So. Today, I bought the game Vampyr. In this game, you play as Dr Johnothan Reid, a famous blood transfusion surgeon in 1916 London. Upon returning from the trenches in France, where you served as a combat physician, you are attacked and tossed into a pit. When you wake up and get out of the pit, you learn about vampires, and that you have become one. You become friends with Dr Edgar Swansea, the head doctor at Pembroke Hospital. The hospital is overrun with patients of the influenza outbreak, and you do your best to help while also trying to understand more about your own affliction and how to live with it.
==COMBAT==
So far, the combat is pretty smooth. You have 3 bars: Health, stamina, and blood. As you can expect, being attacked by the Priwen (vampire hunters) removes your health. Attacking, dodging, and springing drain stamina. Using your vampire abilities drains your blood bar. With some weapons, you can stun an enemy, and that gives you the opportunity to bite them, which drains their health and gives you more blood to use for your skills. These skills are so far pretty cool. You can have up to 4 active skills and one ultimate skill. The active skills are mainly offensive, although there are a couple of defensive. The first skill you get during the tutorial is a healing one, which is pretty useful. There's also an AoE explosion, a ranged lance, and a ranged leap.
==CHOICES==
Choices play a big part in this game. There are 4 areas in the game: The Docks, Pembroke Hospital, Whitechapel, and the West End. Each area has a Pillar character (for Pembroke, it's Dr Edgar Swansea), and a bunch of other characters. Some characters will have illnesses, such as fatigue or anemia, and you can craft medicines to help them. There are also lots of side quests to help these characters, and some even have their own quests. All of these things tie into the "health status" of the area overall. There are 5 levels of health: Sanitized, healthy, stable, serious, and critical. Speaking with everybody and exhausting every dialogue option is very useful, as it unlocks information about other characters, which will unlock further dialogue options. Some important choices (whicha re clearly marked) also have some locked options, which can be unlocked by learning more about the situation, so it pays to be as thorough as possible.
One of the big points of this game is feeding. There's a passive skill called Mesmerise, which lets you essentially hypnotise somebody. While controlling a person, you can lead them to a quiet area to feed on them, or you can leave them alone. You can choose to feed on as many people as possible, and get as much XP as possible, or you can stand by your hippocratic oath and only feed on those who harm you, A.K.A the Priwen.
==ADVANCEMENT==
As mentioned previously, there is a skill tree system in play. Skills are split between active and passive. Passive skills affect your maximum health and stamina, how much blood you get from biting, how much damage biting does, etcetera. Mesmerise, I believe, is levelled up by using it. As of right now, my Mesmerise is level 2, although I have run into several people who require level 4 or 5 Mesmerise in order to do it to them. I can only assume that this means that the more you feed on citizens, the more powerful citizens you can feed on. You can also use your Vampire Sense to detect how healthy a person is and how much XP you'd get from drinking their blood.
==CONCLUSION==
So far, the game has been very entertaining. The setting is very fitting for the game, the combat is smooth, although it can be very difficult if you get swarmed with 3 or more enemies. The characters are rather deep and some do invoke some emotion. Such as the patient at Pembroke whose wife died in a zepelin raid, and is now annoyed at the doctors that they can't fix his arm so he can go back to work and provide for his kids. The skill advancement is fun, and it's cool to see what stuff you can unlock next. You can make a very defensive build, or you can go all-out vampire psychopath.
I'd give this game 8 jingles out of 10. With one redacted because of some inconsistencies, such as Nurse Crane saying that Dr Swansea's office is on the second floor when it was actually on the first floor, going by the UK system and the game is set in London. And another point deducted for the lack of character customisation. The only customisation you have is the weaponry, and if you pre-ordered, you can get a nice outfit with a bowler hat. But that's it.
