Haven't done one of these in a bit, so why not write about the latest game I streamed. Vampyr!
It's a game with middling reviews. Video games are already chronically overrated by reviewers, so that was a worrying start. But I got it for free and thought, "Hey, it's a dumb, trashy vampire game. How bad could it be?"
..well. First of all, I should say that I don't think Vampyr is a bad game. What it is, is an incredibly mediocre game.
It’s 1918. London. You play as Doctor Johnathan Reid. A posh man that looks like he was grown in a lab to be drooled over by Tumblr fan artists. Johnathan wakes up in a big pile of bodies as a vampire, he staggers around like he's been kicked in the testicles, accidentally eats his own sister who's inexplicably hanging out by the body pit, then goes on the run.
He's a blood doctor (I know) and he ends up taking shelter at a nearby hospital. Off we go on an adventure to find out who turned us into a monster and why. There's also vampire hunters or whatever. Not important.
When it started, we were optimistic. Like naive newborn deer, we traipsed into the open meadow, unaware of the dangers of playing a video game with under a 75 on Metacritic.
The dialogue was instantly terrible, but in a charming way. The sort of writing you'd get in a low budget horror movie from the early 80s. Easy to sit through, easy to mock. Almost comforting. Like “From Hell” if that wasn’t unwatchable.
Muddy-faced poors with accents that would make Dick Van Dyke blush spout lines about the Spanish Flu and how miserable everything is, while feral vampires roam the streets in such large numbers that it stretches belief that all these sickly chimney sweeps aren't dead yet.
All seemed fine, but as we went through the game, like cheap makeup caked on a Whitechapel prostitute's face, cracks began to appear.
The story is fine. Not good, not bad, but fine. It's trashy, and sometimes it even feels self aware and intentional. You can sit back and enjoy pale Londoners wax poetic about life and immortality.
However, the game decided it needed to have combat. The combat system it decided to go with is a sort of sub, sub Dark Souls meets The Witcher. It's clunky, slow, awkward, and there's lots of it. With no option to change difficulty once you've started, it takes about 45 minutes for this to become extremely tedious.
The game in general seems to have no idea what it wants to be, so it crams in as many systems and loops as it can. It’s messy and mildly unpleasant. That tends to happen when you cram things into spaces that can’t take it.
I genuinely believe that this game could have worked extremely well as either of two things.
First, a slow, dialogue driven, narrative adventure game. Solving the mystery of the vampires of London by talking to the locals and picking up clues, offing people, healing them, or hypnotizing them to get clues that lead you deeper into the intrigue. Gain experience and level up your skills to use in your investigations.
The game has touches of this. You can talk to the various residents of London and learn about their relationships, their troubles, and their illnesses. Making them a syringe of goo keeps them healthy for about 12 hours until they apparently eat some soil or something and get sick again, and if they get too sick, the area suffers.
All of this feels a little shallow. Mostly the characters just repeat the same lines over and over again. None of them have anything particularly interesting to say, and when they do decide to ask you for help, the sidequests feel so shoehorned in that I’m genuinely surprised they bothered including them. “Carry this letter to another person. They’ll say thanks and hand you like 5 shillings.”
The other track Vampyr could have taken was to commit to being a straightforward action game. Linear, combat focused. Narrative told in cutscenes or between missions ala Wolfenstein.
Again, it sort of tries to do this, but between the frankly irritating combat and the inclusion of pointless RPG mechanics and a crafting/upgrade system, it gets muddy and frustrating quickly. I took a note from Dark Souls and beat a boss early on that was giving me trouble. Apparently the game didn’t want me to do that because afterwards every basic enemy was so overpowered compared to me that it made even simple combat take 10 minutes per encounter.
Either of these aspects of the game could have worked if they had been plucked out and fleshed out on their own. Instead they smash into each other. There’s no real connection or intertwining, they just exist. If you let a district get too sick and unstable it’ll make more monsters and soldiers appear, but other than that, these two sides of the game remain disparate and awkward next to each other.
The final straw felt like the culmination of problems. We arrived at a boss fight that was too difficult to interact with. Clearly the game was worried we were blazing through its world too quickly, and it demanded we take our time and go grind out some more levels. Really immerse yourself in the filth.
Off we went to hand in some more incredibly unsatisfying side missions. “Oh thank you sir, here, have these shillings and a box of nails for your trouble.” After fighting our way through cramped side streets filled with faceless goons to hand in these quests, we went back to level up.
The amount of experience we gained, after grinding for over an hour and running errands for ungrateful street urchins, barely covered a minor health upgrade. The amount of grinding I would have to do in order to get significantly more powerful made me feel a pit in my stomach.
But wait! We were told earlier that you could pick off named characters for quick XP. Get them healthy and well fed, and then harvest them for massive, evil power.
This isn't a new idea. Dishonored notably did this in 2012 and even that was far from the first. “Evil” equals easy power but grim narrative, while “Good” equals harder game but greater payoff.
It works in theory, if you do it right. Vampyr, from what I saw, doesn’t do it right. An arbitrary “Mesmerize” level meant I couldn’t drink anyone worth any meaningful amounts of experience.
I ended up offing a racist landlord, which is about as noble as you can get in a killing, but it still barely made a dent in what I’d need to take on the boss. The game flashed warnings about how the area would suffer consequences, too, so I don’t know what it wanted from me at that point.
I read some ominous things online about trying to play this game while not killing NPCs. The words “interminable grind” were used more than once, and I can see why.
I heard better things about the story mode setting, which makes the combat easier and lessens the need for the RPG mechanics. But that just begs the question even more. Why have those parts there in the first place? A misguided sense of variety? Padding?
I’m disappointed in Vampyr. It’s not terrible, you can absolutely get some enjoyment out of this. If you’re in the right headspace and you just want something with vampires and cobblestone streets, there’s worse stuff you could pick up.
But there’s parts of it that I think could have made something genuinely entertaining, and it felt sqandered. Generic. I can see why it earned the (lack of) reputation it has.
What it comes down to, and the reason the game is currently uninstalled and won’t be streamed again, is that after I killed that greasy landlord, I realised I hadn’t had any fun in over two hours.
Games can be long experiences, so that might not sound huge, but when you’re spending your time on what is essentially a toy, and especially while you’re streaming something to an audience, that feels fairly damning.
Rating: Queen of the Damned.