V.O.D.K.A. Open World Survival Shooter Reviews

This isnt even a game right now. It has no flavour. I wouldnt even call this an Alpha. There are zero settings or options. Cant change sensitivity. There is no multiplayer. Mutants are boring and tasteless. Bot enemies are lame. Sound is buggy AF. The "anomalies" are just little stationary clouds that hurt you when you get close. There is not a wide range of guns at all. Hunger and thirst drain so fast DayZ will seem like a piece of cake. It only contains some sort of tutorial which is so repetitive you'll have it figured out and bored of it after 5 mins. Nothing positive about this at all.

I wish I could say this was a good game... I wish I could say that despite this developers other games that it was fun or at least interesting. V.O.D.K.A. is an fps survival "rpg", by rpg I'm not sure what it means because unless there're characters to talk to or quests to follow or stats that change aspects of the game that all lie beyond the military base, then this cannot rightfully be classified as an rpg. Heck, it can't even be called an adventure like it's tags would make you assume (which I'll get to)! [h1]Hazards[/h1] Look, I like STALKER too, this developer seems to as well since it's name is a nonsensical initialism (and for some reason is a Russian drink, I wonder why), it's a first person shooter with survival elements. It borrows from STALKER to the point that there're random mist balls here and there that hurt you if you get too close, which is similar too the anomalies in STALKER, but unlike STALKER, these strange mist balls are easily mistaken for just fog and straight up hurt you instead of hurting you if you stay in them like in stalker. The mist balls also seem to make a weird whooshing sound that I thought was just ambiance or the wind. They don't draw you in, their just mist so even if you would assume this mist is a hazard, you still wouldn't be able to tell the distance you're able to get to them or what their effect is, if something sucks you up, it's probably not good. In addition, enemies with guns will shoot you from nowhere, you can't see them and can barely hear them, but they can see you through bushes and from kilometres away and hear you from the same distance. Meaning the damage you take may be gunfire or may be an anomaly you didn't see. Speaking of enemies, there're only two: the silver nude man and the swat officer. The silver men see you randomly and when they do see you (which is easy since they see through objects) they run like hell to get you after screaming like a velociraptor. They have no idle sounds so you have no way of knowing they're there until they screech. This lack of idle sounds carries over to the only other enemy: the swat officers. Which are so out of place and way over dressed considering they go down in one hit from the sniper rifle. All guns shoot bullets that seem to have two components: the bullet and the "bullet". The bullet being an object that moves forwards until it hits something, most likely an enemy. Then the "bullet" being a weird orange-ish yellow-ish blob that is far below the actual bullet, making knowing where the bullet is/is going very difficult and frustrating. The game displays an odd eyeball metre that tells you how long you have to be in their sights before you're seen but... if the dev just made the eyeball metre invisible and made the enemies more obvious on what and how they see, as well as where the enemies are more easy to tell. [h1]"Survival"[/h1] The "survival" aspect is so shoehorned in that I'm surprised it got past testing (assuming Sweet Games has testers). You have four things you need to worry about... the usual four even: health, hunger, thirst and stamina. Stamina regenerates over time and you never have to worry about running out since you loose it very slowly. Thirst is replenished by water and goes down over time. Hunger goes down over time as well (pretty much a reskinned thirst but goes away slower). Health is taken away when in an anomaly, shot by a swat officer, hit by a silver nude man or... I would say when you have no hunger or thirst but I can't seem to tell. There's only one water bottle that I could find, so for the majority of the game I was at -1 thirst and hunger goes down fast but there's so much food it doesn't matter. There're medical kits which regain you a reasonable amount of health but are used up, then there're needle-shot-things that regain an amount of health (I honestly don't know how much, I barely used them). Thing is, none of these survival elements serve any purpose other than "is survival game". Why have hunger? It seems that there's plenty of it, and even if there wasn't why are you requiring players find innocuous items that extend the already long timer that is your in-game life. The thirst is just a fast version of that, so why even have it? Stamina at least makes sense, but not in the way it's implemented here, you have a tonne, it goes away slowly, it regens fast, there's no penalty to running or jumping (noise at least, only guns make sufficient noise apparently). reduce the amount of stamina and make it so that enemies are less-likely to hit you but more likely to see you. Health of course is the only sensible one, but even then it's far too mundane with how it is currently: you lose it through damage and regain it through the use of an item, which takes a little timer to use and unequips your weapons and locks you in place. Make items have no timer or have a timer and allow the player to move at a slower pace, and reequip the weapons afterwards, it's already difficult enough to use weapons. [h1]World[/h1] The world is bland, unfun to explore, boring looking and confusing. I can't tell where I am and am not allowed to go: for example at the beginning of the game there's a tunnel behind you with two large wooden crates in the way, I looked at it and thought I could shoot the wooden crates to break them and allow me to continue, but alas it's a dead end. There's a hole underneath a wall that seems like could be crawled through, but no, you're [i]just[/i] too tall when crouching. There's one direction to go, for the entire game. And the entire world can be explored in ten minutes or less, I only have longer play-time because I messed around with the systems to see how it works. Which--again--might not be true if there is a wonderful paradise beyond that military base, and which is not shown in the trailer, or any of the screenshots. Post apocalyptic games are great vehicles for interesting and varied level design (and environment design) but there's no heart in this environment, no inspiration, no soul or intrigue. [h1]Controls and Menu[/h1] Some other reviews say that the gunplay is nice and the controls are good, while they're not 100% wrong--the guns are okay to control and the movement is pretty decent (if you ignore phasing down drops and some stiffness here and there). The issue however is that the inventory is awful, the guns have little responsiveness, and the main menu is practically non-existent. When I started playing I tried to switch to the weapon I had just picked up by using the scroll wheel, alas it did nothing. For a little while I fiddled around with different keys and buttons figuring out what might work, ends out that "1" and "2" are the keys for the equipment (and "3" if you have a melee weapon). Even if you already have a weapon equipped you still can't use the scroll wheel to cycle through them, I guess the 1, 2, 3 controls makes sense in retrospect and the floating white text might've been more useful if it wasn't so hard to look at. Which is how this V.O.D.K.A. tell you how to play; two walls of floating blinding white text. I don't know why the text is glowing and I don't know why it's a world-object but it certainly is easy to implement. There is no settings menu option which others have pointed out, no turning on VSync to stop the screen-tearing or turn down the bloom or invert the vertical mouse axis or reduce the screen bob or change the loud volume or anything. The game is boiled down into play or no play, there's no ability to change settings to make the game more easily played by people with worse computers or who don't want to get motion sickness. And the main menu is used both in game and on the main menu before the game's started, so you can hit play while playing. Speaking of there only being two menu options: you can't save or load! It makes sense since the game is barely ten minutes long. Apparently this is the max length of a review... wow, I didn't even know there was a li

