Vaporum: Lockdown

As a grid-based, first-person, action/adventure RPG, Vaporum: Lockdown offers plenty of gameplay elements to keep you busy. The dungeon-crawling game play is straightforward and not overly complicated, despite a good number of puzzles sprinkled in. In short, this is a solid prequel to the original Vaporum. Have fun exploring.

If you like puzzles and steampunk themes, Vaporum: Lockdown will be a big deal, providing many hours of challenges and battles. However, the narrative leaves something to be desired, discouraging the player to a point that it can almost be ignored.

If you love challenging puzzles, some of which feel like you need to be reading the developer’s brain to figure out, you’ll have a field day here. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t frustrating sometimes. Hidden breakable walls become so hard to spot that you start whacking every surface you come across. Logical leaps that probably made sense to someone during development but don’t work out so well for a player trying to figure things out. It can be utterly exasperating. But I still kept on playing it until I reached the end, which I think speaks to the underlying appeal of this game.

While Vaporum: Lockdown initially seems like an intriguing proposal, especially on the Switch where dungeon crawlers are fairly few and far between, it ultimately it ends up being just a perfectly fine experience overall, if perhaps a bit too derivative to be memorable. Only recommended for diehard dungeon crawl or steampunk fans.