Why You Shouldn’t Play ‘Vampyr’
Vampyr is an exhausting game. From annoying technical issues to an overburdened story, the game falls apart at nearly every opportunity. What seems like an interesting narrative-based action game that branches out in consequence to your actions turns out to be a Souls-like grindfest towards a halfhearted conclusion. The quality of production that went into most of this game is undeniable – its an impressive game to look at – but so little of it effectively lands that this game isn’t worth the struggle.
I find it generally distasteful to relish in denigrating someone’s creative work, especially when you can tell that a team of talented people have put their heart in to make it something special. This is the case with Vampyr. Dontnod is a well-esteemed developer. I respect this creative effort even as I tear it apart. So before delving into what made this game so exhausting, I’d like to acknowledge what this game does well.
The setting of Vampyr takes place in post-war London during the early years of the twentieth century, harkening foggy alleyways, winding streets, and aging Victorian architecture. Most of the game’s sub districts of the city are well-crafted in terms of level design, though most of the sections feel identical. And the lighting in the game reflects the mood of the story in a way that is unparalleled anywhere else in the vampire genre of gaming.
The music of Vampyr is the best part of this game. Olivier Deriviere, who composed the game’s soundtrack, did a masterful job of setting the tone of the eerie nighttime world. Sweeping cellos and chanting choirs crescendo into beautifully haunting moments, such as when your playable character, Dr. Jonathan Reid, mesmerizes a weak-minded citizen as he walks them off to feed upon their blood.
The quality of dialogue was also something I greatly appreciated throughout, although I do think the writers went overboard with dialogue options. The game’s cast of main characters all have their own unique stories, but so do the side characters. Take for example Milton Hooks, the shotgun-bearing ambulance driver who can be found at the entrance to the hospital. There isn’t a similarly written character in the rest of the game, even if Milton isn’t crucial for the story. Not to mention the voice acting is superb.
And that’s where the praise ends.
Let’s start with the game’s many performance issues, which admittedly might not persist on the PC or Xbox One, but were ubiquitous on my Playstation 4. In Vampyr, you will find yourself sprinting through winding alleyways, which drains your stamina meter down until you slow back down to a jog. At many moments throughout the relatively open world that the game presents, the game would completely stop to load in the rest of the level ahead of me – before I had even run out of my stamina meter. In other words, this game is designed in such a way that you can’t even exhaust your stamina meter before the game panics and must stop you from moving further.
These loading pauses were annoying on face value, because the artificial mid-action interruption completely broke my immersion in the experience. It was even worse when running past alerted enemies who were trying to attack me. Multiple times, these loading pauses would cause me to take unnecessary damage. This could be solved by sectioning off places throughout the world – which the game also does in certain areas – behind a door that then transitions into a proper loading screen before spawning you in the next area.
Beyond these mid-play loading pauses, there were maddeningly long load times between areas and respawns. Each loading screen lasted a minimum of forty seconds, and some persisted upwards of two minutes. This is true even if you die and respawn in the same area. (I often joked that this game had “Anthem load times,” per the universally bad press that game received on release.) I even came up with loading screen activities to keep myself entertained while streaming it. This should never be something a player has to consider.
The game’s sound broke on multiple occasions as well, dragging out the sounds of characters yelling at me and distorting the otherwise phenomenal music. This happened seemingly randomly, with no identifiable cause as to why the sound would break. The only fix was to close the game entirely and load it back up to reset this problem.
The final fundamental problem with this game’s performance is the fact that it literally crashed four times during my playthrough. I have never experienced a game crashing before on any console, especially not my Playstation 4. I don’t have a copy of Vampyr for my PC to compare the performance, but at this point I don’t want to. A game crashing during simple gameplay even once is unacceptable.
The combat in Vampyr is also poorly executed. Clearly the developers looked to games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne for the game’s design, especially in terms of how they mimicked the combat. Your character, Dr. Jonathan Reid, has two main loadouts where you can customize which kinds of weapons you prefer. I ended up wielding a two-handed staff, alternating during key moments for a sawed-off shotgun. There’s no doubt that the game provides you multiple kinds of weapons to choose based on your preference, but none of the weapons felt genuinely different in combat.
Though I don’t seek out many Souls-like games, I understand why people find the battle patterns to be satisfying: dodge, rush in for a few strikes, parry, then dodge again from the enemy’s retaliation. It’s tense. You learn an enemy’s specific strikes and patterns, adapt to them, and patiently wait to go in for the final blow. You strike that final blow and the adrenaline pays off.
This style of combat doesn’t appeal to me, but Vampyr’s implementation of it was sloppy at best. The character response to the input is clunky, the enemy responses are inconsistent and sometimes break boundaries that they shouldn’t. I specifically remember hiding behind a door while an enemy was telegraphing their next shotgun attack, and it hit me right through the door as though it wasn’t there. The combat also suffers from its sloppy hitboxes, generic and repetitive enemies, and a “stop everything to defend yourself or get killed running away” reality that stalls progression through the narrative. Somehow this was missed or ignored during playtesting.
One redeeming quality of combat is the parrying and stun mechanics that allow you to gain the upper hand in most combat situations by feeding off of enemies. While there are no real stealth mechanics to speak of in this game – an oversight that truly feels bewildering given the combination of environmental setpieces and your vampiric abilities – there is the option to wait patiently before engaging with the enemy until they turn away from you. If you sneak up slowly, the game will prompt you with the ability to bite and stun this unaware enemy, which drains their health and replenishes yours. However, as soon as you do this, every other surrounding enemy is alerted. What could have been a fun stealth system to vary the experience of combat turns into a minor advantage for the beginning of most encounters. Biting also renders you temporarily invincible to oncoming enemy attacks, which I used to my advantage multiple times throughout my playthrough.
