Vertigo 2 impressions
With 2/3 (almost 3/4?) of the game done, it’s time to write about it. It’s a game very much in the game on Vertigo 1, a single indie dev trying to do a ‘Half Life-like’ experience, but Vertigo 2 is better as it’s longer and more varied. I really appreciate the latter, I really like when games that try to mix things up. In Vertigo 2 you go through a river of lava, you participate in a city battle helping communist robots, you are trapped in a giant whale, you fight archer centaurs in swampy areas, you have unexpected allies in your fight, you have a big Portal reference, you sail the open sea with a boat, or you have a creepy dark factory with mannequins everywhere, and more.
So, is Vertigo 2 worthy of the top scores I’ve seen in some places?
The short answer is: no. It’s more a 7.5/10 game.
I think it’s the type of game that a specific, older than average audience wants in VR (not a multiplayer game like lots of modern games, not a roguelike action game, not an arcade small experience, just a good traditional single player game with some meat on the bones). Because of it, I think some people are over praising it. Hell, I’m IN that audience. But that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the weak parts of the game.
Because it’s still an indie game, and you can appreciate a series of issues because of it.
-The graphics are a few years outdated (although thanks to that, it doesn’t need a powerful computer)
-The entire art design, from character design to textures isn’t very good. This is less forgivable than the previous point. Some of the weapon sounds are pretty weak, too.
-It’s a bit buggy (I died twice by going through the floor and a third time respawning in a moving boat when loading a checkpoint)
-I feel the dev efforts has been spread too thin, so while at first it’s impressive he did all these levels, you can see how some areas didn’t have the user testing and iteration needed. The difficulty is uneven at places here and there, the controls of a vehicle you use briefly are pretty bad, some of the places you can’t use the teleport doesn’t make a lot of sense, and well, the typical jank you should expect from time to time.
But more importantly, I don’t like some of the core aspects of the FPS experience:
-The writing. Decent in parts, but my issue is that the tone is all over the place, from attempts of telling a serious straightforward scifi tale, even with some gravitas, to totally silly parts.
-Health regen. I hate it in FPS, although I will give it a pass as you only regen up to 50% of your total health, and it isn’t very fast. Still, I’d prefer to only use items to recover it.
-Ammo management. There is none. Ammo is infinite. I hate it. There is a small twist here in that while I said ammo in infinite, it needs a time for the magazines to regenerate, which in practical terms you can’t use a single weapon in a long engagement, you need to swap between two weapons.
-Level design. Not bad, but honestly, it isn’t very good. It’s very linear (not that being linear is bad, but other better games still know how to disguise it better), there is little effort in making interesting side areas, or levels inter connected in interesting ways, or levels where you have to get several objectives letting you decide how to do it, or using hub level, etc.
-Exploration. Bad. As I said it’s very linear, the game lots of times won’t let you go back to explore other areas once reached a point (and you aren’t warned in any way), and there are very few rewards for exploration, as there is no rare ammo pickups, only two items (health, grenades, the latter are kind of rare except for a single level), there isn’t armor, or consumables like rebreathers or shields or anything useful like that, nor permanent upgrades for your character, with the exception of briefcases that upgrade your weapons. In fact the briefcases are basically the single reason to explore. Alas they are rare and lots of times I wasted time exploring some areas for nothing.
-Weapons balance. This is about a complaint about a specific weapon. At first the balance it’s pretty good, but around the middle point of the game I got a ak-47 and man, why I would use any other weapon. It works both long and short range, the DPS is notably higher than the SMG with both rof and damage upgrades, and the magazines regenerate very fast.
-Encounter design. While there is a good variety of enemies, it doesn’t particularly try to use them mixing them up in creative or novel ways. It’s more ‘here are some robots’. Later, ‘here are some dinos’. Later ‘here are some centaurs’, etc.
edit: that said, the combat itself is more intense and dynamic than say, HL Alyx, with more enemies and they move around more, sometimes taking cover, others retreating, etc.