Almost exactly 3 years ago a Slovakian indie dev studio Fatbot Games, s. r. o. released a grid-based dungeon crawler RPG Vaporum, which managed to exceed all of my expectations. Despite being openly influenced by the genre revival done by Almost Human with Legend of Grimrock titles and unapologetically “borrowing” the style and themes from Bioshock games, it had a voice of its own and played really well. Which is exactly why I bought Vaporum: Lockdown, a prequel originally announced last year, the day it launched. And while it’s not without faults, the game managed to exceed my expectations yet again.
Just like with the original game, this take on dungeon crawling feels closer to a straight action RPG with heavy emphasis on exploration. You play as one character with two sets of weapons switchable on the go and gets special abilities to work as a “magic” substitute that use energy and have a cooldown. You get to select a class near the start of the game, though this time the choice is more nuanced as classes get unique abilities of their own. And you have a set of skills that you can upgrade during a level up and, as before, it’s best to specialize in certain skills instead of trying to be a jack of all trades. Combat is real time, but this time the “stop time” feature, that was originally added post-launch in Vaporum, is available from the start. It doesn’t make the game turn-based in a conventional sense, but can be very helpful for those, who can’t keep up with the realtime tile dance around enemies and wish to plan their attacks more carefully.
There are numerous tweaks and quality of life improvements in all elements of the game, which I did expect, but what I didn’t anticipate is that the game moved to a more open-ended level design. I suppose, this is a move similar to Legend of Grimrock 2, compared to the first game, except you don’t get an “overworld”. Essentially, after a tutorial floor of the Arx Vaporum tower and the first “proper” floor, the game starts giving you multiple options of directions to choose from. The path remains linear, as to complete some locations you would need specific keys or quest items that you get elsewhere, but it makes the exploration feel very different. You constantly get to revisit floors, either for story reasons or because you’ve decided to search for secret areas you’ve missed before with new understanding of the game. And even the optional “special keys” are now used on a completely separate optional floor with tough puzzles and only experience as a reward. It can occasionally feel overwhelming, but overall feels like a welcome update to the flow of the game.
Even the story this time around isn’t completely throwaway. It’s better written, better voiced and, partially due to it not just blatantly reusing most of the BioShock plot, it’s just more interesting to follow. It’s still not fantastic or even halfway good and the locations you visit never really feel like places anyone would ever work or live in, no matter how many times the notes and voice recordings characters keep throwing around joke about living with death pitfalls all around. It was somewhat excusable in the original game, where you never got to feel how long has it been that everything turned to crap. But in this game, it being a prequel, things are supposed to be still kinda normal at the very beginning and only go bad during the gameplay. Which doesn’t feel believable in any way. Still, it’s an overall improvement over the original game. Even if the music remains forgettable and the visuals aren’t as rich and stylish as you’d wish they would be, given the setting.
What was somewhat disappointing, is a certain lack of polish in pacing or design of some areas and puzzles. At it’s best, it’s a really fun grid-based dungeon crawler RPG, but at it’s worst… To compare – Grimrock games at their worst felt somewhat obtuse or frustrating, but in general the pace almost never misses a beat. Vaporum: Lockdown at its worst can be basically unreadable or beyond frustrating. A puzzle can be extremely poorly explained or just take way too long to solve, far beyond the point where you got the satisfaction of figuring it out. And secrets are so inconsistent in what they are and how they are hidden, it is often genuinely infuriating when you find one in a place you’ve already looked through many times.
Which isn’t helped by the fact that the map has areas you can seemingly never visit, so you’re stuck searching for a puzzle or a trick that doesn’t exist (unless they do exist and are even more annoyingly nonsensically obscure than what you already get in the game). Oh right, and also there are several sections in the game that are accompanied with nauseatingly bad screen effects that last far longer than they should and become really annoying.
All things considered, though, I loved my time with Vaporum: Lockdown. Given the history with the updates for the original, perhaps some of the more annoying bits of the game will be improved in the future. But even as it is now, the game is a wonderful example of the genre and is a lot of fun. Definitely check it out if you’re into these types of game or are interested in trying them out.