Vampyr Reviews
Check out Vampyr Review Scores from trusted Critics below. With 39 reviews on CriticDB, Vampyr has a score of:
Vampyr is another fantastic concept from DONTNOD that falters ever so slightly in its execution. The story, the world and its characters are all oddly compelling, despite some visual and technical shortcomings. Despite its issues, Vampyr is a rare instance in a game where I felt like my choices meant something and had consequences. It’s a huge shame that repetitive combat and exploration means it doesn’t keep up that momentum from beginning to end.
Read Full Review
Vampyr serves delicious ladles of angst and drama with a hearty slice of excellent, morally grey choice system that will genuinely surprise you, all wrapped up in a wonderfully gloomy London. It's just a shame the combat turns a bit sour.
Read Full Review
Like many games ported to Switch, Vampyr is perfectly adequate on the format, but nothing more. If you don’t own a PS4, Xbox One or a PC up to the task and have been itching to play the game, by all means pick it up; you’ll get a lot of enjoyment out of it. The Switch version is the weakest available though, and since Vampyr has such a wonderfully haunting atmosphere, the downgrades and performance issues do detract from it somewhat. Vampyr is still a good game on Switch, but it’s not the best way to play it.
Read Full Review
It's 1918 and vampires are in. In London, that is. Is their return a triumphant one? Or will Vampyr be relegated to the history books?
Read Full Review
We tell you, it’s a good game! It’s not average! It might have some problems here and there, but you have to admit it is a “Good” game.
Read Full Review
I want to like this game, I really do. But it's holding me back from doing so. Reading into it, I find a lot of near-depth, but nothing that the game actually employs has much depth to it. There are a ton of amazing aspects that boost the game, but its larger ambitions lies just outside the reach of its execution. But it is worth a try, and an admirable achievement. In truth, I think this game is more a 7.8, but I feel the current rating it has adequately describes its qualities, while acknowledging its flaws.
Read Full Review
Vampyr is a game that's mainly focused on telling a good story and developing its characters, which it does respectably. That being said, things such as combat, mission variety, and even hardware, end up getting put to the wayside. All in all, it's a rather bleak experience.
Read Full Review
When viewed in that light, the story is an enjoyable mystery that brings together medicine and science, vampire politics and zealous hunters, and a city suffering from ancient evils. Aside from a rushed romance and a sudden shift near the end, the story is good and has intriguing twists and turns. Its atmosphere also deserves credit, especially the musical score, which creates the perfect gothic mood for a vampire story.
Read Full Review
When I was a kid, I tried assembling a model car. This was back before “Nailed it!” was a meme (and before the internet in general), but I remember being disappointed by the disparity between the picture on the box and my final result. Compared to the idealized image, my car was lopsided, painted poorly, and glued together in the wrong places. This memory came back to me several times while playing Vampyr. Dontnod’s gothic action/RPG has conceptual components that could have been assembled into a great open-world vampire experience, but they weren’t. The gulf separating that perfect vision from...
Read Full Review
Vampyr is one of the year's most interesting games, cementing Dontnod as one of the most interesting developers around. Go get your teeth into it.
Read Full Review
Vampyr delivers an excellent story experience, but is held back by its dull and repetitive combat.
Read Full Review
Vampyr is a collection of wonderful ideas held back by a limited budget and a dated engine. The lack of expression and emotion on the faces of London's many characters, and often disjointed lines of dialogue, plague any hope of being fully immersed in this dark re-imagining of London. A fluid and well designed combat system, alongside the infinitely appealing aspect of battling with morality as a creature of the night, offer plenty for those looking for a new angle on the vampire story, but for those wanting a more complete experience, it may not make the mark.
Read Full Review
Set in 1918 London during the Spanish Influenza epidemic, Vampyr tells a dark fantasy story ripe with intriguing lore, moral dilemmas, and monumental amounts of death. In the aftermath of the Great War and at the height of death and disease thanks to the Spanish Flu, Vampyr’s setting is one that is both unique and unbelievably underutilised in gaming. This becomes especially true when a vampiric presence enters into the mix.
Read Full Review
Embrace the monster within in the story-driven RPG that is Vampyr! A game that breaks a long vampire game drought and serves a gothic and dark section of London as your playground. So was it worth the wait or are vampires better left sleeping in the coffin for another few years? Find out in the review below.
Read Full Review
I yearn to give this game an 8. It fulfills many of its promises and I enjoyed my time with it. However—speaking for my Playstation 4 review copy (v1.02)—when you take the above alongside grammatical errors, UI errors, crashes, continually pausing to load, combat clunk, and perhaps its narrow interpretation of replay value, what could have been minor and forgivable grievances deal some objective damage.
Read Full Review
Vampyr is at its best when players are digging into the lives of London's citizens and choosing who to kill or who to spare, so it's unfortunate that the developers felt the need to shoehorn in uninspired combat and frustrating exploration elements. Beneath these problems is a classic vampire story that leverages its grim visuals and moody soundtrack to create an engrossing atmosphere, but the many technical issues still make Vampyr hard to recommend, even for diehard fans of the genre.
