Finally finished it yesterday. Took me quite some time, had a few instances where I almost dropped the game, but I ultimately made my way through. I admire Dontnod for trying something bold and original, as much as I admire their sense for style and narrative, but I had quite a few problems with this one:
1) The combat simply never clicked. It's stiff, unsatisfying and, worst of all, not very fun. I don't think I've had a single fight in the entire 25-30 hour playthrough where I felt good after defeating someone. For the most of my playthrough, I avoided killing civilians for blood, but after the difficulty spike in Chapter 3, I realized I simply wasn't having fun being constantly underpowered. Even after eating some civilians that turned out to be murderers or guilty of heinous crimes, I never felt too powerful and never truly enjoyed playing with powers.
2) The performance on base PS4 is a goddamn embarrassment. I don't know if the recent patch did anything to it, but for most of the playthrough it was just abhorrent. Constant dips of FPS below 20, long loadings, freezing after quickly looking at the map, freezing in combat (!), freezing before cutscenes, loadings inbetween areas, softlocks, hardlocks, crashes – all that jazz. Performance-wise one of the worst PS4 releases I've ever played.
3) Navigating the world is a pain. Even after 20+ hours of gameplay I mostly couldn't orientate myself and it made an otherwise interesting mechanic (healing civilians) a nuisance you do to obtain the best ending. Couple that up with loadings between areas, frequent freezes, and I'm even surprised I actually bothered to visit every district to heal anyone who needed it.
Despite these issues, I enjoyed most of the other elements in the game, especially Jonathan Reid as a character and his story. The atmosphere is also dreary and just bleak enough to my liking. Usually, I'm not a big fan of endings based on your actions in game (especially the way it was done in The Witcher 3 was horrible imho), so I have to give Vampyr huge credit for being one of the first games to judge me accordingly. I didn't get the best ending, I didn't get the worst either, but I felt it was a fair assessment of my decisions and mistakes in-game. I also really loved the concept of deciding on who to kill/spare based on hints you get from civilians, notes and side-quest, really made me feel more connected with the world.
Overall, I'd give it a 6/10, maybe 7/10 for a well-done ending sequence. I can understand PC players handing out 8's and 9's, but the console performance significantly hindered my enjoyment of the game.
