Reposting my Escape Vektor impressions because some were interested in them:
Some minor things the game does very right:
- Live Area (that screen you see between clicking on a bubble and starting up a game) integration is one of the best on the system so far. It shows your current progress, ingame trophy status and the last lines of story dialog. More developers should make me WANT to look at this screen and make it a dynamic representation of your progress. A+ for the dev in that regard.
- UI and style fits really well for the game. The simplicity bothered me a bit at first, but it actually suits the game really well.
- Progression is measure in the upgrade level of the main character of the story (Vektor, ver 3.14), which is admittedly just a small touch, but pretty neat.
- Overworld, which basically serves as a level hub, actually makes this game more enjoyable for me. You can finish additional challenges in a level to unlock additional secret levels. Finishing those might net you access to additional secret areas or Mario style short cuts to other worlds. Pretty nifty and actually makes you interested in stepping through a warp gate to see where it leads.
- Technical obstacles, like switches that may deactive barriers or activate enemy spawns. This is a pretty interesting addition since it makes you feel like you are controlling the level a bit, instead of only reacting to what happens. Also fits really well with the theme of the game.
- Lots of space to improve once you finish a level. If you end up liking this game, you'll be busy for ages platinuming (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum) every single level. Most of those will ask you to prepare your way through the level very carefully, making it a reflex AND intelligence based puzzle game.
Some minor (?) things the game does very wrong:
- Loading times, although I might seem a bit too harsh on the game for that, starting or restarting a level takes about 7 seconds, which is just a tiny bit too long for a game with such a high focus on highscore gaming.
- Honest question for others playing it: Wtf is the point of Wild Cards? Its basically a score double card that you get for beating an earlier score of yours. Once used it doubles your score and the card disappears. However, those cards are imperative to reach Platinum scores, which means you need them in EVERY level for highscore play later. If you already created WC scores on all levels and then run out of these WC, you are basically shit out of luck and cant improve any of your scores. Wtf were they thinking?
- Replaying earlier levels is a bit annoying due to the overworld hub, which means you need to travel along the whole path, to arrive at an earlier level. This is a bit remedied by the fact that you can just tap on a level you want to access, but unfortunately, there is no zoom out button in the overworld screen, which means it still takes a while to get back from the first to the last world. Not sure why you cant just switch to the world before by pressing L or something.
- While talking about zoom, you can actually zoom out within a level to allow for proper judgement of the level situation (especially with enemies that have random movement). Unfortunately, you need to hold down R for that, which basically means you sometimes hold R down for 3 minutes instead of just having R trigger the zoomed out state. That button input seems a bit pointless to me. I'll play it zoomed out most of the time.
- It doesnt explain some things very well (if at all). What are the stars on the levels for? Some level I got Bronze trophies in have a star, others dont. Whats the deal?
Overall its a rather good game that does some things really well, and fails monumentally on others. If there is no endgame way to get an infinite amount of wild cards, this actually completely breaks the highscore nature of the game for those planning of squeezing every inch out of their scores. That is a huge, huge, huge minus. Someone who finished it please verify or correct this statement for me. If it wasnt for that, or if you dont care about optimising a level to perfection, this game definitely could be rated as 7 or even 8. Even with that caveat in mind however, even finishing all the normal and secret levels will probably take you a while since the difficulty ramps up quite a bit. The overworld hub with secret areas, additional tools and traps in levels, bombs and speed up mechanics making this game feel surprisingly deep and therefore gets a thumbs up from me (with the aforementioned caveat). Unfortunately, that caveat is also keeping me from giving it a universal Vita game recommendation so far, as I really fear it might break the highscoring aspect.
