Review: Vaporum

cre: Review: Vaporum

A tower of monsters

I feel like grid-based dungeon crawlers are rare these days. Except for a wide range of Etrian Odyssey games available on the 3DS, this can be a particularly tough itch to scratch.

Fatbot Games Steam, however, is a very well done example of the genre. The maps are well-designed, the enemies are engaging, and there’s surprisingly good voice acting for a small indie game. It’s a great, neat little package and one that can drag you into its world pretty quickly.

Steam (PC, PS4 [reviewd]Xbox One, Switch)
Developer: Fatbot Games
Publisher: Merge Games
Released: April 9, 2019
MSRP: $24.99

Steam is a steampunk dungeon-crawler, as such you’ll smash your way through hordes of mechanical spiders and steam-bloating mechs using swords, hammers, guns – anything you can get your hands on on – and all experienced from a first-person perspective. In the first moments of Steamthe player character finds himself waking up to a mysterious tower in the middle of the sea. Rather than driving to a nightmarish town like in Bioshockwe find ourselves fighting against mechanical monsters, in search of the secrets of what exactly happened here.

At first, you have a few different exo-skeleton rigs to choose from to attach your character to. This initial choice can really dictate how you play in the future. You can choose a light and fast combination with minimal hit points, a strong and slow one to crush opponents with melee attacks; there are many discrepancies. I went with the beefy costume with a whole lot of health since I’m an unconfident jerk.

You will gather a substance called Fumium to defeat enemies. Fumium acts like your experience and lets you unlock circuits, which are basically just skill points. You can use all of this to improve your damage with certain types of weapons, gain new abilities through gadgets; there’s a lot of customization to be found. As I learned pretty quickly you’ll really want to focus on a specific type of gameplay, being a regular guy isn’t something that works long term for Steam. The skill tree gets a bit more complicated as you progress, and it’s best to find a playstyle that works for you early on and stick with it.

Combat is fun with a heavy emphasis on timing. Using the control sticks to back up and dodge, then dash forward once your attack’s cooldown wears off is satisfying. If you’re looking for a purely strategy-based combat system, you can tweak your settings so that time is only active while you’re moving, giving you all the time you need to plan that next attack.

Steam has a lot of settings for player preferences which can drastically change the gameplay. If just slowing down the fight isn’t enough for you, it’s even possible to have the game not automatically draw the tower map for you. This one seemed like a treat for the hardcore pen and paper crowd and was decidedly not for me.

When you’re not hitting steam-spitting robots with hammers, Vaporum has plenty of puzzle solving to do. Never anything too complicated, push a block here, press a button or turn a mechanism there. Logic puzzles just tricky enough to interrupt the fight and keep you on your toes.

As you move through the mysterious tower, you will find that the best weapons and items are often hidden in secret passages. These passages can only be accessed by finding hidden buttons on objects and walls; it’s this design choice that ends up making the console controls feel incredibly weird at times. When playing on PC, it’s as simple as dragging your cursor over the buttons and clicking them. On the PS4, you need to hold down the right trigger to bring up a slider, then drag it to the hidden button.

This system works, but it’s slow and makes it easier to analyze hidden loot. I’m sure I missed my fair share.

At the end of the narrative, Steam is more than enough. Amazingly well-executed audio logs litter the hallways, telling the story of our clock tower. Visually, the halls are dimly lit and filled with clanking robots and steam-gushing pipes. Nothing revolutionary, but it’s a pretty good steampunk fantasy world.

As a complete package, Steam is large enough. A well polished and challenging dungeon crawler set in an exciting world. While the controls can sometimes be a bit of a pain for the console editions, we see so few games in this genre today that the minor headaches are worth overcoming.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

source: gameplaytrick.com -

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