Vampyr is a bit of an amalgamation of different gameplay mechanics and ideas.

The way the weapons are found, how you upgrade them, down to the equipment menu is very souls inspired.
Same with the stamina bar and dodge gameplay and how every barrel and crate explodes when you touch it.
Yet despite that, it plays nothing like a soul game and instead like a slower, more methodical 7th gen action RPG.

You can feel brush strokes of Bioware and Obsidian game design all throughout.
The skill tree, the way the dialogue is handled, and also certain story beats couldn't make me stop thinking about classics such as Alpha Protocol, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, and even Mass Effect 1.

What sets Vampyr apart is how it marries the narrative and gameplay.
You, as the player, and Jonathan, as the character, both want to do the right thing by not killing innocent people.
The way the game goes about this is that you are starved of XP by not killing innocent people.
This in turn makes your journey and choice of abstaining from innocent blood feel impacted not just in the narrative but also the gameplay.

I think on paper this is brilliant, though in practice the implementation of this system can sometimes leave something to be desired.
In particular, the way high-level enemies simply take less damage while dealing more to you.
A low-level playthrough turns a lot of otherwise simple enemies into damage sponges that one-shot you.

The skill tree also has a problem of not every skill being made equally.
When starved of XP, you really have to be efficient with the little you have.
But if you do decide to kill and level to max, you start killing most enemies and bosses in just a few hits, making the skills even more pointless as they all instantly kill enemies at that point.
It is a system that punishes experimentation and excess equally.

An interesting way Vampyr handles NPCs is that almost every single NPC you meet can be killed by you, either for story reasons or for XP. To actually make you care for these characters, almost every single character actually has a side quest for you and a lot of backstory and dialogue, more so compared to the average NPC in other games.
Though at times, and especially when you meet bad characters or criminals that abuse or hurt other NPCs you interact with, you are never actually allowed to help them or stop these crimes from happening.
Either you take it upon yourself to kill these people or leave them be; much to the dismay of the community.
I wish it wasn't so black and white and let you resolve these conflicts in a more elegant way.

The story NPCs have better-defined arcs and satisfying resolutions to their conflicts, on the other hand, thankfully.
It's not a huge cast of story-important characters, but much like the NPCs you meet in the world, they have so much dialogue and backstory you barely even notice how few of them there actually are because you know so much about them.
I think the developers did a great job making the conflict and story feel deeply personal. Immaculate voice acting all around. The world design is just incredible. Loved the costume design of the characters, and the music paints a somber picture as much as the visuals do.

While I won't say I enjoyed every single part of the game, I ultimately enjoyed it as a whole package and do not regret the time I spent in this wonderfully macabre world.
For the very low price this game goes on sale for, you really cannot go wrong with Vampyr.
It's completely worth it in my humble opinion!

I decided to play Vampyr for the first time now after holding off on it for a long time, since Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 (VTMB 2), the sequel to my favorite game of all time, is due to release in October. If you crave more vampire gaming in the (blood) vein of VTMB, you could do a lot worse than Vampyr, but that's not because Vampyr is great. It's rather that all the alternatives seem bad or lacking, though Skyrim's Dawnguard DLC might be good. Vampyr itself feels anemic next to VTMB, but that's unsurprising as VTMB is great in so many ways (as long as you play with the unofficial patch 7.0 or later versions).

However, Vampyr compares favourably in some of the most important sections and those are voice acting, story and lore, which are all great or really good. I don't think I've ever played a game with as much voice acting as Vampyr and I love playing games with lots of voice acting. Most of what I did in the game was solely to hear more voice acting, get more dialogue choices. All the side quest rewards were insignificant, getting more voice acting was its own reward. Unlike other games, it's worth talking to the same person several times, because you can unlock new dialogue choices through the game's hint system.

You're supposed to be a doctor fighting an epidemic, but apparently that involves finding a lot of gossip (i.e hints) and confronting the NPC's about that. You can force them to tell the truth via your vampiric mind power (those dialogue options are blue colored) and thereby learning more about them. The more hints you gather, the more XP that NPC will be worth, because as a vampire you have the option to "embrace" them, i.e. killing them (in VTMB, embracing means turning them into a vampire).

The game sets this up like a huge dilemma, because sparing NPCs leaves you underlevelled to fight enemies, but is bad for the community. Oh no, what to do? It's quite an overrated mechanic and a major complaint among reviewers, which is the main reason I was hesitant to play it. To minimize this, I played on the easiest difficulty and I advice you to do the same if you, like me, don't want to kill any NPC's. To be honest, the combat isn't that bad, but quickly gets repetitive and fighting more than two enemies is difficult. The enemies aren't fun to fight, they respawn in some areas and the variety isn't great, but it increases a bit later on.

The game does give you plenty of skills and weapons to deal with enemies, but that only lessens the tediousness of fighting the same few enemies again and again. I focused on biting enemies to death, which means I first needed to deplete their stun meter, so I had a one-handed melee weapon focused on damage and an offhand weapon focused on stun capacity. A few hits with the offhand weapon stuns the enemy enough for me to bite them, which does damage, heals me and gives me blood for my skills. A few hits with my melee weapon takes care of the rest of the health bar. That was my rinse-and-repeat tactic, but the game offers other ways. I didn't find much use for two-handed weapons (allows you to parry) or guns (limited ammo).

The game loves to send you from one side of the map to another to do a quest and on the map it might look like you can go in a straight line to your objective, but just like in real life, the map and reality can be two very different things. I found it necessary to memorize how buildings, locked gates and debris are located, rather than using the map to help me. There is often only one way to go before you unlock more paths as the game progresses. The thing that pissed me off the most is that some side quests are located in areas that are inaccessible when you get them. I travelled a long way several times, fighting the same old enemies again and again (just running past them would feel even less fun) only to find that the objective marker is on the other side of a locked gate which only unlocked later on. What the hell is this actual literal gatekeeping BS? Why give me a side quest now and then deny me the ability to solve it until much later when a main quest unlocks the area it is in?

Given all I've written above, I don't think I want to replay this game, even if it has plenty of replay value and I now know several things I wished I knew from the start. It wasted a lot of my time, but I don't think it was a waste of time overall.

Vampyr: talk talk talk, run around, talk talk some more, run around some more, fight some vampires, talk talk talk