Vampyr is a decently made game, with an interesting gameplay dilemma at its centre - kind of like Unsighted in a way, that i played last month

The gameplay is fundamentally a souls-like, although with no blocking, the gun off-hands, blood all over the place, and the Euro-gothic aesthetic, it skews closer to Bloodborne than any of the ones with souls in the title. The shake-up here comes from vampire "spells" fueled by blood taken from enemies - which also fuels your healing ability. Opponents are always resistant to one or two of the four damage types, so it makes sense to mix these moves into combat effectively. Not a world-shaking change to the formula, but combat does end up having a nice back-and-forth between sourcing blood to casting these spells

While it doesn't transform the souls-like base a whole lot, Vampyr prefers to use it as a solid structure to hold up the narrative. The main plot concerns the Spanish flu in Britain, wrapped up with secret vampire societies and ancient druidic gods, but far more interesting to me is the dilemma of the main character. You're a doctor who wakes up as a vampire, so right off the bat your oath to help the injured conflicts with your need to feed.

How this translates to gameplay is the interesting bit: as a doctor doing the night-shift (naturally), you'll spend a lot of time talking to patients and hospital staff, listening to their stories, solving their problems and occasionally crafting medicine to remove their illnesses - classic side-questy stuff. As you do this though, their "blood quality" goes up, which makes them more valuable as vampire food, and at pretty much any time they can be mesmerised into a quiet corner for such things.

I generally do the good boy route in games, so i resolved to not eat anyone at all, but XP comes in much slower from other sources, and the enemy levels don't wait around for you, so once you hit a hard spot of combat, seeing these literal bags of XP walking around with enough for a good health upgrade, really starts to look quite tempting. The characters you interact with are often clearly there to test your willpower as well - this guy is a violent criminal, surely it's fine to take him off the streets? or hey, this guy is a filthy landlord profiting from the crisis, isn't it better for all if he was gone?

The combat also being a bit janky doesn't help this conflict though (or maybe it helps it more, in a weird way ?), with dodges being a bit unreliable, and sometimes feeling like you got stun-locked to death out of nowhere. There were some very frustrating moments in my playthrough, and part of me wished i went for a "eat everyone" run - or just a few chomps at least, for some much needed health/stamina

An alright game overall, plus i feel like we need more of these double-A type games in circulation