Vaporum

Bottom line? It just feels good to play.

Intro
Waking in a storm in the middle of an ocean with no memory of how he got there, is The Man. Frantically he scours the horizon, bewildered he searches his mind; both are a sea of confusion.

Then he sees the light. It pierces the blackness from an opening in the base of a colossal tower, right there where he's stranded, beckoning him inside. Somehow, he thinks, I've been here before. With little choice, he makes for the doorway and enters.

Welcome to Vaporum.

Review
Many years ago, before digital worlds were able to be rendered with the detail they are today, early RPGs existed with a snap-to-grid first person view, where you could only move one tile at a time, and turn in 90° motions. Eye of the Beholder was a classic of the genre, which was revived somewhat with the Legend of Grimrock series some twenty years later. Although technology has since given us experiences like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3 & 4, a lot of love is held for these old-school dungeon crawlers, with their restrictive movement and real time "dance around the enemies" combat.

Fatbot are a developer who've chosen to bring that experience back, albeit in a steampunk environment and with some little tricks up it's sleeve when it comes to the combat.

In Vaporum you control a single, ready made protagonist rather than a custom party of adventurers you might be used to in classic RPGs. This means we get a character with personality: One who has lost his memory, and along with the player begins to piece together what happened to him and how he ended up in the sea outside the tower. The story is well told through a combination of player character voice acting and the now ubiquitous Bioshock-style voice recordings.

In fact, there's a lot here reminiscent of 2K's landmark game. The audio recordings, the steampunk-in-the-sea setting, and the enemies: A combination of automatons and strange biological creatures. Even the opening scenes are similar, despite the fact we're ascending out of the sea rather than diving beneath it. Heck, the game even centres around a new kind of powerful material found down at the sea bed, although this time it's not drawn from a sea-slug's bottom.

None of that is to say this is Bioshock "lite" or anything of the sort. As eerily familiar as those aspects may seem, Vaporum is very much it's own thing, not least in how it plays.

As mentioned, the first person perspective is fixed to a grid. You can step one tile in any cardinal direction with left stick and turn in 90° snaps with the shoulder buttons. As the game is built in a proper 3D engine, you can use the right stick to look around like you would in a traditional first person title, which is handy if you're trying to open a particular lock or loot an enemy corpse.

Very early on you'll gain access to a room containing several Exo-Rigs for you to pick from. This is essentially how you choose your class, and they can be likened to the classic Warrior/Rogue/Mage archetypes of yore. Every rig you wear supports melee, firearm and gadget (spell) combat, but each rig has it's own set of circuits to complete. Think of these circuits as skill trees, because that's very much what they are, and they're catered to a particular style of play. So although you can wield rifles when wearing the "Mage" rig for example, the circuits you activate will go predominantly towards your use of gadgets, which focus on area-of-effect and ranged damage. Once you choose your rig, there's no going back until you start a new game, so choose carefully!

Activating circuits is done via leveling up, which is carried out through the collection of Fumium, a substance discovered under the sea that has the power to enhance your abilities. Fumium is collected mostly from defeating the roaming mechanical and biological denizens of the tower in first person combat. In the older RPGs of this early first person style, you often found yourself dancing around the enemies; you'd land an attack, then sidestep away and turn 90° before it could retaliate, continuing the exchange until the foe was felled. It's obvious that Fatbot wanted to bring that combat into the 21st century and skilfully weave the classic experience with modern sensibilities, as they've clearly done a lot of work to keep you on your toes. Some mechanical enemies can fly, allowing them to float over parts of the map you can't access, restricting your movement whilst freeing theirs. Others will have melee attacks that suprise you as they leap two tiles at a time (but not every time) and other enemies will deploy ranged attacks on a line-of-sight basis. There are fast moving spider turrets equipped with AoE gadgets that can stun and burn you, and the best moments come when you're attacked by two to three enemies at once, each needing a different approach to counter and avoid them. The combat really feels tactical and alive in these moments.

The environments are good looking if a little predictable, all concrete floors and steam pipes. As well as being full of death dealing automatons, they're littered with puzzles and secrets. The puzzles aren't too difficult, although there are a handful of annoying timed ones where you have to dash through a door before it closes, for example. The secrets hold great loot and often hidden recordings to shed more light on the story, but they can be a pain in the arse to find, often relying on you spotting a hidden switch in the middle of a cluster of screws, for example. Unlike when pulling levers or using switches, you can't snap a cursor to them with a press of the DPad, you have to hold down a trigger to bring up the cursor on screen and use the analogue stick to highlight it yourself, which is painfully slow without a mouse.

Achievements
Achievement hunters will find a good, respectable completion here. It won't be quick or easy - 20 hours I would estimate - but it'll certainly be a fun ride. A guide will likely be necessary though, as you'll have to pick up every recording and find every secret on every level to get the full completion out of it. One point to note is that enemies don't respawn when killed, and you can backtrack to previous levels by going back to the entrance of the map you're currently on to try and discover secrets you may have missed. One achievement in particular will grind your gears though: racing through the game in less than 90 minutes. It is possible, but it requires an almost perfect run.

Overall
The tight quarters, unpredictable enemies and plethora of weapons and gadgets you can equip mean the pre-rolled protagonist doesn't hinder the RPG experience. You get the best of both worlds with a solid, character driven narrative and freedom to play the build you want, in the way you want. Players new to the genre may find the controls and restrictive movement odd, and that's fine - it's not for everyone. But for those who know what to expect going in, you'll find the superb and satisfying combat nicely varnishes the already solid experience. Bottom line? It just feels good to play.