Read Full Review
If you can fight your way through some technical issues, a good story and interesting action RPG mechanics can make for a bloody good time.
Read Full Review
An inspired use of the usual vampire clichés with some fascinating moral decisions to make, that always impact the game world and its combat in unexpected ways.
Read Full Review
Vampyr is an action RPG which probably would’ve done better if the ‘action’ part was left out. The story is fun, the characters all feel like real people, and the decisions on which innocent to devour are perfectly weighty. Unfortunately the player doesn’t have enough say in where that story goes to make it truly satisfying. The world itself is gorgeous and dripping with atmosphere, but its design is maze-like and is both boring and frustrating to explore. There’s far too much focus...
Read Full Review
This was supposed to be the RPG of the year. In fact, it was supposed to be a strong candidate for game of the year. Vampyr delighted with its vision, hypnotized its atmosphere and promised groundbreaking solutions. What came out of all this? A title whose memory will make us sad for a long time...
Read Full Review
There are some bugs that can just be glanced over during a playthrough, but there are a few that certainly need the development team’s attention post-launch. It’s far from spotless out of the gate, but DontNod has created an interesting concept in a world that I want to learn a lot more about. It’s a world that is a lot of fun to explore and manipulate at its best.
Read Full Review
Not only do you get supernatural strength, but you don’t have to worry about getting grey hair or wrinkled skin. But then you remember you’d never be able to enjoy the sunshine or chow down on some garlic bread ever again. The horror.
Read Full Review
Vampyr is a slow burn of an RPG, taking its time to ramp up its intriguing blend of science and the supernatural in an elaborately gloomy version of London. When it gets going you can see the potential of the way it offers you more power if you consume its interesting citizens. But Vampyr never commits to this idea to the point where I felt I needed to make that sacrifice to succeed in its relatively simple combat, which leaves it feeling toothless and vulnerable to having a lot of its fun sucked away by technical issues, despite its genuinely...
Read Full Review
Vampyr is ambitious for sure, but with ambition comes risk, and unfortunately, here it provides very little in the way of rewards.
Read Full Review
As much a detective story as a horror one, Vampyr rewards you for taking an interest in the people around you and tests your moral compass with a lack of black and white options.
Read Full Review
Admittedly, I’ve never had a desire to obtain eternal youth and drink the innocent from their necks at the expense of eternal damnation. But upon delving into Vampyr, I swiftly abandoned my fleeting sense of morality in exchange for unparalleled might. It’s fun to be a vampire, and despite a few minor nitpicks, DONTNOD Entertainment’s ARPG prevails in fulfilling its bold ideas.
Read Full Review
Vampyr is very ambitious and presents a lot of cool and interesting ideas, but just doesn’t quite hit its mark.
Read Full Review
Vampyr is a marked departure from Dontnod Entertainment’s most recent enterprise, the acclaimed Life is Strange series. Tonally a complete polar opposite, and featuring gameplay mechanics within an RPG design, putting aside the story-driven adventure genre that’s brought them such universal praise was an unexpected and somewhat risky move. Particularly so, given that their only previous venture, a third-person action game titled Remember Me, wasn’t all that well received.
Read Full Review
Vampyr is a brilliant single-player RPG with deep social mechanics that make playing as a vampire a truly unique and satisfying experience.
Read Full Review
The story may be a tad lackluster, and the combat may be clunky as hell, but Vampyr does offer a compelling adventure for those looking for some blood-sucking fun. It also manages to effectively make you feel like a creature of the night at times. Unfortunately, the frequent technical issues sapped just about every ounce of joy from the experience, leaving this digital world a dry, lifeless husk.
Read Full Review
Vampyr has a lot of good ideas, but its execution is sorely lacking in most areas. It is a game that is competent in terms of its systems, but ultimately fairly boring to play.
Read Full Review
Much like its early 20th century setting, Vampyr feels like a bit of a throwback to a past age of action RPGs. In a time where the genre is evolving Vampyr holds on to past ideas for much of its tenure, and it doesn’t have a story strong enough to overcome that fact. The world itself is ripe for lots of stories to be told within, with Dontnod having done a good job with world building, but while Vampyr isn’t a bad game, nor is it as great as it could be.
Read Full Review
The old foggy streets of London are infamously appealing for serial killers since the days of Jack The Ripper. The roads wind and end unexpectedly, the gaslights cast long impossible shadows and there’s the unmistakable sense of danger around every corner. But as you walk down these streets in Vampyr, you are not the victim of the story.
Read Full Review
Vampyr manages to deliver on its promise to make choices matter. Every decision has implications that spider out in unseen directions, often far into the future. While there are some wobbles in terms of combat and load times, the engaging storyline and premise carry this title far.
Read Full Review
There were few moments in my time spent with Vampyr when I didn’t feel indifferent to what was going on. Its setting tries to create a dark, ominous atmosphere but only manages to be drab. Secondary characters more often than not feel like checklists instead of people, giving little natural reason to take the time and walk around London healing them. Respawning enemies lead to repetitive encounters littered in the same spots on a map that will have you walking the same dull streets a good number of times. The seemingly small impact of the choices made only enhance the...
Read Full Review