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Dontnod adopts a deeply Gothic perspective at the beginning of the 20th century in London, but squanders it in a dismal and indecisive adventure.
The great gothic horror is all about color, or the lack of it. The dark of the night, the white of the bones, the monochrome of a dark paved street dimly lit by a single paraffin lamp. When color is used, it is to highlight scenes of the macabre and morbid so loved by the fearsome pennies – the yellowing of a solitary corpse and mouldering, the foul green bile of a plague victim or a single shining sheaf. Where it should never exist is in the kingdoms of beige.
Vampyr is an RPG action that attempts to return to the roots of great Gothic horror in an environment that is often lacking criminally. Jonathan Reid is a renowned doctor specializing in blood transfusions – what else? – and serves as a military doctor in the Great War before being attacked in a London street one night by an unknown assailant and turned into a newborn vampire. Who is his creator, no one can say, but soon Reid is involved in a plot to find the source of the disease and understand why a group of secret mystical orders are suddenly making a comeback.
Editing is precipitated in a scary prologue that places you in the wake of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which at its peak has left millions dead. In the midst of all this, when the bodies lined the streets and fear and chaos seized the capital, which noticed the absence of a lonely Whitechapel shopkeeper, from a gang leader Dockland, from a friendly thief from the West End? It's the season of buffets for the immortal undead, but as a man once sworn not to hurt, will you participate?
Well, as Vampyr himself says loudly in his first seconds: "What is life, but death?" Ouch. The writing can become rather embarrassing, with the intro gushing out as "that's the glass but the sand tortured?" And "What is darkness but the sun?" Each line is delivered with a seriousness that facial animations fail to sell. However, this is not entirely the fault of Vampyr – the tortured belly button goes hand in hand with the genre – and as a former doctor penetrated into this world of vamp-eating-vamp without any explanation, Reid has Equal reasons to ignite or to try and scratch his return to a normal life.
This is the central vanity of the game – are you going to heal or are you going to hurt? Will you support your Hippocratic oath or will you succumb to your thirst for blood? Unfortunately, it never feels like the dramatic conflict that the game turns out to be. Essentially, NPCs give a certain amount of XP when they are bitten, but you can maximize that bonus before biting by looking after that NPC for any disease that might undermine their strength, and by revealing clues to the complexity of their character, which they taste all the sweetest. There is rarely any skill except to search the houses for letters and documents and exhaust all the possible options on the dialogue wheel of this person and his relatives, but sometimes, if you observe people while your vampire sense is active, I will see them brilliant. Standing in a specific spot marked on the ground as it happens will unlock a short sequence in which you will usually observe them doing something strange or illegal, which in turn will unlock a another clue to which you can confront them. Sometimes you can fail by choosing the wrong answer to the dialogue, but all of this is a bit debatable unless you intend to "kiss" that individual eventually from all way.
Vampyr insists that the fewer lives there are, the more difficult it will be to follow the right path and kill no one (the humans you bite and kill in battle do not count) play mostly in hard mode. And yet, there's never really any reward for that, except for some commendations from some NPCs and a very hasty lip service, which flickers during the end cutscene. As someone who likes to take on a challenge and who usually tries to try the virtuous path in narrative games, it's hard not to feel wrong, all the more so as it does not take long for history to move away from the truly interesting lives of mortals to survive a very dark chapter in the history of London to an apocalyptic battle between three former warring factions.
This is the true disappointment of Vampyr – he says nothing or does nothing new with the genre (already sadly -used in video games) or the interesting premise that he's going to be in the game. installed. Instead, he recreates old tropes without flair or clean mind. It borrows from the big – and the name – checks out a number of them too – but these are all stories we've heard before. There is the tortured vampire who is reluctant to take a life, the heartbreak of the family, the secret orders pulling strings, the deadly aspens waiting for their chance of immortality, the vampire hunters protecting civilians not always innocent while categorically refusing to acknowledge the remaining humanity – these are all stories very familiar to all fans of Gothic horror. There are some allusions to NPCs that involve minor relationships involving LGBT relations, racism and women's suffrage, but like all other quests, these stories are never expanded or explored with more than one line or two of vaguely sympathetic dialogue, especially if they are not drawn to a conclusion involving a dark alley and some sharp teeth.
