![]() ![]() 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 If that prompts vague memories of exploring the underwater ruins of BioShock's Rapture, that's because Vaporum wears its visual influence by the dystopian FPS on its sleeve, with its abandoned industrial environments, steel doors covered in art deco designs, and most imposing foes' designs being heavily informed by early diving gear. Set in a foreboding tower, the Arx Vaporum, that juts out of an anomalous body of water, the player takes control of an amnesiac man braving the tower's many enemy-filled and trap-laden floors, discovering his identity, the dark purpose of the Arx Vaporum, and the fate of its residents and employees as he climbs. Impressively, Vaporum goes to considerable lengths to furnish a mysterious plot line to drive along the action and puzzle-solving. First among Vaporum's smaller deficiencies are its story and setting.
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