Its a pretty fun game overall. I am a bit surprised to see that my initial impressions werent all that wrong. It feels like a spacey and more complex Pacman-style game to me. You run on lines to improve your score, all the while eating, err... I mean bombing enemies if they cant be avoided. The overall style of the game actually looks pretty decent and fits the tone of the game well. If I am honest here, I didnt like the style too much based on the videos I've seen before, but it grew pretty fast on me. I was also surprised to see that there is actually a story that ties together the levels, meaning the levels dont feel like they are only being strung together for the hell of it, although the story definitely is not one of the games selling points as it is rather generic so far. Considering the tone of the story, graphical style and decent music, I am getting a bit of a tron vibe here, which is rather neat (although I wish it had more different tracks).
Some minor things the game does very right:
- Live Area (that screen you see between clicking on a bubble and starting up a game) integration is one of the best on the system so far. It shows your current progress, ingame trophy status and the last lines of story dialog. More developers should make me WANT to look at this screen and make it a dynamic representation of your progress. A+ for the dev in that regard.
- UI and style fits really well for the game. The simplicity bothered me a bit at first, but it actually suits the game really well.
- Progression is measure in the upgrade level of the main character of the story (Vektor, ver 3.14), which is admittedly just a small touch, but pretty neat.
- Overworld, which basically serves as a level hub, actually makes this game more enjoyable for me. You can finish additional challenges in a level to unlock additional secret levels. Finishing those might net you access to additional secret areas or Mario style short cuts to other worlds. Pretty nifty and actually makes you interested in stepping through a warp gate to see where it leads.
- Technical obstacles, like switches that may deactive barriers or activate enemy spawns. This is a pretty interesting addition since it makes you feel like you are controlling the level a bit, instead of only reacting to what happens. Also fits really well with the theme of the game.
- Lots of space to improve once you finish a level. If you end up liking this game, you'll be busy for ages platinuming (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum) every single level. Most of those will ask you to prepare your way through the level very carefully, making it a reflex AND intelligence based puzzle game.
Some minor (?) things the game does very wrong:
- Loading times, although I might seem a bit too harsh on the game for that, starting or restarting a level takes about 7 seconds, which is just a tiny bit too long for a game with such a high focus on highscore gaming.
- Honest question for others playing it: Wtf is the point of Wild Cards? Its basically a score double card that you get for beating an earlier score of yours. Once used it doubles your score and the card disappears. However, those cards are imperative to reach Platinum scores, which means you need them in EVERY level for highscore play later. If you already created WC scores on all levels and then run out of these WC, you are basically shit out of luck and cant improve any of your scores. Wtf were they thinking?
- Replaying earlier levels is a bit annoying due to the overworld hub, which means you need to travel along the whole path, to arrive at an earlier level. This is a bit remedied by the fact that you can just tap on a level you want to access, but unfortunately, there is no zoom out button in the overworld screen, which means it still takes a while to get back from the first to the last world. Not sure why you cant just switch to the world before by pressing L or something.
- While talking about zoom, you can actually zoom out within a level to allow for proper judgement of the level situation (especially with enemies that have random movement). Unfortunately, you need to hold down R for that, which basically means you sometimes hold R down for 3 minutes instead of just having R trigger the zoomed out state. That button input seems a bit pointless to me. I'll play it zoomed out most of the time.
- It doesnt explain some things very well (if at all). What are the stars on the levels for? Some level I got Bronze trophies in have a star, others dont. Whats the deal?
Overall its a rather good game that does some things really well, and fails monumentally on others. If there is no endgame way to get an infinite amount of wild cards, this actually completely breaks the highscore nature of the game for those planning of squeezing every inch out of their scores. That is a huge, huge, huge minus. Someone who finished it please verify or correct this statement for me. If it wasnt for that, or if you dont care about optimising a level to perfection, this game definitely could be rated as 7 or even 8. Even with that caveat in mind however, even finishing all the normal and secret levels will probably take you a while since the difficulty ramps up quite a bit. The overworld hub with secret areas, additional tools and traps in levels, bombs and speed up mechanics making this game feel surprisingly deep and therefore gets a thumbs up from me (with the aforementioned caveat). Unfortunately, that caveat is also keeping me from giving it a universal Vita game recommendation so far, as I really fear it might break the highscoring aspect.
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