Vampyr

Whiplash. That's the word I would use to describe Vampyr, the brand new game from the makers of Remember Me and Life is Strange. It's a game I initially loved, then hated and then loved again. I kept bouncing back and forth, not sure where I would ultimately end up. With its ambitious story, conflicted hero and incredibly atmospheric setting, I have a hunch that this curious adventure game will find a loving audience. But do I like it? Well, it's complicated.

There was a moment right at the start where I fell in love with Vampyr. A lot of it has to do with the way they introduce us to Jonathan Reid, a famous doctor who crawls out of a giant pit to discover that he's been reborn as a vampire. We're just as confused as he is, and not just because we're able to see the desperation and hunger from his perspective. It gave me hope that we would finally get a game that explores the unique struggles and emotions that come with being a newborn vampire.

And you know what? That's pretty much exactly what this game is. We follow Jonathan as he walks around a plague-stricken London helping survivors and making the most out of a truly terrible situation. Does this mean embracing the darkness by feeding on the people of London, using your unique talents to work towards some sort of cure, or something in between? In Vampyr, the choice is up to you.

No matter how you choose play it, Jonathan will end up making a big impact on the city. He does this by talking with the doctors, nurses, shopkeepers and random people on the street, helping the survivors and curing disease. It's a never-ending tug-of-war where we're constantly trying to keep the city disease-free, which is not exactly an easy task in the middle of a plague. Not taking good care of the people will result in harder enemies showing up, civilians dying and side-quests disappearing forever. It's a stressful balancing act.

This is just one of the compelling ideas found in Vampyr. And the truth is, the first two chapters hooked me with the storytelling and characters. I loved getting to know everybody and understanding their suffering. I was amazed at the attention to detail found in London, and how each part of the city felt completely different. I liked the bleak atmosphere, the morally ambiguous hero and the all the twists and turns. I turned the system off on the first night genuinely thinking that Vampyr could be a real contender for my Game of the Year list.

When I came back the next day, it felt like everything had changed. The phrase I would use is "bait and switch." Where the first two chapters were mostly about introductions and investigations, the third made a hard turn straight into combat. Tough, unrelenting combat. This was the point where they started to throw boss after boss at you, mixed with a handful of lame arena battles and a whole bunch of extra guards on the street. This is the exact moment I stopped having fun in Vampyr.

The combat is pretty simple, largely relying on melee weapons, stabbing tools, guns and your vampire superpowers. You'll hack and slash with swords, hatchets, clubs and more, while using your secondary weapons to stun the opponents. There are also a number of supernatural powers you can summon by using blood, with the idea of feeding on the stunned bad guys when you run out. All the pieces are in place, yet I'm here to tell you that I had a miserable time fighting my way through Vampyr.

The problem I repeatedly ran into was that for being a guy with super-powers, Jonathan is the definition of fragile. He'll constantly find himself teamed-up on by bad guys that can take as much as 75% of his health in a single hit. It's not always that much, but I was shocked by how easy it was for our hero to die. And it's often in completely aggravating ways, such as a flaming arrow coming out of nowhere. There were times when it felt like I was spending more time dead than undead.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

This problem is only amplified in the boss battles. Every single boss in this game has 200% (maybe 300%) more health than they should. This creates long, drawn out (and often boring) fights where your weapons do very little damage. And no matter the location or the villain, I found that every boss fight involved me side-stepping in a giant circle while waiting to use my super-powers.

Did I say all of them play out this way? Well, that's not entirely true. The first boss I ran into in chapter 3 was a dude with a giant flamethrower in a tiny warehouse. Remember, this is pretty much the first thing I saw after stealthing my way around the first two chapters, so I was floored when I was expected to fight a guy with a weapon that stretched pretty much the entire length of the arena.

It got to the point where I started to wonder if I was missing something. And the truth is, I probably did miss something along the way. I had a hard time finding better weapons and stuck with my underpowered hatchet for way too long, so there's a good chance that I simply passed up a weapon that would have made the experience ten times easier. But that's not how my playthrough went, and I spent at least half of this game thinking that I was missing some important detail.

Dying over and over and over again taught me a few things about Vampyr. First, it has obnoxiously long load times. I had to wait more than a minute every single time I died. But it's actually worse than that, because Jonathan returns with almost no blood in his meter. This means you have to go out of your way to find either people or rats to feed on, which tacks on an extra few minutes every time you want a rematch with a boss. And even if you do get close to winning a fight, there's a chance the game is going to crash and you'll have to start the battle all over again. This happened three aggravating times to me.

And that's not the only bug. Beyond the unstable frame rate, Vampyr also has some issues with the side-quests. I ran into one particularly annoying situation where I picked up a box I needed for my mission, only to immediately die. When I came back, the box wasn't there and I wasn't able to complete the quest. I'm not sure it makes a big difference (since most of the side-quest rewards aren't worth the trouble), but I hated leaving it incomplete.

And that reminds me, even with the side-quests to complete, there isn't much to do in this game. I was genuinely surprised by how little there was going on in 1918 London. I mean, sure, there's a plague going on and it's not like people are out in the streets at night. I get that. But this city is dead, both literally and figuratively. It would have been nice to have more to do for those times when I hit a wall trying to beat a tough boss.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

And did I mention that the enemy A.I. is laughably bad? They may pack a mean punch, but they are limited in where they can go. There are a bunch of spots where all you have to do is step beyond an invisible line and the bad guys won't be able to see you. Step out and they'll attack, but step back in and you're invisible. The A.I. is pretty bad.

The good news is that the story is constantly compelling and investigation stuff worked on me. I wasn't a big fan of how they would introduce seemingly important characters mere seconds before fighting them, but this is hardly the first video game to pull that trick. I found that I was constantly annoyed by how much combat would seep into the missions, and I probably would have liked this game a lot more if there was a better balance to the puzzle solving and fighting. And that's the thing; I liked the story, atmosphere, characters and mystery, but just didn't have that much fun playing Vampyr.

I had a roller coaster of emotions while playing Vampyr, but not always in the way the game intended. With so much care put into this world and story, I can see this gaining a big following that loves everything it does. But for me, I found the never-ending battles and lame boss fights to be a slog. It's also a mess from a technical perspective, souring an experience I had fallen in love with just a few hours earlier. There's a chance that I'm alone on this one.