Vaporum: Lockdown Reviews

The box puzzles will continue until morale improves. It took me awhile after enjoying Vaporum to finally play Lockdown. Confident with my experience I beat LD on hard as a gadget caster/gunslinger, immediately replayed on brutal as a tank and returned to V to nearly 100% both games. As my mania attests if you liked V then you'll like LD, of if you like grid and tile dungeon crawlers with battle chess and puzzle rooms then you'll like both. LD delivers more of the same with a big overhaul in level map design, a slightly different approach to combat encounters and emphasis on more complicated puzzle rooms, for better or worse. I'd suggest playing Vaporum first. Although this is a prequel I find that V delivers a better paced, more immersive experience with a cleaner narrative. LD does a fine job but it's more of a side dish for the main course, an old school expansion for fans of the main game. LD *will* spoil twists in V for you. Once you're ready for LD it follows Ellie Teller, promoted from off-screen notes author to protagonist as she tries to escape terrifying tower at sea Arx Vaporum during those first hours it goes off the rails. Killer robots and every OSHA violation in the world stand between her and freedom! It's a decent narrative, though Ellie is a lot quieter in LD than the player is in V and I found things a touch sterile for it absent the protag's personal musings. LD still looks great, a foreboding nightmare of box halls and mechanical gizmos whirring and steaming. The sound design is good though LD is even more music-shy than V was, seeming to have a great title screen and final boss track and nothing but good ambiance past that, not even the guttural IT'S A FIGHT NOW ditty from V. Not a big strike against a game where you spend a lot of time in tense and contemplative silence but the tracks we do get are great so I'd love a few more. Exploration is king here and these games scratch the itch of steadily building power and resources to survive turn-based horrors. While you can trade swings with enemies as a traditional RPG you're encouraged to be tactical, including an option to fluidly pause time between actions. The better dance is to evade as many of your foe's attacks as you can while getting your own in and the difficulty rises based on terrain, number and type of enemies and their attacks as well. You can't casually annihilate everything once you make the game at least a bit hard so you need to carefully plan kill order, when to unload and get somebody out of your way NOW and what to evade. Later on combat tools and satisfying build options give you a lot more control over things, whether you get better at killing, tanking, kiting or crowd control. Exploration is greatly rewarded with power spikes, so both sides of the game are nicely linked. Although the roster caps out at a decent size it can feel a bit limited until more of the heavy-hitters start cycling in. LD also dials back the emphasis on combat vs V. There's less of it overall and less focus on tense situations where you're tossed into an arena and surrounded, forced to divine(or obliterate) a path to safety in the overlap of enemy threat zones. This makes V the more gung-ho and adventurous of the two with simpler and much less frequent puzzles and more common and dangerous combat, though LD doesn't slouch in any department and has quite a few good brawls, including the final boss. You can definitely do much safer pulling and kiting in LD though. Where LD shines past V is the level design. V didn't hide that you were in a Rube Goldberg machine of a tower with death traps for a video game dungeon. Of course it was great for that but it really shows in LD that effort has been made to reflect that the tower was a place the researchers lived and worked in. To a point, it is still an insane place where you can fall down three separate pits on your way to the bathroom. LD also takes the puzzle(and secret) design and massively expands on it. I'd say every puzzle in V put together would fill out one of the late game levels of LD! This is great for having some thorough brain-greasers and the reward of thinking through or brute-forcing a solution at long last... but it's also as merciless as V was. If you get stuck, you are once again STUCK. And when the last three levels of the game have about 12+ total box riddles to get through the pacing can feel like wading through molasses. Now, I wouldn't say any of the puzzles are badly done, it's just a difference of design style and pacing. V was the action game, LD is the creative design experiment by devs with better experience with their engine. They compliment each other and although finishing LD can take awhile it is satisfying, though I had to look up and face palm twice when I overlooked details like pushing vs pulling boxes. Ah well, a 95% blind clear rate is pretty good but I tell you, fumatons hath no fury like sliding boxes in the Air Control Facility! Lockdown and Vaporum compliment each other nicely. Play V first then get LD if you want more. V has the stronger combat emphasis and a cleaner narrative, LD is great for those who want more and to really see the puzzles get some teeth. They're worth full price and go on sale often enough, a delightful series for the tile-crawler aficionado.