Vagante Review (NSW)

Written by Patrick Orquia

Title: Vagante
Developer: NukeNine
Publisher: Blitworks
Genre: Action, Adventure, Dungeon Crawler, Platformer, Roguelike
Number of Players: 1-4
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: 27 January 2022
Price: $14.99

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I think I have a love-hate relationship with roguelikes. They are very fun to play, yes, but before you get to the fun part, you will have to spend hours upon hours to get good, both as a player playing the game and as your character in the game to get leveled up enough for you to not die right away on any given run. Plus, you have to start at the very beginning of the game each time you meet your demise. Depending on the quality of the game, this could possibly be a very frustrating ordeal.

Anyway, the subject of this review, Vagante, is a roguelike indie game that tackles many usual roguelike tropes, like the procedurally-generated levels and permadeath. In this game, you play as an adventurer who enters a cave at the edge of a forest to explore its many levels and hopefully get the treasures within. Pretty much it. Roguelikes really don’t have or need deep storylines or characters. You enter a dungeon, fight off the baddies, get all the loots that you can, survive, and reach the next one. Die and start again. Rinse and repeat. Vagante embraces that game mechanic, and quite well. And since the levels are procedurally generated, no two runs are ever alike.

At the start of each run, you have the option to choose the class of your character. You start with three: Knight, Rogue, and Mage. Later on, as you progress into the game, you unlock more classes. Knight has high HP but can only yield a sword at the start of a run. A rogue is equipped with a sword and bow, but with less HP. A mage has low HP and has no sword or bow, but can use magic right on the get go. Each of the classes can use weapons such as swords, daggers, axes, bows, and use magic if they have them equipped. You can collect different kinds of weapons as well as other gears such as boots, mitts, robes, rings, etc., usually from treasure chests and breakable boxes and barrels. You mix and match whichever equipment that you choose. You also collect coins, which you can use to buy additional equipment from shops.

Of course, the dungeons are infested with enemies with varying attack power. It is imperative for you to eliminate them first because they will hunt you down at first sight. By the way, enemy AI in this game is quite good, so you better outsmart them as soon as possible. Aside from the enemies, there also some obstacles scattered around, such as spikes, floor monsters, booby traps, etc. Due to the procedurally-generated nature of the game, there would be times where the placements of the enemies and obstacles are rather unfair, and the frequency of when they occur is a bit too high for my liking. It is a source of much frustration in this game for me as they often result deaths and I wish that the level design was better in this game. Other roguelike games don’t have unavoidable arrows waiting right in your path or floor traps right where you would land that is next to impossible for you to see. I hope the developers can patch this in the future.

Anyway, the goal for each level is for you to find the passage to the next one. Usually, a powerful enemy awaits near the exit, such as a dragon or a big stabbing goon or a large serpent, and you have the option to either fight them or avoid them completely, given that you can dodge or block their attacks. These enemies appear even on the very first level, which is quite annoying since, of course, you don’t have enough powerful gears equipped for you to really efficiently fight them, and they hit really hard. But, if you manage to defeat them, they drop a special key that will open a treasure chest with some good weapons/gears/potions or optional challenging areas with more goodies (and tougher enemies) within. When you exit a level, you will reach a safe area where you can replenish a bit of HP and increase some stats if you happen to level up. You can also save your game here. The levels do increase in difficulty as you progress into the game, but you also get to acquire more powerful upgrades, so just keep on staying alive more if you can.

If the steep difficulty or grind-heavy nature of the game don’t entice you to play further, may the Vacanti awesome visuals and music will. This game looks really good, with detailed pixel art style that is highly reminiscent of the 16-bit era. The biome changes after every few levels, and with each change introducing new enemy types and other challenges.  The music brings everything together, ranging from somber to tense (during boss encounters). The small indie dev team took a few years to complete the game, and the level of aesthetics in this game shows how dedicated they were.

Overall, Vagante is a really good game, despite it being just another one in many, many games indie games that have the same formula. The overall gameplay is good, it looks and sounds good, and with the procedurally-generated levels, you can pretty much play it for hours and hours. But, like I mentioned earlier, this game can be quite frustrating also, which may hinder your enjoyment and even discourage you from playing further. You will really have to grind a lot to level up and open some new additional perks, referred in-game as Backgrounds, that will give you more boons for each run. Boons like faster movement or having stronger attack and the like, but you really have to work your way to getting them. The longer you run gets and the more powerful enemies you defeat, the more experience you get. It is the nature of roguelike games, but this game takes a rougher approach to it. But if you have the time and patience and don’t mind the game being unnecessarily dickish to you, then you will probably enjoy Vagante a lot.

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REPLAY VALUE: High

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PRO

• Awesome pixel art style, reminiscent of the 16-bit era
• Excellent music that makes you feel more engaged with the ambience of each level
• Tight controls
• Good variety on enemies and weapons/gears
• High degree of customization options for skills, equipment, and other perimeters in the game
• Very good gameplay, albeit a bit repetitive
• Performs very well on the Nintendo Switch, docked or handheld

CONS

• Very grind-heavy
• Unfair trap/enemy placements; the levels are procedurally generated but the devs could have programmed it in such a way that will prevent enemies and obstacles from being next to impossible to avoid
• Takes a long time to level up, and the rewards for leveling up are not worth the time
• Very steep difficulty level right on the get go that might discourage players from further playing the game

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RATING: 4/5 dungeons and dragons and other monsters

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