Can you survive this looter shooter?
1991. The nuclear war is over. Central Europe is devastated, Norway has become the last stand. You start as a nameless outlander, but who will you become? No time for uncertainty. Turn a shelter into your home. Fight, run or hide. Take risks, claim rewards, and survive this cut-throat experience.
Vigor is a free-to-play third person shooter in the guise of a survival game, mixed with battle royale type gameplay. Sounds fun, right? You’d be right if it wasn’t for the abundance of microtransactions that essentially make the game pay-to-win. The object is to essentially gather what materials you can on the maps and leave without getting killed, either solo or as a team. When it works, it works well…although the shooting itself is a bit of a mixed bag.
It’s hard to tell if it also will have the replay value for people to keep playing as there are only a handful of maps, plus there are development waiting times for building your own weapons with the supplies you gather, which can be hours. There are some good ideas in Vigor but there are also some pretty bad ones and this is definitely one of the latter.
Visually, Vigor is actually a decent looking game. It runs at a solid framerate for the most of the time, but load times can be long and there are a number of bugs that hinder it.
The Verdict
Vigor is a solid idea let down by poor execution and mishandling of microtransactions that makes it pay-to-win. It’s also hit and miss with the shooting itself which is a big setback. Hopefully it’ll improve over the next few months via patches and become more balanced, but as it stands it’s simply not as good as the competition.