If you can find Vexx at a cheap price, then it might be worth checking out. Just don't expect anything too great.
Genre: Three Dimensional (3D) Platformer
Release Date: February 10, 2003
Player(s): One (1) Player
Rating: T For Teen[ager]
Systems This Video Game Is Available For: Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo GameBoy Advance, PlayStation 2, XBox
After Super Mario 64 was created, there were a lot of video games that tried to copy it. Some video games actually turned out to be better than Super Mario 64, in my perspective, such as Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, and Donkey Kong 64, but some other video games did not, and one of those video games would have to be Vexx.
Vexx is not a horrible video game, it just is not as good as most video games, and it feels a little bit too outdated. This game does have some quirks, but you will be having fun every once in awhile.
Vexx's story is so horrible that the developers should not have even included it. Vexx is a slave, as well as his whole town. The dark, evil wizard, Yabu, is the rule of some realm called "Astara." One day Vexx decides to strike back at one of the guards, but then the guards begin to strike back. Vexx's grandfather defends him, but he ends up dieing. Vexx wants revenge, and he will go through heck for it.
After you see that whole cut scene, you will do a course that will explain some things to you. You will get your first shadow wraith heart there. And then you will talk to an old man that will talk to you. After you finish talking to him, your journey begins.
There are three main collectables in Vexx. If you collect one-hundred circle-shaped objects, you get a shadow wraith heart. If you collect six souls that belong to some odd spirits, then you get a shadow wraith heart. These souls just look like a yellow cherry to me, but the look does not really matter. The main thing that you have to collect are the shadow wraith hearts. These hearts look like an actual heart from a person's body, and it pumps blood to. You can hear it, and the sound is just sickening.
So basically, you start out in the first level that seems like a pretty nice scenario. The setup is unrealistic, though. Even if there was some magic world, it would not look like this. For example, there are some rocks that are floating in the air, and it is a perfect setup to get a shadow wraith heart.
There are nine levels in Vexx that can be accessed through the main hub. It is sort of like the Super Mario 64 setup. There are levels that you can choose from, except in Vexx, they are right in front of you, and you will not have to do a lot of searching to find them. They will be right in front of your eyes, and you will see the number of how many shadow wraith hearts you need to access the level.
Most of the shadow wraith hearts are way too difficult to obtain, and the only clue you get is pretty hard to figure out. When you step on a level's pad, you will have to click a shadow wraith heart that tells you a clue. The shadow wraith heart is not an actual real one. It is like Super Mario 64's setup. When you enter a world, you have to choose an episode to beat, except Vexx's are not right in front of your eyes, and the short clue that you get before you enter the world is a short, four-line poem that rhymes. Most of them will just make you perplexed, and after awhile, players will just stop reading them because they do not help that much.
The level designs are beautiful, and most of the levels are about as large as Banjo Kazooie's levels, but that is not too big, but the levels certainly get bigger as you progress through the video game. There is much diversity in this video game, but some of the levels seem silly… The fourth level is a good example. That level takes place in a house, and you are smaller than a pencil, apparently.
The enemies in this video game are not challenging at all, but they are always fun to fight with your long claws. To defeat enemies, you will barely ever have to use much strategy. Just repeatedly click the A button, dodge a few attacks, and you will win the battles. The cool thing about battles are that you have a gauge. When you fill up the gauge by just attacking the enemies, (You do NOT have to kill the enemies to fill up the gauge.) you can perform some pretty cool attacks, such as shooting little fire balls at enemies, but you really do not need all those "cool" moves to kill the enemies. Pressing the A button should do the trick.
Vexx has some fun moments, but most of it just gets way too tedious too fast. You will eventually go inside of a picture, and you will practically be in a two dimensional level, and then you have to collect an object, or a couple of objects to get whatever it is you need. You will also be placed in some cool mini games against three shadow figures of you, and those are almost always fun. You will occasionally fight some bosses, mostly a fat, overweight sumo wrestler, and those can become quite challenging.
The worst part of Vexx is that the levels that you enter will be way too challenging, and you cannot select any difficulty at the beginning of the video game. In the ninth level, gamers will be placed in some dark world that seems like it has fallen apart. Just getting to the next area is a challenge. You will have to cross a moving platform, while avoiding getting sliced in half by sharp knifes, gamers will have to jump across platforms at the right time, or else Vexx will be knocked off the arena. There are a lot of challenging things like that, and most people will most likely just shut off their system and regret ever buying this video game.
There are some moves you can learn in Vexx, but you do not use them too often. You can learn how to fly by obtaining some card somewhere, and you can also turn into something as hard as a rock by obtaining some card somewhere. These abilities are stupid because you can only use them when you find a pad. For flying, there will basically be a shadow wraith heart in the sky, and you will have to get that object, and it is a little bit difficult to control Vexx while flying. When you turn into something as a rock, you will always have a time limit, and you will have to find a shadow wraith heart inside of a container, run into that, and then take your shadow wraith heart. But other than that, there are really no moves in Vexx.
