Vangers: One for the Road Review

Confusing. Off-putting. Indecipherable. Mystifying. These are just a few of the words that crept into my mind as I wrestled with what should have been a fairly straightforward game of driving, combat, and resource management.

Confusing. Off-putting. Indecipherable. Mystifying. These are just a few of the words that crept into my mind as I wrestled with what should have been a fairly straightforward game of driving, combat, and resource management. A vague interface, nonsensical nomenclature, in-game dialogue that borders on the psychotic, unrewarding action sequences - all these help make Vangers feel as if the main design goal was to ensure that only the most stubborn, dedicated gamers would have any desire to stick with it long enough to reap whatever joy it might have to offer.

Things start off innocently enough with an intro (in the manual) that explains how humankind discovered the secret of interstellar travel through Passages, presumably something along the lines of a wormhole. Failing to learn anything from our past, we simply conquered the worlds we visited and exploited their resources with total disregard for the inhabitants - until we ran into a race called the Cryspo (sounds like a cereal from the 1950s, doesn't it?).

As the Cryspo forced the human settlers to retreat into sealed cities, the colonists resorted to genetic warfare. The result was a new race, the Lostie, which combined elements of human and Cryspo anatomy and culture. The Lostie live in escaves, underground cities built by humans during their battles against the Cryspo. Vangers, it turns out, are a clan of Lostie - and it seems that the Infinite Mind (umm, I guess that's like a supreme being or something; it's the thing that gave Earthlings the technology of the Passages) planned the entire affair in order to create the warrior race of Vangers.

That's the abbreviated version, so unless you buy the game you won't get to experience the sensation of moving from comprehension at the beginning of the introduction to dazed confusion as the narrative starts introducing concepts like bunch cycles, the "Bouillon of Spawn," the bios, and other ambiguous terms. Vangers' developer K-D Labs is obviously trying to make some comment on the human condition here: In describing the Lostie, for instance, the intro says they live "on the rubble of powerful and ancient civilizations... practic endless cult cycles in an attempt to establish a rationale for their existence." Yes, the Lostie are a pretty clever little metaphor for mankind - but a better idea would have been to attempt to establish a rationale for the existence of this game.

Of course, you're wondering just what you do in Vangers. Well, Vangers drive mechos, armed vehicles that can venture to the surface of a planet and travel between escaves. When you enter an escave, you can buy mechos, weapons, items for trade to earn beebs (beebs also happen to be creatures that roam the surface of planets), and take on tabutasks - specific jobs that can earn you the really big beebs.

And it's in the escaves that you meet counselors - caterpillar-type creatures you can interrogate to learn more about phrases like "phlegma," "Feenger," "beeborat," "cirt," and other bewildering gobbledygook. Counselors don't speak a language you can understand; you read generally unhelpful text responses as you hear a bunch of grunts and guttural sounds and stare at some crummy claymation model contorting its insect-like face.

To leave the first game world of Forstral and move on to the next planet, you have to win a race from the Incubator (which looks just like an escave) to Podish (a bona fide escave) while carrying an eLeech (don't ask). All the action takes place from a top-down perspective as your mechos travels overland, burrows through the earth, drives underwater, and even hovers and flies.

To be fair, the terrain graphics in Vangers are some sweet eye candy. The ground can be permanently deformed by explosions, and you actually see the surface undulate as other mechos (and God knows what other things) burrow underground. But what good is all that when simply making your way from point A to point B lends itself to neither skillful driving nor exciting combat, and the vehicles handle like souped-up shopping carts?

There are no roads per se in Vangers, and because the surface is multitiered you can wind up driving along a lower level, completely unable to see your vehicle - particularly annoying should you run into another Vanger who decides to open fire on you. There's nothing like a combat-driving game where you can't see where you're driving or who to shoot, is there?

And that's not all. You'll expend a prodigious effort trying to extract your mechos from rivers, hilly terrain, strange buildings, and other places where you can get almost hopelessly ensnared - not to mention being continually forced to use your weapons to cut a path through all sorts of obstacles blocking your progress (these problems are reduced immensely once you earn enough beebs to purchase devices that'll let you hover). K-D Labs obviously created all the weird terminology for Vangers in an effort to make you feel as if you were part of an alien civilization; in practice, it means you're forced to read confusing descriptions for every object in the game. Why couldn't the manual put the phrase "rocket launcher" under "Spreettle System" or "plasma gun" under "ghOrb Gear," for instance, so that you'd know right away what they were without having to endure someone's attempt to be clever and witty? With words like nobool, eleepod, poponka, nymbos, cirtainer, and leepuringa (to name just a few), you wind up walking away from Vangers feeling as if you'd just played a game designed by Dr. Seuss in a hallucinatory stupor.

But let's forget the wacky words: Often you don't need to understand fully what they mean, and some folks might even like the style. Here's the deal - even though I dragged myself back to this thing for hour after hour, I never began to approach a level of fun that would make me want to fire it up for any reason other than to give it a fair shake. A lot of gamers have described Vangers as unlike anything they've played; that's because they paid too much attention to the weird language and didn't notice that fundamentally it's not much different from a dozen other games that put you in the cockpit of a heavily armed car of some type.

Vangers should thrill you with the excitement of vehicular combat while gradually advancing the admittedly unique plot; instead, it bores you to death with a confused story that takes too long to get off the ground and gameplay that would only impress someone who's never played a decent driving-and-shooting game before. Yes, you could easily spend dozens and dozens of hours playing Vangers - but all I can say is better you than me.

The Good

  • N/A

The Bad

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