning from the war, except suddenly he gets attacked and turned into a vampire to awaken some time later in a mass grave and accidentally kill his own sister due to his thirst for blood. The opening hours of the game, setting the tone, showing the moody streets of London, building the mystery around the mythology of the vampires are genuinely great. The mood is spot on, the voice acting is top notch, the writing is great and the soundtrack is once again written by Olivier Deriviere and, once again, he does not disappoint, delivering one of the better game soundtracks of now last decade. Game also borrows and updates some clever ideas from games like Pathologic, so you have “Citizen” in each of the available districts of London, who’s well-being reflects on the state of the whole district. Which adds curious gameplay loops tied into the fact that your character is a doctor, but also a vampire and choosing whenever he has the right to kill a character for their precious blood because you learned that the character is a horrible person conflicts with the desire to help everyone and instead give that person medicine.
Well, at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work, but sadly a lot of these concepts are tied only to the skill system, and the skill system is connected only to combat. And the combat in this game is horrible garbage. After showing that they can’t do a Batman: Arkham approach to combat in Remember Me some brilliant minds in Dontnod decided that what they should do next is try to take that horrible mess they’ve created before and add Souls-like elements to it, like very limited stamina and incredibly high damage from the enemies. Which they intended to balance out by the vampiric abilities, except even if you’d try to kill all the NPCs (and get a worse ending, of course) you’d still have to specialize in one of several crappy skills which make the game combat be slightly less obnoxious and unbearable.
Combat is the single worst thing about the game and yet, it is sadly everywhere and while it can be at times avoided, even the process of avoiding isn’t some cool stealth idea, but rather boring detour or exploit of the dumb enemy AI. But the sections of the game where lots of NPCs are and lots of adventure-ish stuff happens are so numerous it’s very easy to see how the city was divided into places where the developers knew how to make things interesting, and places where they just had to fill the space with something so they put lots of garbage combat and annoying loot everywhere. I was dumb enough to play the “intended” difficulty, but I feel like playing the easiest difficulty is the only way this game could be enjoyable.
But it can. Sure, the story gets dumber and lots of ideas feel underutilized. But there are also really good and memorable moments all the time. There are bugs that remained unfixed ever since the release, including one huge bug along the main questline, where you might not get a prompt to do the thing you need to do, even though it’s there (but on a tiny square instead of a big area). But it’s also surprisingly high quality in many other areas. The dialogues are a constant mix of brilliant and dumb. Running around the beautiful and haunting city streets is constantly tedious. It is a mixed bag, but unlike Remember Me, it is a mixed bag of great and terrible, not different shades of average and forgettable.
Vampyr isn’t the game that I would outright recommend, not something that you must play. But if you’re interested in a good, even if not great, vampire story and feel fine with playing on the lowest difficulty (don’t even bother with Normal or Hard), this is a game to check, especially when it’s on a discount. Oh and yeah, definitely give the soundtrack a listen, at least that part of the game is consistently fantastic.