Your foe will, of course, retaliate, but this is where the best part of Lockdown’s combat comes into play – evasion. You can choose to specialize in any one of these disciplines by spending skill points and become a spell-hurling steampunk wizard, a beefy tank with mace and shield in hand, or even a dual-wielding DPS monster that dishes out damage at breakneck speed there’s a decent bit of character customization available, so if you’re the type that enjoys trying out multiple builds across multiple playthroughs, well… the world is your steam-fueled oyster.īy default, battles play out in real time: when you’re in range of an enemy, you launch your attack and hope it doesn’t miss. Gadgets are this game’s version of magic spells, allowing you to deal continuous elemental damage over time, summon minions, apply useful buffs/debuffs and do a variety of other cool things that further widen your tactical options in battle. In combat, you have several options: launch a melee attack, fire a ranged weapon, or use a gadget. That means each level is divided into squares, and instead of being able to move freely, you sort of just slide across the map, going from one square to the next – almost like a chess piece. But really, the true highlights of Vaporum: Lockdown are its mind-bending puzzles and unique, “real time with time stop” battle system.Īs mentioned above, Vaporum: Lockdown is a grid-based dungeon crawler played from a first-person perspective. The occasional journal entry and audio recording, detailing the circumstances of what went wrong inside the tower (why do video game villains always feel the need to record their evil plans on tape, anyway?), mostly serve as additional fluff – a side dish to lend some extra context to all the relentless robot abuse and puzzle-solving you will inevitably partake in. We’re primarily here to beat up robots and solve puzzles. It’s a glorified shopping list is what it is, except you’re running around looking for a bunch of different gizmos and thingamajigs instead of eggs and milk.
I’ll be honest, though – from a storyline perspective, Vaporum: Lockdown didn’t particularly capture my imagination, nor was I constantly at the edge of my seat trying to find out what would happen next, as the vast majority of Ellie’s quest consists of her visiting multiple levels of the tower trying to repair things that need to be repaired before she can escape in her submarine. You follow the adventures of Ellie Teller, a scientist just trying to make it out alive from a mechanical tower called Arx Vaporum where all hell seems to have broken loose, with robots, mutated roaches and steampunk zombies attacking everything in sight. Vaporum: Lockdown comes as a standalone prequel to Vaporum (which, if you’ve read the previous paragraph, you’ll know that I haven’t played), and is a steampunk fantasy dungeon crawler with an absolutely gorgeous, and at times genuinely creepy, visual aesthetic.
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