Game Review: Vigor

Vigor (Xbox)

Review by Gregory Rodney

I feel conflicted when writing about Vigor.

There is the base for a very strong game with some fun gameplay ideas. The developers put a unique twist on a popular genre and created something that's somewhat refreshing. Unfortunately, some big issues are overshadowing the game and it's driving away supporters.

Vigor is a free-to-play online action game developed and published by Bohemia Interactive.

Bohemia has a large catalog of games but none of them compare to the success of their two largest titles. You can see that Bohemia is hoping Vigor can join the ranks of Arma and DayZ, but I think that maybe a dream. When speaking about Vigor it's important to understand its unique gameplay features.

The game is instanced based on lobbies of 12 players. You're allowed to party up with one person, but it's not advised as your allowed to kill your teammate at any time and steal their loot. The goal is to explore the map and make it out alive. You're placed randomly on the map with POIs marked and allowed to explore at will. Some of the POIs give advantages such as better loot; move the drop zone, or the ability to see other players.

You're also not encouraged to kill everyone, as you'll be marked if you kill more than 3 people. Every instance lasts about 5-10 minutes and is determined by what time the supply drop is deployed. Now here's when it gets interesting. You can only enter instances with items that you either found in other instances or crafted yourself. But when you die everything you had on you is lost forever. This means you can be forced to go into games with no weapons or all your weapons, but risk ending up with nothing in the end.

Personally, the game has a survival feel to it when you're weighing how much your items are worth to you. The ability to lose everything makes you feel so anxious in a world where everyone is an enemy. The games saving grace is the ability to escape through exit points marked out across the map. When leaving through these points you earned the right to keep all your items.

The game has a lot of potential but sometimes it just doesn't seem to work well. Server issues were constant at the beginning for a lot of players. I didn't have even disconnections in an instance, but I didn't get disconnected in my shelter multiple times. The game allows you to buy insurance so that if you die you don't lose all your items.

Players have reported buying the insurance and being disconnected, which resulted in them losing their items. You must buy insurance and other boosts with coins that cost real money, and on unstable servers, you pretty much never get your money's worth. The prices for the boosts and insurance are pretty high as well even if the game is free-to-play.

Server issues aren't the only problem, I also ran into a couple of bothersome glitches. Animation glitches and a lot of gun glitches involved with shooting plagued my experience. One constant glitch was when my automatic guns randomly stopped firing after a few bullets. Another one was when my guns would do the reload animation but still have the same number of bullets in the magazine. With the high microtransaction prices, the game needs to address some of these issues, especially in a high stakes game like Vigor.

I think the game is worth a try, but I cannot recommend spending any money on it. Not until they've lowered their microtransaction prices and fixed a lot of their glitches and server issues.

Final Rating: 👎