The combat doesn't feel as great as a Souls game, that's for sure. It lacks weight for a system designed with stamina management and not a lot of HP between the player and the enemies. But it feels good enough that I got the hang of the tempo of every encounter.
I suspect that a lot of people who didn't like the combat are the type of player who wants to be "good" all the time in games with morality systems, and so they hit a wall with this particular system that was intentionally designed to reflect the dilemma of being a vampire and a doctor. They didn't feed on anybody and were basically gimped the entire them they played.
Yes, it's difficult in the beginning when you've maybe only fed on that Cox asshole. I fed on a decent number of people I thought deserved to die, so I had fun fighting enemies with all the options open to me, and I wasn't dealing with any damage sponges. In fact, combat got real easy halfway through that I tried using all sorts of weapons and skills just to vary things up. Only the last boss proved to be a decent challenge.
Even then, I admit I did get to a point where a lot of the normal encounters just felt rote. I did all the sidequests too, so keeping everyone relatively healthy with medicine was kind of a pain in the back half of the game, having to manually walk all over London and look for some NPCs who take long, winding routes.
It didn't help that the main plot made that very genre fiction decision to dive deep into ~lore~ heading into the climax. A couple of the plot complications also fell flat (
), and I did not at all buy the central relationship of the leads, so the resolution for that particular arc did nothing for me. I don't care for the moral implications of any of the endings either being weighted more on the number of people you fed on. I believe most of the NPCs I embraced were bad people, and I kept every district afloat, with most of them healthy, too. So getting the "second to worst" ending didn't sit right with how I saw my version of Jonathan Reid - an empathetic doctor who never failed to make his rounds and consistently provided medicine to whoever needed it, and a vigilante putting an end to the violent, abusive, and cruel.
I can imagine that even though it's easy enough to dodge enemies, it still must have taken a while to actually kill them when you're constantly underleveled and suffering (what feels like) a damage penalty throughout the entire game. Did you even get to max out any of your special vampire attacks? I fed on 6 or 7 people, and I think I only maxed out two vampire attacks and one ultimate. I guess there's the weapon upgrade system, which I assume is the mechanic to fully optimize on a no-feeding playthrough.
I don't recommend playing it on Story Mode since that removes any of the tension in the one interesting system in the game, and the actual plot isn't really anything to write home about. I guess it would make seeing all the NPC sub-stories easier in that you won't struggle to progress through the game and finish the sidequests with combat encounters, but these stories also don't really develop past unlocking the dialogue options once. Part of why I found a level of investment in becoming familiar with the characters is because I had to make do with level limitations while facing stronger enemies.
Anyway, this game is on my top 10 list for 2018. It's an ambitious AA game with mechanics I've never seen before, solid writing on the periphery, and oh yeah the music in this game is pretty damn good, contributing greatly to the atmosphere. It's worth supporting games like this that lack polish but strive for something new.
