Really digging Vampyr so far. The reviews are mostly accurate. It's a game that's carried by the strength of characters and story and the combat kind of sucks, or at least just feels like more of a chore to get to more of the talky parts. It's strange that a game about vampire combat is buoyed by your interactions with the everyday poor of London, but it somehow works. I like the dichotomy of playing as a doctor who strives to help people, but who is also a vampire and must, at some point, kill them. Further, I love the system where you are encouraged to get to know people before killing them, as you gain more sustenance from the blood of a person you know in the game's lore. This is a great system because, once you get to know a lot of these people, you don't necessarily want to kill them. This is especially true because each person you kill means potential changes to the story, and also potential lost subplots and side quests.
Somehow, this game just makes walking around and talking to people work, which I guess owes to the developer's past experience making Life is Strange, another game that basically amounted to chatting it up. Here, though, there's just a lot more depth. As a doctor, your duty is to heal people, and so you can check up on them and craft antidotes to whatever is ailing them. This, in turn, feeds into a public health system for each of the four districts in the game. The sicker people get, the further each district delves into chaos. The more chaotic a district is, the more chance that people will go missing and that stronger foes will appear to fight. Thus, your ironic duty as vampire is to ensure the health of the citizens. You also get more XP from killing a healthy citizen than a sick one, so once again you are encouraged to chat and heal.
Finally, I really like RPG system here. You gain XP by doing various actions during the night...killing enemies, progressing the story, feeding off of citizens. However, you can only spend that XP by sleeping, which progresses the game a day. Progressing the game also means that each district has the chance to delve further into chaos, provided you aren't doing enough to help it. This turns each night into a sort of cat and mouse game where you try to see how far you can push the story forward before you start encountering foes that you can't face at your current level, which then forces you to eventually sleep, level up, and spend your XP to unlock new abilities or upgrade your health, blood level, etc. Since you can very easily wander into areas where enemies vastly outlevel you (I've gotten killed by a couple of two-hit combos after doing so), it forces you to be both careful and aggressive in equal parts. I've had a couple instances where I powered through a tough fight, sometimes dying a couple of times in the process, just for the long-term benefit of getting more XP that night and not having to advance the game forward just yet.
Decisions you make also can have consequences. I've already made one mistake I really wish I could take back, where I didn't quite realize what my actions would cause, which in turn hurt the overall health of a key district.
The only real downside to this game thus far is the combat. It's not outright awful, but it's not really fun either. Maybe it gets better at higher levels, but right now it's just a chore. It's not too bad when it's just a one on one fight, or even two on two, but anything beyond that and it becomes unwieldy. The system just doesn't seem to be designed to allow you to properly fight more than one enemy at a time. I usually just try to whittle the numbers down as quickly as possible, but that can be difficult, especially when you're in a fight with multiple enemies higher-leveled than you. Thus far, there just doesn't seem to be much balance in the combat. Either I'm tearing through enemies with ease or combat is frustrating and overly difficult, usually more due to the poor lock on system and the sluggishness of melee combat than anything else. Fights mostly devolve into running in, swiping a few times, and then using your evade ability to quickly get the fuck out and regain stamina while your foe flails at you. Hitting enemies with a melee attack rarely stops their attack from going through either, which is equally frustrating. It makes sense with the larger enemies in the game, but when I hit a regular dude with a machete, he should get staggered, not instantly counter with a swing of his own. This leads to a big lack of fluidity in combat, as it's tough to get combos going when enemies just hit through them.
I'd definitely recommend this game if you're into story-based experiences, though. It's fun learning about all the people in this version of London, along with slowly uncovering the vampire lore in the game's world. The combat sucks, but I find it doesn't suck enough to make me not want to keep playing.