Vigor

Genre: Third-Person Shooter

Players: 12 Competitive / Team Competitive (Online)

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS AND WAIT MECHANICS

Vigor (Not to be confused with Vigour, a completely different and unrelated game) is a free-to-play Third-Person Shooter that takes a fairly unique approach to the genre. Players are placed in a large area in a post-apocalyptic Norway, much as in a Battle Royale game, but here the object is not to eliminate the competition. Rather, players are tasked with scavenging for supplies and making it to one of the area’s exits without getting killed by the other players or the incoming radioactive cloud. As such, it’s a perfectly valid strategy to avoid combat altogether if you so desire, or alternately you can try to hunt down the other players and try to pick your winnings off of their corpses. This game was originally released in 2018 for Xbox One and brought to other platforms including Nintendo Switch in 2020

In terms of of presentation, this game is rough. While the environments here are large, they’re also rendered in fairly low detail, with blurry textures, and everything has a low-resolution “fuzziness” to it that’s eye-wateringly distracting, especially in shadows and foliage. The sound design fares better here, as the game does a good job making it clear when you’re hearing a gunshot nearby or off in the distance, although otherwise it’s not especially noteworthy.

The gameplay, at least, has some interesting things going for it here. Players have a home base they maintain in between missions using the materials they scavenge in those missions, which gives players a long-term goal to aim for. To make things more interesting, there’s multiple risk/reward mechanics to the game’s missions – when you die in a mission, you lose whatever weapons and items you brought with you, so knowing this, do you better equip yourself for a fight, or do you go in lean so you’re not risking as much, but leaving yourself vulnerable to attack. However, while I do credit the risk/reward mechanic as clever, it’s also hard to ignore the fact that this plays right into the game’s microtransactions tempting players to spend money on this in-game stuff, or at least to bypass wait mechanics throughout the game.

Anyway, getting back to the gameplay, it’s not all random looting. Every mission will see the release of a cargo drop with more valuable loot, but of course these drops tend to attract others, meaning that heading for a drop will make it more likely that you’ll be getting into a fight. You could always choose to skulk off to the sides, of course, but then you’ll just be bringing home scraps. Another option is to use one of the area’s radio towers to move the drop to a more advantageous spot, to sabotage it, or influence things in some other way. While the game does have a brief tutorial, much of this is stuff you’ll have to figure out on your own, as that tutorial doesn’t do the best job of showing the player how all of this works.

Still, this game has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it falters when it comes to the simple mechanics of movement and combat, which just aren’t very good. There’s a noticeable lag in movement, and the third-person view the game uses frequently makes it difficult to tell whether your shot is obstructed, since taking cover is often ideal and as a result you’ll find yourself getting into a lot of fights ducking in and around buildings and other objects. And even worse, at multiple points I found myself getting stuck on the level’s geometry.

It’s a shame Vigor has so many problems, both in terms of its gameplay and its visuals, because it really is an excellent idea, and in the hands of a more talented team, this could have been something truly special. As it is, Vigor might interest those intrigued by its premise, but most will likely find their time better spent with the other online shooters available on the Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Vigor is a free-to-play Third-Person Shooter that has players scavenging in a large area in post-apocalyptic Norway while trying to avoid getting killed by each other and an incoming radioactive fog. This is a great concept done poorly, with some good ideas and mechanics ultimately undone by bad core gameplay and distracting, ugly graphics. It may be worth a look if you find the concept interesting, but otherwise you’re better off with one of the Nintendo Switch’s numerous other shooters.

Grade: C

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2020 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Microtransactions

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