Vaporum

Vaporum is - much much like the Legend of Grimrock series - a modern-day throwback to the dungeon crawler RPGs of old. This is most noticeable in how unwaveringly hardcore Vaporum is throughout its game design. Combat is grid-based and real-time, and most enemies' usual attack speed is FAST, so be prepared to do the "side-step dance" to avoid enemy attacks. Personally, I found the pace of combat to be a little too fast for me, so I had to rely on the “stop time” function to get through a number of battles - but this then made the fights too easy (but then again, I’m an old-time gamer, so my twitch reflexes aren't as good as they used to be). Secondly, while I love hidden secrets and puzzles in games, I found many of the secrets in this game to be a little TOO well-hidden: a lot of the secret buttons are so small, and their colour palette blends in so well with their surroundings, that you really have to pixel-hunt to find many of them. Many times I searched the same wall repeatedly before I noticed the button, and this level of pixel-hunting was just not enjoyable for me. All this being said, I did love the game and the style of gameplay it presents. Solving puzzles and clearing out levels was fun. The game is also just dripping with atmosphere; since most dungeon crawlers typically take place in medieval fantasy settings, it was refreshing to have a creepy, abandoned industrial tower as the game’s setting, and the graphics really sell this. I also appreciated that the game devs included some environmental reactivity into Vaporum, as in a few instances, you could use the game’s traps and hazards to your advantage by luring enemies into them. Overall, this was a great game; if they had toned down the combat speed just a bit to make it more accessible, it’d be perfect.

I had a great time when not cursing some of the bosses. Lol. I don't want to compare the game to others-that's been done in this thread. I played through in the Combat Suit; as such I missed out on many of the upgrades I saw other folks take advantage of using other suits. The puzzles were many and great. The bosses were fun and not repetitive. I may give the game a break and then play through again using a different build/suit. This game is definitely worth your time and money.

It begins well enough but deteriorates at every stage (as other reviews have correctly pointed out) all the charm and cleverness of something like Legend of Grimrock is replaced, time after time after time, by the same locked room ambush. Level after level, this is repeated verbatim until you expect it, you anticipate it, you look into the next room and say to yourself "yup, here it comes again", and you become increasingly disgusted when, yes, here it comes again. There's a lot of potential in the atmosphere of the game but this is greatly hampered by a cliché story featuring some very bizarre failures of logic (for example: I can't imagine why each member of Vaporum's staff has decided to tear their journals into fragments and distributed a single page of each of them into every single locker and box in the place). In short, it's obvious that the strength of this game's creators lay in shaping the environment for Vaporum, but after that there's really not much else to recommend it.

I'm glad I bought this one. It was far better than I dared hope, and it wasn't so long as to overstay its welcome. The enemies were varied and their abilities were interesting. The exploration was satisfying, as were the puzzles, and the finding secret rooms was always cool. I definitely recommend it.

This game has a fantastic atmosphere and very nice graphics and sound. It all comes together to create a very nice game. The gameplay is perfectly solid and the challenge of the game, at least in the standard difficulty, is very well-balanced. Highly recommended.