For .50c, its a fun way to spend 15 minutes. Game has potential. But feels kinda buggy. You cant access setting to adjust the quality, so if you have an older computer i would avoid because youll probably lag.

i cant recommend this game at all at the moment, however, I think with a bit of work this game could be a lot of fun even as a single player game, a couple " issues" I ran into include but are not limited too: full auto on weapons seems to empty the mag in about half a second, could empty the sniper rifle without having to with for reload, some graphical glitched when behind the army base area. put some work into this game, fix bugs, add content, add story, new weapons, options tab, refine current mechanics and I would happily pay 15-20 AUD for this game. I think as of right now $1.50 AUD is about right

The game's pretty basic for the cost but what you can do depends on how long you want to experiment with it. I'm willing to give it a try and see how far I get. It also looks surprisingly well for an indie survival game. So would I recommend it? Mildly, again, if you want to experiment with it and see if it is your type of game.

Has a lot of potential. I think if they added a settings option, increased running speed, Removed or buffed stamina, either buffed or removed hunger and thirst, it would be a great game. If they added more variety of enemies. Although it seems like a lot it is all quick fix stuff. I just feel like it was overly ambitious and because of that the quality of play did not get what it deserved. I feel that this could be improved upon and made into a spectacular game if they put the work into it.

So basically... This game is absolutely S.H.I.T! 1. You don't have sound settings 2. You don't have any settings 3. The creator literally just pressed CTRL+C and then CTRL+V... It's a fucking copy xD! 4. You shoot BLUE, naked and ugly zombies/people.. WHY?!

Sweet Games.. oh Sweet Games. Ended up with quite a few of their games while perusing the depths of sub-$1 games on Steam. So far this is only the second game I've tried, with the first being Soviet Hentai. It was a asset-cobbled hentai shooter game that somewhat worked and had essentially no content. Ended up not recommended. Perhaps V.O.D.K.A. is a hidden gem though? ... nope. The game launches with a title screen and two options: Play or Quit. No rebindable keys. Motion blur is in full force with no simple way to turn it off other than modifying client files. Map and other assets aren't optimized. It's a headache-inducing mess, with the same grating 3 notes ambient-esque music playing over and over. And the graphics and sound might actually be the high point. There's essentially no game here. You kill zombies and keep 4 bars from depleting to zero by gathering food, weapons, and ammo. That's it. No end condition. No high score. Apparently it's up to you to decide what the point of this game is because Sweet Games didn't consider that aspect of game design. The guns aren't impressive either. This looks like it was created from a tutorial or asset pack demo project, with a few modifications. I'll give them credit for at least having a title screen. Graphics/Sound: 1/10 - If configurable, this could go up considerably. Motion blur makes it unplayable for many. Gameplay/Controls: 2/10 - Delayed input relating to no optimization hinders this area, as well as no purpose / goal for the game. Misc / Other: 3/10 - The map is somewhat interesting and enemy placement isn't as bad as it could be. Value: Value: 2/10 - 99 cents for what is essentially 10 minutes of pointless gameplay is no value, especially considering there are free-to-play titles of higher quality on the market. TOTAL: 2/10 - Not recommended. Perhaps the next title by Sweet Games will actually be good? I'll settle for it being just a game.

This game is just way to short maybe 10 mins and you are done. The shooting is okay for the price point. Even for 0.74$ it is not worth it.

The movement and shooting are not that bad, but there is no options menu AT ALL the only options you have are Play and Quit the and for a survival shooter within 5 minutes i had what i would call end game weapons and more food than i knew what to do with. Save yourself the money and just go play Stalker.