Vektor Wars Review

Expecting a game based on Sonic’s Crocodile friend taking on an army of poachers? You’re in the wrong place. Vektor Wars is actually a first person shooter set in a neon skyscraper filled city with one hell of a soundtrack. You are commander James Moses, the year is 2024 and your mission is to obliterate the robot death army and rescue the Robodudes thus saving the world. Sounding more like a Saturday morning cartoon, Vektor Wars offers plenty with 5 different modes and 9 zones to explore. Will you take on the rogue robots and saved the planet from mechanical doom?

“Brilliant!”. Was my first response seeing the nostalgic NES style menus. I immediately felt affection for Vektor Wars due to rarely seeing an 80’s vibe and classic feel combined together. Booting up the digital only title, the music explodes and makes its presence known with an original killer soundtrack. Fitting with the neon theme we have techno tunes cascading perfectly with the concrete jungle surroundings. Very unusual, especially on a Nintendo console, to find this style of music yet it poses a refreshing take contributing to the battles and staying in your mind well after putting the game down. If I could score the music alone it would get a ten.

All the action takes place in first person using analogue sticks to move and turn accordingly. Dropping into the battlefield you’ll quickly pick up the controls though I did end up experimenting to see if the GamePad worked similar to Splatoon; It doesn’t. In all truth the GamePad screen is pretty much obsolete only used for a map system of the city and any enemies. I ended up avoiding using the screen, opting to go in blind which I found a better experience. The artillery at your disposal is what you would expect with a shooter; Pistol, Machine gun, Shotgun, Mini-Gun and of course a good old Rocket Launcher. Most of these are found in pick ups and will give you a limited amount so use sparingly as the evil mecha can corner you if your not prepared.

Not long into gameplay though, I encountered a few bugs all caught in the same space. Whilst venturing around the map picking up a health bar would throw the camera off and result in my health actually decreasing. Consequently from this my character would be frozen in one spot with the only option being to restart or wait until an enemy destroyed my lifeless body. This needs patching as it affected my play on a few occasions and is beyond frustrating having to start over after making so much progress. Researching online the majority of players have managed to avoid this issue with people experiencing frame rate more which did play a part too. Just be for warned there are some issues present.

With every mode centered on survival you are offered a fair amount. Alongside Story mode you have Arcade where you are given three lives to see how long you can live. Deadline; score as many points as you can in  five minutes. Sequence; 2 minutes in 5 zones to try achieve the highest score and survival which you guessed it. You have 1 life and no health packs as you try to survive. Apart from the story my time spent was predominantly in sequence with the variation of the zone changing up every few minutes keeping the pace strong. If anything the one thing that I enjoyed most was the shock inclusion of an achievement list. Quite a meticulous one at that too. For so long now Nintendo have felt behind the times with no achievement/trophy system so when one turns up I was flabbergasted. Easily extending my overall playtime this added feature goes a long way.

What no one can deny is that developers Super Icon have created an original piece that stands out from the crowd. With an endearing 80’s theme, killer soundtrack and considerable amount of modes, Vektor Wars seems like the perfect package. It even has an achievement system! That’s why I was so downhearted to find frame rate slowdown and sporadic bugs that freeze your movement. Lets hope these Robots don’t rust.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Nintendo Wii U code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.