It’s a Little Bit Souls-y and Witcher-y
From what we saw of Vampyr’s presentation at E3 2017, combat seems to be rather varied. As an action RPG, the game allows you to preform melee attacks as well as cool vampire powers that you can use to teleport and confuse your foes. Vampire powers consume blood power, which is indicated by a red bar on the top left of the screen. These powers can stun foes for a short period of time, or even allow you to perform swift attacks in between combos. It looked similar to Geralt’s own powers in The Witcher 3, and it adds some freshness and variety to the gameplay.
Vampyr’s combat feels a bit Souls-y as well. Beneath your health bar is a stamina bar that dictates how much you can do in the game. Every action costs stamina, and if the bar is completely depleted, you’ll have to wait for it to fill up before you can attack again.
The demo that we saw also featured a boss fight at the end of the level, along with the Souls-like mechanic of having to return to a safe spot to consolidate all of your experience points and level up from there. It’s a nice mesh of gameplay features, and it looks exciting.
How Its Level Progression Works
Jonathan (the main character) can gain experience points by killing enemies and sucking the blood out of his victims. Before choosing to attack a victim, you can enter a menu to view critical information such as blood purity and their relations to other citizens in the city. The higher the victim’s blood purity, the more experience you’ll receive.
After you’ve amassed a good amount of experience, you can head back to a safe house and level up from there. There are also skill trees that will allow you to increase Jonathan’s strength or improve his stealth skills. It’s all up to your own personal preference and play style.
Your Actions Have Far-Reaching Consequences
One of the biggest draws of Vampyr is how every NPC in the city is connected in some way or other. As you explore the city, you can trigger new side quests that will lead you to interact with some of these citizens. A side quest has multiple conclusions. You can choose to hand over some key materials to a boy to help save his life, or keep them for yourself and make potions that help strengthen you. The way you deal with citizens will affect the lives of the people around them and, subsequently, the entire city itself. When talking to citizens, you can also view their willpower level, which determines how easy or difficult it is for you to charm them and talk your way to getting what you want. If that fails, you could always fall back on brute force.
The key thing to remember is that Jonathan himself is a vampire, which means that he needs to feed on victims in order to survive. It seems impossible for players to do any sort of pacifist playthrough where they leave every citizen untouched.
Whenever you rest and level up, Jonathan will wake up the next morning to see how his actions have changed the city. The overall blood purity of a district could go down because of something you did, and the entire economy can change as well. All of these things will factor into the kind of ending you get.
The Story
Vampyr’s main character is a doctor named Jonathan, who also happens to be a vampire. The interesting conflict here is that he’s also on a mission to find a cure to the plague that’s infecting all of London. While he does know people that are sympathetic to his cause, there’s another faction known as the Guard that’s determined to wipe out all vampires, monsters, and other supernatural beings.
Outside of all this, there are other villains to contend with. Throughout the course of the story, Jonathan can run into other vampires, whose intentions may not be as noble as his is. There’s a lot of tension and mystery in Vampy’s story, and the inclusion of multiple endings makes this one intriguing title to keep an eye out for.
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