Genre: General
Website: http://nekki.com/vector/
Shane:
- Platform: Android
- Hours logged: 5.0
- Playthroughs: 0
- Rating: --/10
Lee:
- Platform: Android
- Hours logged: 0.5
- Playthroughs: 0
- Rating: --/10
- Shane (4/8/2014): This game has proven well worth my time. I saw it being played by someone on a tablet while flying to New York earlier in the year. It seemed clever and simple. Once I installed it I first thought "So that guy on the plane had an Android tablet? Who has an Android tablet?" Then I found it to be clever and rhythmic, not really as simple as I had originally thought.
The story is something about a dystopian <Editorial note: I typed "distopian" here and Chrome tried to change it to "pianist"... WTF Google?> future and a huge corporation and ... maybe some kind of mind control? Not sure about that last part. But there is some kind of REALLY fit resistance group (I say REALLY fit because have you ever tried to do Parkour stuff? Balls it is exhausting. And hard.) that spends it's time running from the shock troops with tasers. Some of them even get apprehended while helping my character escape. I thought that was pretty noble of them but really didn't know why I was special enough to be sacrificed for. Maybe that is explained in the last chapter.
I have not logged a full playthrough of this game yet. I will keep playing it. Individual levels are not more than a minute or so. Totally playable while on the toilet. <Second editorial note: Lee had selected a pretty boring screenshot for the game when he built the base report for this game. I thought we could do better so I took a stab at grabbing a screen grab during a "special move". The scene: Bathroom, lunch time. Me, sitting in a bathroom cubicle. Other cubicle also occupied. Phone volume at max for whatever reason. What I didn't realize was that taking a screenshot activates the camera sound. Now I am not a shy bathroom person but in this case I felt the need to hide out for an additional minute until the other bathroom patron left as to avoid the required question "what exactly where you taking a picture of in there?"> An additional mechanic popped up after finishing the second zone "industrial park" where I had completed each level with just 1 star. I need 25 stars in this zone to unlock the third zone. I will keep this one around until I manage a full playthrough.
- Lee (4/10/2014): I made a deal with myself after my write-ups for Color Sheep and Bad Hotel that I needed to write a positive review of a game before I tear into another game with more negative opinions. With yesterday's favorable Katamari Damacy entry now up on blog, I feel that I can share some brief thoughts on Vector.
Some positive stuff: The concept of the game is awesome. I loved being able to fly through the air, spin over some obstacles, and dive under others. Fantastic.
And now the negative: I really wanted it to be like a Tony Hawk game, but without the skateboard. I wanted to run around and do cool tricks, perhaps with the goal of maximizing your points for each level, or gathering items during your run, or meeting some other objectives...just like in Tony Hawk games. But in this one, there is some dude chasing you with a taser, so your moves have to be near perfect, else you are dead. And this game has no "Lee Mode" (Easy Mode). After getting killed MANY times on only the third level, I gave up.
That's when I had a discussion with Shane about it. He made a very clever and profound analogy about this game (which I noticed that he didn't mention in his write-up). He said that playing a level in Vector is like learning a song on a musical instrument. You have to learn and practice the nuances of each level/song. Playing doesn't necessarily have to be perfect, but it has to be good enough, otherwise the song sounds like shit...or you get zapped to death by a taser. (I may have paraphrased a bit there...) That is the real power of this video game project. Being able to share some thoughts, both positive and negative, on a particular game with someone can have a profound effect on one's approach to a game and on the gameplay experience itself. Thanks, Shane. I'll probably give this one another spin someday.
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