When you do not talk with or fix snacks, you fight them. Basic combat consists of brandishing a two-handed weapon or favoring one in each hand – a melee weapon such as a hacksaw or saber and a freehand weapon such as a shotgun or stake. Then you have your special abilities that need to be unlocked over time, from defensive to offensive to passive; sharp claws that can damage enemies and give you bloodshed, blood barriers that can absorb the damage, health regeneration, and ultimate attacks that include the ability to switch to dumb mode for a few seconds, hitting all the enemies in your neighborhood.
The most important fighting element that Vampyr does not teach you is Blood (separated from the blood that you are harvesting in search of XP reinforcements), which acts a lot like vampiric mana. Left-handed weapons such as the stake inflict a quantity of stunning damage to an enemy, shown as a lower gauge than their general health. Stunning them completely will cause them to fall to the ground, allowing you to bite them and replenish your blood counter, which you can then use to shoot more special attacks. Battles thus become a balance between regular and special attacks alternating, dodging, healing the aggravated damage (ie the damage caused by fire or by the holy relics that break your overall health bar and do not not allow progressive regeneration). So you can fill your blood count and start again.
It's fun to find the right pace, but all too often it can boil down to a frustrating war of wear as you work through crowds of tanks, gunners, and long-range threats. Boss battles – especially if you play virtually and are probably under-leveled – last way too long and test your patience long before they test your skills, with enemies sporting inflated health bars and the same two or three lines of dialogue that they constantly repeat until you slowly lose the will to live. Vampires can have all the time in the world, but that does not mean that we can expect as much from the players.
It all goes like a missed opportunity, and you think that if Vampyr was solely focused on fighting or storytelling design, he could have done something really interesting, and more importantly, satisfying, with the l & # 39; one or the other, instead of stretching thin. At present, it looks more like a versatile craft, and although it talks a lot about the consequences of taking and saving lives, it seems to favor the fight over history, more so than the first is an inevitable fact of the beyond and the only reason to unlock clues and take lives for XP is to increase your arsenal of spooky skills with which you will take even more lives, but the kind that does not really matter in the grand scheme of the story.
Added to that, there is a general lack of varnish that tends to pile up. The loading times are painfully long (running too fast from one open area to another and the game will pause the action halfway to load everything) and bugs like the framerate slowdown will crop up sometimes in combat. In one case my game crashed at the console, and in another a fairly monumental boss fight suffered some serious audio stuttering throughout, until I completely left the game and reloaded . These are questions that will probably be settled in time, but all of this suggests that Vampyr could have done a little more development to improve the initial experience of first time adopters.
It is also not known how much individual player choices really matter. A fairly early sequence involves Reid working with a nurse to try to rescue a man on the operating table, ask questions and make requests as he cuts the patient from the root to the stem and struggled his urge to bite, but despite loading and reloading and approaching the scenario from different angles, each ended the same way.
However, not everything is dark. There is satisfaction in being able to make drugs and tonics to heal your favorite civilians (though it's hard not to have the "formula" to cure a simple headache when your pockets are overflowing with codeine) and to monitor their reactions. the neighborhood, with relationships and social circles between NPCs that evolve and intermingle. The Pembroke Hospital, the first main center of the game, offers a delightful wealth of crazies and potholes to explore, which you end up feeling oddly protective. And Vampyr also knows its decor, giving life to the filthy lanes of Victorian London under a soundtrack worthy of a maudlin. It's a well-designed, small but perfectly formed world, making it all the more unfortunate that your interactions are so limited.
Pressing the left stick on the consoles unleashes Jonathan Reid's Vampire Sense, which renders the world as it sees it, in black and white, except for the liberal splashes of blood lining the dark streets of London, and the keen and pounding hearts of everyday people that he has promised to protect. But if Vampyr had taken the time to refine all those moral gray areas for the rich narrative vein that they presented, rather than considering them as a resource to support a mundane combat system, this could have been a pretty special game . Whatever it is, even with whips of the red substance, Vampyr definitely finishes beige.
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