Out of the ninety shadow wraith hearts that are featured in this video game, you will only need sixty to beat the entire video game, after fighting Yabu, of course, but most gamers will most likely just stop at about level five and realize that this video game has little point to it, and running around collecting random objects in this video game is just not a fun thing to do. If you have a strategy guide for this video game, you will still have trouble overcoming obstacles, and if you do not have a strategy guide, then you will almost always be lost in this video game.
There is a sundial in Vexx, and I do not think that is cool at all. Just like in Jak 2 or Jak 3, as players will play, it will become darker and darker, and then lighter and lighter. You can change the sundial if you find it, but I would rather play in a light course than a dark course where I can see nothing, but the whole ninth course is dark, anyways. The sundial can also open up portals to a little, mini course that will have a shadow wraith at the end of it. It is sort of like Wario World's mini courses, except these ones are a lot more difficult.
Vexx may seem like a cool, punk-rock rodent, but that is just the way he looks. There are not a lot of cut scenes, and when there are, Vexx just occasionally grunts. He really never says anything, and the only word that can describe his personality is the word called "angry." Just the look in his eyes makes you feel like he wants to kill anyone or anything.
There are not too many characters in Vexx, and the ones that are characters are just enemies. There is an old man that you can talk to in the first level, but he will always say the same thing. You basically do not interact with anyone at all in Vexx, and you will just always feel alone everywhere you go. In Super Mario 64, there was at least Yoshi at the top of the castle to give you companies, and there were some Toads that you could talk to, but Vexx seems like it only focuses on game play, and the game play is not too good to even begin with.
The sound in Vexx barely ever changes, except when you get a shadow wraith heart, or you visit another level. When you kill an enemy, it sounds pretty disturbing, and it does not seem like that noise would emanate from any of the enemies. The sound is a horrible feature in Vexx, and players might as well just turn their television on mute, and listen to their own taste of music while they are playing Vexx.
Despite all the negative things about Vexx, it does have a good camera that you can control with the C analog stick, while you move with the control stick. This is really simple to do, and the camera angle will almost never be a main concern.
The graphics in this video game are decent, and the way everything is designed is just beautiful, but there is not too much to see in Vexx. The graphics are worse than Mario Party 7's graphics, but they are also better than a lot of other video game's graphics.
This video game is also not a multiplayer. The developers could have used the few mini games this video game has to offer by just adding multiplayer to it. It would probably not end up that good, but it would at least be something addition. They should have no problem adding something like that in the video game… I mean they lacked effort in almost every other facture.
If you can find Vexx in a store for ten dollars or less, then this is a pretty good deal. But if you see Vexx being sold for about twenty dollars, then that is questionable offer. This is the cheapest video game I have ever bought, and it was only two dollars from my friend who did not own the system he had Vexx on, so I just took it off his hands, and it was definitely worth it, but then again, that is not saying much.
If you truly love challenging platform video games, then you might like this video game, but if you just want a straightforward video game where you do not have to use your brain to figure out where everything is, then this probably is not the video game for you. You can always admire the original, diverse levels in Vexx, and its cool character, but when you fall off a large cliff, and you end up having to do the same thing over again, you will just find that this video game is a waste of time, and it even took me over two hours just to find a shadow wraith heart once. You can always collect those objects that look like coins if you want an easy shadow wraith heart, but there are only about one-hundred-ten of those in each level, and they are really difficult to find. The six souls that belong to heroes are much like Super Mario 64's eight red coins, and those can be found usually somewhere in the same area, but all the other shadow wraith hearts are cleverly hidden, but that really is not a good thing. I can completely understand if this video game ends up becoming your favorite video game of all time, but for most people, it will just be another average video game, and nothing more than that.
Pros:
1. There is a unique level design in Vexx.
2. If you truly enjoy this video game, you will have countless hours of fun trying to find all the shadow wrath hearts.
3. The boss battles may be a little bit frustrating, but they are one of the best aspects of Vexx.
4. Vexx looks like a unique individual, and he seems to look like one of the coolest characters yet, in my perspective.
Cons:
1. The music is horrible, and it seems as though the developers did not put any effort towards this part of the video game at all.
2. The repetitive, tedious, and boring item collecting will not have that many gamers playing for long.
3. There are very few characters in Vexx, and the characters that are in Vexx do not really even have a personality.
4. This video game gets way too challenging, and you might as well avoid the last level (Level Nine [9]) if you are an average player.
5. There are barely any cut scenes, and when there is a cut scene, there is barely ever any dialogue in them, and they are usually just shown a boss's reaction to Vexx before a battle, or after a battle.
6. There is not much to the story, and the video game does not explain why you need to obtain wraith hearts to access other levels too well.
Game Play: 7/10
Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 4/10
Storyline: 2/10
Controls: 9/10
Overall: 6/10
Review created on July 26, 2006.