Vampyr

Vampyr is a horror-themed action RPG set in London during the Spanish flu pandemic that ravaged the world during the final year of WWI. You play an English surgeon, Jonathan Reid. After he returns from the war, something happens and the game begins with him waking up in a mass grave with no more than the vaguest idea of how he comes to be in his newly-undead state.

In this game, vampires are not beautiful people who glow in sunlight. Rather, they are unclean creatures of darkness and plague carriers. The majority are degenerate beasts (called "Skals", meaning "slaves", in-game). Even the relatively civilised "Ekons" are frequently depraved, toying with and preying on the humans that they live amongst. Vampires are opposed by a secretive paramilitary organisation, The Guard of Priwen, who respond to a legitimate threat with the tactics of the witch hunter, further terrorising the city's beleaguered neighbourhoods.

No game exists in a vacuum and Vampyr is heavily influenced by Bloodborne both in its setting (diseased city, perpetual night) to its mechanics (action RPG, dodge-and-parry combat, locked off areas that only open up much later). This isn't a bad thing - if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best. But if Bloodborne is Premier League, Vampyr is playing in a lower division with a certain amount of jank that comes with a smaller team and development budget. It is poorly optimised - I had to take my Playstation apart to clean it so that I could play it without the system overheating. It crashes and freezes more frequently than is acceptable. The writing is frequently overwrought ("What is glass but tortured sand?", asked no-one ever) and the game's text is marred with editing oversights and localisation slips. In spite of these imperfections, Vampyr remains an excellent game and is sure to be a future cult classic like the similarly themed and much more flawed Bloodlines.

Tips

The average enemy level depends on where you are in the game and is unrelated to your own character level. You can stay ahead of the power curve by upgrading your weapons. "Common" parts will upgrade your weapons to "Good" condition and you need a total of nine Common parts to upgrade a weapon to "Good" from "Used". Upgrading weapons further requires "Good" parts and nine of these are needed to upgrade a weapon to "Perfect". Tiny Good Handle Parts (for offhand weapons) become available as early as Chapter 2. Good Trigger Parts (for firearms) become available around halfway through Chapter 3. You have to wait until Chapter 4 before you can buy Good Handle Parts (for melee weapons). Later still you'll want to buy Aluminium Parts and Rivets to fully upgrade your weapons. You can sell low-grade parts and components to help pay for all of these.

If you wait for parts to drop from enemies, you'll be waiting for a long time. Therefore, you should spend money you acquire on the upgrade items carried by merchants. Their inventories refresh each night at which point you can buy more.

At each level above "Used" you can add an optional upgrade. Generally you want this to enhance the primary purpose of the weapon. For example, the primary purpose of the Liston Knife is draining blood from enemies. Therefore, you want to take the upgrades that increase blood absorption rather than the ones that reduce stamina use.

Serums are good for staving off defeat. However, the "Strong" serums are probably more powerful than you need so save your resources and craft medium strength serums instead.

To conserve resources, only craft the treatments you need as you need them. If you keep on top of citizens' health, you will never see the most serious ailments (sepsis, pneumonia, neuralgia) so crafting treatments for them "just in case" is a waste of components - they're plentiful but not infinite.

To all intents and purposes, death carries no penalty (besides an interminable loading screen), although your blood gauge will be nearly empty on revival. However, any bullets that you fired or serums that you used will be permanently gone. You'll find a bunch of rats to top up your blood gauge just before most boss encounters, but if you're planning on using firearms, you may want to back up your savegame just before the encounter in case things go badly awry.

Occasionally, you will come across a citizen who needs to be rescued. This starts a special type of sidequest. If you rest before killing the enemies threatening them and talking to the citizen in peril, they will die. This isn't fundamentally a problem if you stick to the main quest since when you encounter these situations you'll be able to handle them. However, if you go far off the critical path, you may stumble upon a situation that you are