Vaporum: Lockdown

I loved Legend of Grimrock 1 but LOG 2 was too big and too complex. I don't like puzzles in huge zone. I loved Vaporum 1 and I loved Vaporum 2. Not a lot of differences between 1 and 2. Sometimes puzzles are very very difficult but always nice to resolve. I stopped one month in front of a difficult puzzle. But since I found info on Internet ... I can't stop playing. The more I advance the more the levels are exciting. But I had again found three times help on forums. Finding the secrets are also very difficult this time but I managed to finish the game without that. And thank you also for the french subtitles !

The twenty hours it took me to complete the game were perfectly paced. The game flows nicely, you're never stuck on your progression as the main objectives are split among the different floors. The puzzles are simple in their mechanics, but complex in their execution, often requiring a perfect timing. The real time combat takes some skill to master, is never punishing, and you're never short of opportunities to break a group of ennemies with doors to thin them out. I would have appreciated the possibility to re-alocate my hard-earned circuits (your levels in the game) to try different builds during my game.

I'm a Grimrock fan since the first game came out, saw Vaporum on sale and gave it a shot. Game was good and when I saw this prequel I was like "cool, more Vaporum". Boy was I wrong. This is the game you should play first as it is superior in every way - better narrative and new player experience, more engaging puzzles more balanced combat and as a thaumaturge I ran out of energy like 2 times in the entire game. The pacing is just better and you go from action to puzzle to action, having ample time to recharge between fights while looking for better gear and firmly masaging your brain with the nearest wall. Some puzzles and secrets are pretty hard but they are mostly optional, those give you some of the best gear in the game though and are well worth it. For any dungeon crawler fan, this is a must play.

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.

Good enough game I suppose, but not so good if you cannot find secrets if you don't like playing with a guide. It's especially disappointing since the secrets hide the more interesting items that do more than raise numbers like a cannon (shotgun) like weapon that does the most damage in the game, but is hidden away. Another disappointing thing I found in my opinion is that though the game acts like a prequel, it doesn't go nearly far enough to show this. Each map will be deserted, not even bodies are left behind like you'd expect, and so the premise is simply a retread that follows the original game too far. It would have been exciting to be looking for survivors and just being too late, or doing more than the usual. But, I did finish the game (using a guide for secrets and certain puzzles) so while the game is fun enough it isn't a proper sequel. If they do make a Vaporum 3 I hope they do more with the genre and gameplay and not just make more of the same.