Similarly, nearly all late-game encounters resort to overwhelming the player rather than challenging them, throwing together seemingly random smatterings of higher level enemies in ways that don't feel like sufficient tests of combat mastery. While some enemies that employ ranged attacks encourage the player to tactically position themselves and utilize more of their arsenal, most fights amount to the player and their foe(s) standing still and spamming the same attack at one another until someone runs out of hit-points. The act of fighting enemies, some of which are very well-designed, is reasonably serviceable in and of itself, but the game suffers from a distinct lack of enemy variety, morphing Vaporum into an increasingly tiresome slog by the game's end. Ultimately, though, these puzzles are altogether forgettable, but they do serve to break up the flow of gameplay and make the game's samey floors feel slightly more unique.Īs far as combat goes, it's standard grid-based dungeon crawler fare, complete with melee, ranged, and pseudo-magic abilities that come in the form of Gadgets. (As a fun aside, the auto-map can be disabled to better simulate that authentic experience.) Another genre mainstay that Vaporum incorporates is puzzle-solving, which ranges in size and complexity from simple sliding block puzzles to floor-spanning assessments. Exploration is greatly facilitated by the game's auto-map, which automatically fills itself out with floors' layouts as the player navigates them and leaves it up to the player whether or not to mark key items and areas of interest, much in the way yesteryear's dungeon crawlers spurred players to rely on pen and paper. Arx Vaporum's increasingly labyrinthine floors are fairly rewarding to explore, with plenty of secret areas tucked away to continually tease the player with the prospects unique armor and weapons. There is an awkwardly bound and essentially useless free-look camera, but anyone who has played an FPS in the last two decades will likely struggle to come to grips with Vaporum's gameplay at first.īeyond that genre-specific hurdle, there are some facets of Vaporum's dedication to fidelity that don't detract from what it tries to accomplish. Featuring real-time combat (made more approachable for genre newcomers through the use of an optional Stop Time Mode, allowing players to freeze the game while weighing their next move), Vaporum's movement system only lets players face one of four directions and forces them to navigate Arx Vaporum on a grid - the unitiated can refer to Mortal Kombat's Krypts for a modern example of how this style of movement looks. This works fine on PC while using a keyboard and mouse, but it often feels clunky and imprecise on a gamepad (like much of Vaporum) due to the inherent looseness of analog sticks. As touched upon previously, Vaporum is a throwback first-person dungeon crawler through and through, and much of what it has to offer mechanically feels glaringly dated. However, in fairness, Vaporum's gameplay is what most will come for, but its unlikely that it will convince all of them to stay. Above all, Vaporum's writing would greatly benefit from further leaning into its BioShock inspiration by relenting in its curt exposition and allowing the world to speak for itself instead. The voice cast clearly has talent that shines through on occasion, but the majority of the protagonist's lines are delivered so flatly that it calls the quality (or perhaps even the existence) of their direction into question. Unfortunately, the game's voiced protagonist and audio logs (called phonodiaries) don't do much to pick up the slack. While these notes get the job done on the world-building front, they fail to make the paper-thin mystery of the game's setting any more compelling. A wealth of notes are strewn about the Arx Vaporum, and they make an earnest attempt to paint a vibrant image of the tower's vanished inhabitants, but the writing mostly varies in quality between dull and eye-roll-inducing cliché. For all its clear and genuine effort, Vaporum's story falls flat after a slow, uneventful rising action and an uninspired plot twist, Vaporum ends on a wholly unsatisfying and undeserved cliffhanger. The similarities to BioShock end there, though. Related: Darksiders: Warmastered Edition Review - A Sloppy Port of An Enduring Game
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