Vampyr

there's a special kind of pleasure to completing all the quests and hints for a civilian that you do not like and then devouring them for the maximum XP they can provide you

A daring nocturnal adventure in the Spanish Flu torn London. Has its flaws, but definitely recommended.

In the beginning, I felt that the game tries to be three games, a vampire game, obviously, a doctor game, surprisingly, and a very English game, refreshingly. OK, most of the time, you will roam on the grim industrial alleys of London, killing anyone, who dares to oppose, but for the first half of the story, you probably would cure the residents, who are still alive. And doing that in a very special, English gentlemanish way.

The story feels more ragtag, than complete. Pity. It has really good concepts and sadly, there are no heavyweight rivals in the vampire game category, so you got to deal with it. Got some subplots, some romance, sime errand boy chores dressed as side quests, but the romance is kind of forced, subplots are usually bland and chores are uninteresting, still, you would do most of them for the XP.

The characters are rather stock, not really deep. Main character has potential, but does not really evolve in character. The romantic interest is forced because no matter what you do, they would say they love each other at the end. (About 80% of the story they were in friendzone max, but I would say acquaintances rather. Suddenly, main character said he loves her. Felt pretty weird.)
Sadly, the game lacks a good antagonist and carefully made villains.
There is a vast number of named NPC-s, though only a handful are more than just potential food.

By the way food...

Unfortunately no vampire games that I tried nail the core concept that our poor predators need to feed occasionaly. I mean not just for healing after fights, but they need it all the time, because blood is food. Sorry, not just food they must consume after a while, it is also a heavy drug, like cocaine for them, so a vampire, working as a surgeon is kind of hell of a story conception.

In this point of view, Vampyr fails also, because no matter how much blood surrounds our dear Jonathan, how strictly you want to force him on a diet, there are no points in the story where you have to battle his hunger or lust. You can suck everyone dry if you want to or spare them, but not because of the said bloodlust.
On the other point of view, Vampyr still manages to center on the human dilemma. Since you can avoid an extremely huge amount of time, spent on XP grinding (side quests, healing, even combat) if you decide to speed up the process by killing some named folks, sooner or later you would not see people, named Jack, John, or Mary, but good food, mediocre food and junk food. You can moralise that you are not a monster if you kill the bully, the crook, or the serial killer, but after 10-15 hours, you simply won't do that. You check the character sheets like a menu and see, who is weak minded enough to become a meal and is it nutritious (XP rich) enough to make it worth your time.
My Jonathan started with the common hero archetype, good doctor, does not kill any citizen. After struggling with combat and thinking a little about that there are folks, whose life would worth the same amount of XP that killing 1.200 enemies... well, suddenly some patients died, some criminals got killed, etc.
Normally I would say, it is bad game mechanic, since if you want to be a good guy, you need to do every chore, every side quest, cure and combat for obnoxiously long, to get enough XP and with that enough power to defeat the bosses. But isn't the concept of vampire about this? Wanna be good? Suffer. Don't want to suffer? Be bad!

And that is where the fun begin. Eat some good mannered people, enjoy taking out the trash, the annoying, or even the innocent. Become an unstoppable Terminator in seconds and enjoy killing anything. Much more fun than the endless grind.
If you are not adamant that you want to discover what character build you want to make, or that you want a completely different one, I strongly suggest that check the guide section and stick to the Eviscerator build, made by a very decent fellow.

The visuals are okay-ish. Not that bad, but could have been nicer. Sometimes the places are lit so well that you think, Jonathan walk in broad daylight. Cutscenes are weird, people start wiggling, like they are drunk, and staring somewhere else for no reason, facial expressions are meh.

The music is good. It really catches the atmosphere. Voices are okay also. I am not sure if the accents are English, but it felt authentic for me.

Combat is odd. Dodging is paramount, sometimes the difference between slicing through hordes with ease and getting killed by only 3 common enemies is that you failed with your dodges. Since it is a vampire game, I preferred using vampire skills rather than weapons. (A decently upgraded Claw skill makes any main hand weapon, two-handed weapon, or firearm useless.)

Overall, the game is far from perfect, but worth your time and money nonetheless. Buy it on sale!

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☑ 9
☐ 10

Spent the first half of the playthrough thinking, 'man I really wanna love this game but the combat is so bad'. Started over with claws and pretty much just specced them for the rest of the game. Things clicked, sparks (and gore) flew.
The worldbuilding is done with so much care and passion. Story-wise, it's brilliant. It's so simple yet so quintessential in the scope of the genre. I cried a bit.
Strongly convinced this is a flawed masterpiece. It doesn't always nail the whole cinematic/exploration/rpg thing, but when it does, it hits so hard. Stick with it.

A good game, with a good story, interesting combat and good ambiance. Good ideas, but nothing well executed. It seems like the game's focus is to be a frustrating and unpleasant experience from start to finish, without rewarding you for anything, just punishing.
The game's strong point is the story, the dialogues, the characters, with interesting but weak combat.
Here you need to decide how to act after becoming a vampire and "take responsibility for the consequences of your actions", so when trying to be a good person, the game will take huge leaps in difficulty, becoming an extremely frustrating and unfair experience, where enemies will always be levels above you. It's like being a crystal glass fighting rocks. Or you can become a maniac and thus remove any difficulty from the game. There's no balance, it's either 8 or 80. In an attempt to make the game a unique experience, they limit you a lot. There's no new game +, there's no manual saving and there aren't many indications or details of what you're doing, which is where the flaws in the story come in.
Here you have that type of dialogue where you select a simple line and the character says something that you didn't expect or didn't want to be said that way, which will cause you to lose "hints" about the characters, limiting you even more in dialogue and gameplay because of the loss of experience points.
Scarce resources, with characters getting sick all the time, so you need to keep healing everyone, reserve experience points for important decisions or you'll lose them, another limitation, and killing enemies is just work, it gives you practically nothing.
It sounds horrible if you've read this far, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone with confidence in that recommendation, but as I wrote before, lots of good ideas and terrible execution, it has potential and it's interesting. Maybe a sequel will solve the problems because it has everything it needs to be a great franchise, but it needs to fix all the game's mechanics.

Only 2 hours in and I’ve already bitten more people than I do in a week of meetings. Vampyr absolutely nails the gothic atmosphere, I'm loving this game. The choices in this game are amazing do I save the cute nurse or snack on her like a midnight burrito? Combat's a bit like trying to swat a fly with a sledgehammer but hey it’s fun pretending to be Dracula in a doctor’s coat. Have noticed one or two bugs but nothing that’ll make you want to drive a stake through your computer.

A pretty decent mid-budget Vampire RPG. Perhaps its' most interesting feature is how it ties the morality system to the game's difficulty. The more you indulge and feed on the citizens of London, the stronger you become and the easier combat is, and believe me the combat is a tedious slog unless you are feeding and leveling up. Personally I don't see the point of roleplaying a pacificist vampire (and I didn't feel like bashing my head against a wall with the mediocre combat) so I chose to indulge and feed, first on lowlifes and criminals, but as that well dried up and my XP demands grew I had to feed on people I actually liked and genuinely felt guilty about it thanks to the game's competent writing. Anyways I got a solid 20 hours of enjoyment out of it. Definitely worth picking up on a sale.