The only reason I describe this combination of biting, stunning and parrying as redeeming is because it gives you agency in these otherwise helpless, patience-based fights. So much of Vampyr’s combat is grounded in terms of your available stamina. Everything you do – attack, dodge, parry, etc. – consumes stamina. Often times you are literally playing a game of waiting during combat. The parry and stun mechanic, leading to an opportunity to consume blood that drains their health and raises yours, is the only reason this combat system isn’t totally abysmal.
The story itself is an interesting take on post-war London, but it presents nothing groundbreaking or amazing. You’re a doctor who has to navigate the harsh reality of being born a newly created vampire. Morally, Dr. Jonathan Reid must stay true to his Hippocratic oath. He has people to heal, citizens to protect, he wants to preserve as much of his humanity as possible. One strength of this narrative is that it’s always serious and never cheesy, a relief for the vampire genre.
One of the main aspects that drew me to purchase and play Vampyr was the promise of branching narrative and player agency affecting the outcome of the story. To some extent, this is delivered in the game. There are four main endings that the player can reach. Some of these endings can be pretty dark, while some can bring welcome relief. But getting to these endings is made tedious by the fact that the game autosaves at every possible corner, meaning you can’t archive multiple save files to experiment with different playstyles and conclusions.
The game challenges you from the very beginning to make a choice: give into vampiric blood sucking tendencies and kill members of the districts for experience points, leveling you up significantly, or stay true to the life-affirming values of being a doctor, protecting and saving the innocent. The cutscenes and early interactions with other characters make it clear that the game wants this choice to drive your playstyle. This is an exciting prospect for the game that fell apart about halfway through my playthrough.
If you choose to play the game conservatively, choosing to earn experience by healing sick patients and completing quests, you won’t level up too much. This means that enemies become overpowered very quickly. There is the option to upgrade your weapons, which only requires the acquisition of parts that can be found by killing enemies or trading with merchants, but ultimately you’ll face some formidable enemies that can wipe out your character in a few hits.
If you give into the temptation to kill off named characters, you will gain considerable experience. This makes leveling up (and therefore combat) much easier. However, feeding on citizens will destabilize the health of a district. If you kill too many people, or especially the pillars of a community, then the district falls into hostility, which causes named characters to disappear and close up shop. In their place, vicious and highly lethal enemies prowl through the now dark and abandoned corridors.
In other words, playing a darker version of Dr. Jonathan Reid and sucking the blood of citizens actually backfires by creating tougher enemies in the places where you’ll be running through to complete future missions. It sounds like the game will become easier if you’re able to level up to increase your stats and gain new abilities, but that is only true for about the first thirty minutes after your decision to kill off a citizen.
There are few main bosses throughout Vampyr’s story, such as the gruesome Doris Fletcher and the respectable Geoffrey McCullum. These boss fights are by far the most memorable moments of my playthrough, not necessarily because they are well designed but because they are brutally tough if you haven’t leveled up enough. My fight with Doris lasted for about thirty deaths before I gave in and decided to kill off a few characters from the nearby district. Once I leveled up, I was able to defeat her in just a few minutes. It was the right decision for my playthrough – I generally shrink away from difficulty in games, and this was compounded by the Anthem-like loading times – but as aforementioned, this decision came with dire consequences.
The fight with Geoffrey McCullum was so difficult that I genuinely thought about giving up on the game at that point. McCullum is armed with a badass crossbow attached to his arm, which he uses to his advantage in your encounter with him. The fight takes place in a big, open room – pretty standard for this game. But McCullum turns on searingly bright overhead lights that burn you, rapidly draining your health. (The logic here is that vampires are harmed by sunlight.) Not only is McCullum firing off ranged shots at you, burning you with randomly populating, deadly lights, but he also is an absolute tank. For my first several attempts in this arena, I barely even took away a quarter of his health. It felt unfair. And then I went back into the streets, feeding on a few more people, which ended up sealing the deal for this battle.
Perhaps this is where all of you reading start to think I should just “git gud” instead of faulting the game. I’ll grant that. But these bosses fundamentally changed how I wanted to play the game, which was a particularly egregious example of gameplay, design, and mechanics clashing with the story the game was seeming to tell. (Ironically, I beat the final boss on my first attempt.)
Obviously this choice between killing characters for experience and how difficult these boss fights were was an intentional decision made by DontNod that would be compelling to the player. But once it became clear that I was not capable of progressing through the game’s story without corrupting the character I was trying to play, this choice fell flat.
Even if you choose to play in a pacifist manner, there is still the problem of ludonarrative dissonance. Dr. Jonathan Reid fights and kills hundreds of enemies throughout the game, not all of which are monsters. Several enemies are clearly human, whether they’re priests, vampire hunters, or otherwise. In order to progress through an area, you either need to use the ability to become temporarily invisible, which isn’t the most reliable method, or you need to kill your way through because the game won’t let you pass through areas and doors if you’ve been detected. When I was killing off a crucifix-bearing man who was fighting on behalf of the church, the thought occurred to me, “How would someone playing a pacifist run handle this?” And there’s no great answer that doesn’t in some ways complicate or compromise the story this game tries to tell.
Vampyr is not a terrible video game, just a bad one. Again, the developers of this game took worthwhile risks, and a lot of love went into this final product. It barely missed the mark, but in so many important ways: technical and performance issues, sloppy and repetitive combat, as well as presenting what’s essentially a false dichotomy to the player in terms of choice. There is an audience for this game who will overlook all of these faults for the narrative experience. But I was absolutely relieved when the credits finally rolled. All things considered, I don’t believe this game is worth playing.
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