Welcome to our review of the indie title Vaccine, a mix between old skool horror games and the roguelike genre.
The premise of this game is easy, get the vaccine and cure your friend! Get yourself past enemies in a randomly generated house to the vaccine, picking up random weapons while you get from 1 place to the other. Sounds nice right?
Sadly, that is where it ends, the game is based upon a great premise, old skool survival-like horror game genre and considering this game is the brainchild of just 1 person, this is where I am sad to say that the premise of the game and the feeling is what keeps this game afloat.
The graphics look like this game was made in the 1990’s and the soundtrack is basically the best part about this game as it presents itself as a chaotic game without any real feel for what the genre is all about.
The entire game, you are going to be annoyed by several issues that this game is facing. Let me start with the most annoying one of all, the way cameras follow the action or how I like to call it, the worst possible way to follow the action. By far this has to be the most annoying way a camera can handle the action, often switching between views by just moving a foot of your character.
Next annoyance I faced, the controls of the character, it felt like I was driving a car in a 90s game, moving your joystick upwards made you move forward, not just “up”. I know this sounds silly, but really, can it be so hard to include 360 degrees maneuverability? Especially when walking backward, it felt like driving your car, not the way a horror game should feel like.
Another bit that I disliked, while the entire game is based upon randomly generated rooms, the items you find are also completely randomly generated. At one point, 3 minutes into a new game, I was attacked by an enemy that did harsh damage and me, I only had a silly knife. The next game I started, I found several guns, a knife, some keys and that was before I even ran into my first enemy. The difference in these details, made me think that you do not just finish this game based on tactics, but purely on luck…
I hate doing this, but this game never felt finished to me. I do think that this game had a great idea behind it and will definitely give it credit for that. Sadly the way it played… I just never felt comfortable on it and could not see myself playing very long sessions on it.
In conclusion, this game has everything to be a great hit, but was so poorly executed, that I think it needs a big overhaul and I will gladly give it a second chance at that time.
For now, my rating stands at a poor 20%….
