Vampyr Combat and Upgrades - How to Fight Well and Upgrade Your Weapons and Abilities

Combat in Vampyr is like a combination of Assassin's Creed, Batman: Arkham Knight, and Bloodborne. You hack and slash your way through enemies, dodge and parry their attacks, and use special abilities to both heal yourself and harm others. While it's a pretty simple affair, there is a lot of depth to it that you might not realise at first. It's also kind of difficult – particularly for those that aren't used to action RPGs, and that might well be you if you're coming into this because of Life is Strange.

So we've put together this Vampyr guide to help bring you up to speed. We'll teach you the basics of attacking, using your off-hand effectively, and point you towards the best vampire abilities. We'll even go into advanced techniques like stunning and parrying, and how to upgrade your weapons and abilities.

How combat works in Vampyr

Combat is a pretty simple affair in Vampyr. You push square to attack, and hit it repeatedly to pull off combos. Triangle houses your off-hand attacks, which are more focused on secondary effects like dealing ranged damage, stealing blood, or stunning an enemy. You can also dodge in any direction with circle, and pull off special abilities with your bumpers and triggers.

Every action you perform aside from abilities costs stamina, so you can't just hack and slash your way through hordes of enemies endlessly. At some point, you are going to have to stop for a break. Really, we'd recommend you get into the habit of being reactive in combat, rather than proactive. By that we mean learning to parry and dodge to get the better of your opponents, and stunning them where possible to suck their blood.

Blood is a very precious resource for a vampire, and lets you pull off your special abilities. So keeping that stocked up should be a priority at all times.

How to stun enemies in Vampyr

The best way to achieve that is to stun enemies, as this opens them up to a biting attack. That, in turn, provides you with a bunch of blood you can spend on your vampiric abilities.

We recommend sneaking up on enemies from behind whenever you initiate combat, as this is by far the easiest way to stun them. To pull this off, you just have to walk directly behind them until an X symbol appears. Hit X and you'll stun them, at which point you can hit X again to drink their blood.

Another easy method of stunning an opponent is to parry their attacks. You'll need a two-handed weapon to pull this off, but you can get them pretty early on in the game. To parry, simply press triangle while your opponent is charging an attack, and if you time it just right you'll parry and instantly stun them. It's quite tricky to pull off, so it might be best waiting until your opponent is charging up their most powerful attacks.

Finally, you can also use weapons with high stun damage. These directly harm the white bar beneath an opponent's health bar, and when this empties the opponent is temporarily stunned. Most blunt weapons deal stun damage, or you can use weapons like a stake in your off-hand but they're pretty slow.

Parrying also deals quite high stun damage, so if you can't be bothered to time them correctly, you can just repeatedly parry them until the bar disappears. Stamina-permitting, of course.

How to upgrade weapons and abilities in Vampyr

The best way to survive in combat is to upgrade your weapons and abilities. You can upgrade any of your weapons at a workshop in your safe house, but you'll need the appropriate materials. You can grab these from enemy corpses, in boxes littered around the environment, or purchase them directly from merchants.

Weapon upgrades aren't entirely focused on damage, either. They can also increase your stun damage and reduce the amount of stamina it costs to swing the weapon in the first place.

Then there's your special abilities, which you can level up using any XP you've earned. You can get passive forms, which increase your health and stamina, as well as how much damage you deal and blood you drain from biting. Then there's active abilities, which are either defensive, offensive, or provide utility effects.

We'd recommend focusing on just four to begin with, as XP is a pretty precious commodity. You'll want a healing, damaging, protective, and utility skill preferably. Keep just these levelled up alongside your passives and you should have more than enough to handle whatever the game throws at you.

What new combat and upgrade tips did you learn for Vampyr? Refer to our Vampyr guide for more.