What can be said about Vampyr?? In a nutshell this game is absolute chaos in the worst possible way. Don't get me wrong the story is not bad and the voice acting is pretty good but where it matters the game Stinks big time.
For starters the loading times are atrocious, they seem to take forever, to put it in perspective to reload the game when you die, on the 5 occasions I timed it took nearly 55 seconds on average, loading between screens can take between 20 and 27 seconds, this in itself makes you want to switch off and do something else.
As for actual game play, for this type of game you expect a lot of dialogue , unfortunately, this takes up most of the game, and after a while, after talking to the NPC's you really start to hate them and lose any interest in their wellbeing. That being said, the everyday diseases of the era seem as though they will kill them off for you before the plague will actually get them. The idea of giving the player choices is not a new one but with Vampyr, when it comes to making those choices you get very little indication of what is right or wrong. For instance, I saved the priest Sean Hampton near the beginning of the game, however, further on it turns out he had been bitten by the Skas I saved him from and had started to turn into one. When I caught up with him, he seemed quite coherent and understood his condition and that he wanted to keep doing Gods work helping others, his human and Skas flock [turns out he had been secretly helping both for a number of years] Anyway, after undergoing a mission set by him you come to the conclusion he has hurt nobody and his heart [seems] to be in the right place, you get the choice to either kill him, turn him or just let him carry on his work. So I thought, being the good guy I am [I did not want to kill people if I could help it] turning him might unleash horror onto the streets with a blood thirsty Vampyr, I did not want to kill him, he had done nothing wrong, so I let him carry on. No sooner had I left the district [minute or so later] I get a message which basically said everyone in the are were now dead, yes, out God fearing Skas had killed [or turned] everyone, don't figure!!
The other shit area of the game is the health of everyone in the districts you encounter, they go down quicker then the noonday sun, you have to flit between districts offering each and everyone medicine to help the and raise their health bars [over time the still go down] the problem with this is you can only carry so much of anyone medicine but trying to make more is hampered by the fact collecting resources is quite limited and few and far between, so in some case you can't save everyone.
Combat is terrible, in fact terrible is too nice an expression to give to it, even atrocious is to light a word. You have certain supernatural abilities thanks to your newly found undead status, which you can build their strengths through the upgrade tree at any workstation. For powers you need to build XP and for weapons you need to scavenge parts [which, as with the medicine, this is limited] Combat consists of using you weapons, either one or two handed and just using your super speed, Dash [or dodge as it comes under the keybinding] you dash forward, sideways strike and dash back, this uses stamina which dwindles really, really quickly so once your stamina bar is empty you stand there like a limp dick in a sausage factory. This makes fights not only with bosses but just general enemies quite painstaking and very frustrating as they don't suffer with "loss of stamina". For example I am fighting a certain female boss in the cemetery I can impale her on myAbyss attack [an ultimate supernatural ability] yet she can still use her abilities to attack me. If I attack her with one of my melee weapons and try and get a few swings in, I soon run out of stamina yet she can chase me all over the area without even stopping for breath [while she is doing this I have to use dodge but only when I have stamina to do so, which makes it difficult]. You get no respite, what's even more annoying is if you are killed, you go back to the previous respawn point yet you lose anything you may have used during the fight, bullets, syringes etc. Fighting in this game is generally too boring with very little you can do to shake it up, you use a power, for example your claws you cannot chain together a couple of strikes you get one hit then you have a 3 to 4 second countdown before you can use it again, plus all your supernatural abilities rely on how much blood you have in your blood bar. You can't even use your abilities to escape or move to Andrea for a quick breather. For example you can teleport from the ground up to a balcony or across a river, but you can only use this ability when the game tells you, you can't get into a 3 on 1 brawl and decide, "hey, I'm getting my arse kicked, lets teleport uptown that balcony so I can recoup and decide whether to stay or run" no you either win or die and then wait for an eternity for the game to reload the last checkpoint without any of the consumables you may have used during the fight.
Sadly the £44 that was being asked for this game was way to high, I nearly bought it when it first came out because of the reviews and hype behind it but a couple of other games came out at the same time that I was after so I held off, I recently purchased it while it was on an offer so only paid £10 and although it is worth it for that price I would say to anyone thinking of getting it, do so only when you have nothing else on your wish list due out anytime soon and don't pay any more then £10 for it. There is a lot that needs to be addressed in this game not least the lob sides mechanics when it comes to combat. The ideas are great but very poorly implemented, intact I would go as far as to say they were trying to copy or put a new twist on Vampire the Masquerade but have failed dismally.
Sadly I thin the biggest betray is the so called awards this game has received and high point score some gaming sites have awarded it. I somehow feel the played a totally different game to what is on release, it just got to show, even in the gaming world there are too many people willing to kiss ase and lick boots.