Vaporum: Lockdown

by Aethyna Sep 17, 2020 | 1 Votes | 4 Played | 0 Reviews

10 rate

Genres:

RPG

Graphics:

Labels:

Adventure , Real Time , Steampunk , Dungeon Crawler , Robots

Platforms:

Play as a scientist, Ellie, who’s trapped within a locked-down facility called the Arx Vaporum filled with murderous robots and mutated creatures. Will Ellie be able to escape the place in one piece? What will she discover as she makes her way through Arx Vaporum? Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Play as a scientist, Ellie, who’s trapped within a locked-down facility called the Arx Vaporum filled with murderous robots and mutated creatures, Vaporum Lockdown is a first-person, dungeon crawler featuring old-school grid-based dungeon-crawling gameplay with real-time combat, fun Sokoban-like puzzles, cool steampunk-themed setting, and an intriguing mystery to uncover. Will Ellie be able to escape the place in one piece? What will she discover as she makes her way through Arx Vaporum? You’ll be able to find out all of these and more by playing the game!

Plotline

Inspired by his father who was one of the best scientists that the world has ever known and who is an ardent believer in the Supreme Bureau’s vision that sacrifice is necessary for progress, Ellie Teller grew up following in his father’s footsteps, eager to make his father proud.

She became an established scientist, just like her father was, and caught the attention of the Bureau. They are recruiting talented scientists for a mysterious research project, the Arx Vaporum, regarding the “miracle” substance called, “fumium”, the very thing her own father obsessed over his entire life, and they would be happy to have Ellie on board. Driven by intense curiosity, she agreed.

However, things didn’t go as planned and one day, a routine check of the tower in Arx Vaporum turned into a catastrophe. The staff in the facility is being killed by fumium-powered robots gone rogue and it’s in lockdown.

follows the story of Ellie Teller, a scientist who is a part of a mysterious research project in the middle of an ocean. Following disastrous events, she struggles to survive and escape the tower of Arx Vaporum.

As you play, you’ll uncover plenty of notes and audio clips that will show you glimpses of what was happening in Arx Vaporum and what’s the root cause of the disaster that had turned helpful robots into killer ones.

Gameplay

Vaporum: Lockdown begins by asking you to customize the game you’ll be playing. This ranges from choosing a difficulty level to opting for some play aids like game objectives and game tips. You can even choose between 2 different movement types or whether you’d like to have “Old School Mode” on or not.

Now, in terms of gameplay, if you’ve played really old-school dungeon crawlers before, you should already have an idea of how things go. However, if not, the game comes with a short yet sufficiently comprehensive tutorial that introduces the controls and the gameplay to the player within the first few minutes of the game starting, after the introduction video ended.

Basically though, in this game, you’ll be moving Ellie, the protagonist of the story, one grid at a time. Turning to face a certain direction before you can say turn a corner also requires an extra tap of the keyboard. However, this also means that you can actually move like a crab in this game if you’re sure of the path you’re on.

Like most dungeon crawlers, Vaporum: Lockdown comes with devious traps, enemies and puzzles. Traps in this game can be rather easily avoided as long as you got the timing down right. One second or two too late and you’ll find yourself getting a fireball right in the face. Moving through unfamiliar tiles too quickly and you might even fall over the edge and die.

The interesting part about this game is that combat plays out in real-time here, unlike any other old-school dungeon crawlers we have experienced before. This means that it is entirely possible to loop a sequence of “move and attack” when facing something stationary so you can avoid getting hit at all. However, this also means that more mobile enemies can be trickier to slay – it all boils down to timing really.

As the game is set on a grid, if you are in the middle, you’ll be exposing yourself to being attacked from multiple fronts and that’s not good. It’s crucial in this game to quickly find a chokepoint that you can reasonably defend with preventing enemies from circling around and flanking you. This is also a great strategy mainly because of the abilities you have at your disposal, such as the flamethrower and the tanky robot companion. Of course, the starter abilities can be changed as you progress in the game and obtain more abilities that better suit your style of play. Note that you can equip up to 4 abilities at a time but you’ll start with only 2 of those 4 slots unlocked.

There are also fun Sokoban-like puzzles in this game. Most of them involves having you to move crates around to fill holes in the ground, block danger from the path you want to take, or even to serve as paperweights on metal pressure plates. There are even industrial fans that you can move around to blow away poisonous gasses, and bricks that you can drop onto the ground to help keep a wooden pressure plate pressed.

For hardcore treasure seekers, the game even has several hidden compartments that an inquisitive explorer might be able to find, each of these alcoves usually come with some nice rewards. There is a sufficient variety of loot, and you can get better gear as you progress.

Since Ellie has on an exoskeleton, you can customize her rig via the Circuits option too. Here, you can choose which part of the rig to upgrade which will grant you a certain boost to how you use specific weapons and abilities, or it’ll just grant you a permanent stats boost, which is pretty good as well.

All of that aside, Vaporum: Lockdown has a Stop Time mode that you can use. This can be very useful if you know how to use it effectively during combat since it will make keeping up with the enemy’s combat sequences, especially when faced with multiple enemies, a lot easier. However, personally, I don’t find the need to use this Stop Time mode while playing on Normal.

There is also one thing I’d like to point out. Unlike some games, you are free to save the game at any time. However, you only get 1 save point and if you forgot to do so and you so happen to die, you’ll get to respawn at the last save you’ve done. So, remember to save often!

Community

Vaporum: Lockdown is a single player game and isn’t the sort of game you can play co-op. That being said, if you fancy meeting up with your fellow players and discuss about the game, the game’s discussion board on Steam is likely your best bet.

Graphics/ Sound

The atmosphere in this game is nothing short of brilliant. I keep getting this unshakeable Bioshock vibe as I’m playing the game. The graphics are also amazing and the sound is just spot-on. Though, I might be slightly biased here since I have a strong love for everything steampunk.

Conclusion

Being a prequel of the highly-successful Vaporum, Vaporum: Lockdown definitely does the original game, and the Vaporum universe as a while, proud. Besides the few new features here and there, the gameplay is generally similar to the original title and hence, would be instantly familiar to fans of Vaporum. The storytelling here is great as well, offering so much more lore than before, and of course, the fantastic atmosphere here will pull you right into the fumium-obsessed world that Ellie Teller lives in.