3.5/5 ★ – Mike_Kersh's review of Vampyr.

TL;DR - Vampyr is a game of "almost there's." Through its excellent setting and character performances, your choices genuinely feel like they matter in ways we don't often see in contemporary video games. On the other hand, frustrating combat and uneven story pacing hold it back. In all, it's an experience you'll remember, for all its good and bad. Review: It took three attempts before Vampyr finally sunk its teeth into me, not due to any fault of the game but instead to my poor planning and time management strategies. But I've always loved vampire stories. There's something about them, their history, their inherent evil, their ties to religion, that sets my mind and imagination ablaze. So it's unsurprising that this game still skulked quietly in the dark corners of my mind, waiting for its opportunity to consume my headspace. Such an opportunity arose, and Vampyr has been nothing short of a joyful discovery for me. Set in 1918 London during both the Spanish Flu and World War I, Vampyr has you filling the shoes of Jonathan Reid, a moderately famous doctor and high-ranking surgeon who developed a new blood transfusion technique that saved people's lives on the war front. Jonathan awakens in a mass grave dug for those who have succumbed to the flu. While Jonathan knows who he is and retains the memories of his life, he is unsure how he ended up in the grave or why he has a newly developed thirst for blood. Promptly, he learns that he has been turned into a vampire and is forced to grapple with his newfound hunger and the Hippocratic oath he took to "do no harm." All the while, he searches for answers to how he became this way and how to ease the burden of the Spanish Flu running amok among his people. Vampyr is a third-person action game that emphasizes conversation and characters. This facet of Vampyr's systems functions quite beautifully. The city of London is broken up into districts, each with a large number of NPCs to interact with. It's an engrossing and atmospheric setting, with each district feeling distinct and believably conveying the sobering reality of a respiratory epidemic taking its toll during a period that wasn't nearly as knowledgeable as the one we currently live in. Wooden walls and gates are erected in containment zones to prevent the spread of the flu, recruitment propaganda is plastered across every wall, and the distant cries of children can be heard piercing the evening silence. It's somber, and depressing, and melancholy. It successfully portrays a broken city, hoping and praying for the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. And it's under these oppressive circumstances that Jonathan must get to know London's residents. The characters of Vampyr are truly the game's highest achievement. You'll find 16 characters to interact with in each district, and all of them are well-written and well-realized. This is important because you'll spend as much, if not more time, engaging with the denizens of London as you will in combat and exploration. Jonathan is in a constant internal battle between the desire to feed and retain his humanity and this is reflected in which citizens you choose to feast on. Playing through the game, engaging in combat, and learning more about the personal lives of the people of London all net you a small amount of experience points which can be used to upgrade your vampiric abilities, but if you really want to get ahead, you have to feed. Citizens offer significantly larger sums of experience, and you unlock even more experience by discovering more about them. I quickly found myself in the brutal game of playing god, agonizing over decisions on who deserved to die and who should be spared. The stakes are high and your choices matter. Killing a citizen decreases the overall health of their district as disease spreads among the populace, requiring you to expend resources to bring them back to health and maximize your experience gain if you choose to kill again. You may lose access to a vendor or increase the difficulty of your enemy encounters based on your choices — and there is no going back. This system is the most engaging to interact with and it is truly elevated by the excellent characterisation and voice work. Anthony Howell's performance as Jonathan, in particular, is exquisite. His execution is nuanced and engrossing, and it belongs on the front page of his portfolio. All of London's citizens contain depth and sympathetic aspects of their personalities, which make your choices that much more difficult. The budget for this game clearly limited the number of voice actors that could be hired — and I did notice a few characters that sounded eerily similar. That said, I consider the conversations the most rewarding part of the game. The city of London and the interactions with these characters are all accented by an excellent score. I cannot gush enough about it. Composed by Olivier Deriviere, the music of Vampyr is a triumph of ethereal orchestral quartets, haunting chorists, and hints of spectral synth. Each district has its own distinct theme, and major story beats are amplified in their impact thanks to the musical composition. It's about as perfect a match for this video game as there ever has been, I think, and it's one of the few video game scores I've added to my personal music library. Despite all the things that Vampyr does right, there are features that are more lackluster, and which frustratingly hold it back from being great. In particular, combat. It's serviceable. There's a small variety of weapon types that slightly alter your playstyle in addition to a small suite of special vampire abilities. You'll swing your weapon, and use your offhand to try and extract more blood so that you can continue using your vampire abilities which reset on a cooldown, and no amount of upgrades really end up changing this formula. It's repetitive, occasionally inaccurate, and frustratingly janky at times. Multiple instances of getting stun-locked to death by a boss because I couldn't move before their next attack came forced me to put the controller down for a couple days at a time. The difficulty scaling also isn't well-balanced. In fact, it feels like the developers felt that increasing the difficulty actually meant making the experience more infuriating. The combat quickly falls apart when you fight groups larger than two or three, but the late-game bosses frequently summon minions that quickly overwhelm you and there's nothing you can do about it. Enemies hit harder at higher levels, which is fine, but they also get substantially more health. In my time with the game, I made sure to feed on citizens enough to keep me at relatively the same level as my enemy encounters, but despite this and having fully upgraded weapons, fights began to take so much time that I opted to run by encounters without stopping. Not a good sign for your combat system. I can't even imagine how poor of an experience it would be for players who try to avoid killing few to no citizens. I felt the same frustration with Vampyr's main story. It's inconsistent. What starts out as a strong premise steadily worsens throughout the game. Leaps in logic are not explained, important relationships develop that don't feel earned, and important information is left in collectible notes and letters which should only be used to flesh out the world. By the end of the main story, I didn't understand why we had gotten where we had, which made the ending feel unsatisfying. Just a few tweaks to the story and a different approach to the combat would likely have changed the trajectory of this game when it first released because of the high quality on display throughout and so I can't help but be disappointed that those tweaks went unimplemented. Vampyr is a game of great potential and missed opportunities. Capable of elevating the playing of a game into that space that reminds you that these experiences can be an impactful, meaningful medium of creative expression and, in the same sequence, leave you scratching your head in confusion and bewilderment at the shortcomings that hold it back from achieving something great. It's in this "in-between" space that Vampyr finds its identity. I wish that it could be better, but I still found the experience memorable. Most of all, I think that Vampyr will make you think and feel, which is what all art should do. If you're the kind of person who enjoys a wide variety of games and experiences, Vampyr should be on your list.