With so many survival and Battle Royale style games flooding the Xbox store it’s hard to find something unique out there. Vigor aims to solve this with a focus on your base building skills.
Vigor feels like home improvements meet survival multiplayer. The new game from Bohemia Interactive, who are no strangers to the open world multiplayer scene with DayZ and Arma 3 under their belts, is all about surviving against other players while salvaging but it forgoes the Battle Royle ‘one winner’ approach to focus on the building of a safe shelter. The game is set in an alternate Norway during 1991 after a nuclear war which has left Europe devastated, leaving only the nordic country to those who still survive.
The third person survival shooter has a big focus on finding and repairing a shelter, adding new features in order to level up, rather than just focusing on your character. The game has been in beta and Xbox Preview for quite a while now and the version 1.1 release has seen a lot of new features and improvements added.
As an Outlander your actions will revolve around three main things; looting for resources/weapons, battling others for airdrops and their loot and then trying to get back to the safety of your Shelter with new equipment in order to upgrade it.
Your shelter, which you unlock after grabbing enough stuff, is the key to all your upgrades and adds benefits to your character, new weapons to create and, of course, create visual upgrades, too. Any upgrade requires time to create so you’ll need to keep yourself busy in the meantime. It does mean that you’ll get in to a flow of going out to grab stuff for your base, upgrading to improve your chances in the wild and then going out to grab as much loot as you can without getting killed.
There are 3 ways to grab loot; just pick up what you can find on the floor, grab it from other players you kill or find airdrops. The latter is the trickier as it gives your position away. There’s a good feeling of risk reward and staying out too long in one area will see radiation gradually cover the area, just like in a Battle Royale game. Upgrading your base feels like a good reward for your efforts but the time delay does mean this is a slower paced game in the long run.
With more maps added, each one adding different scenery and strategies, much more stable code and support for adding a team-mate, Vigor is an interesting Xbox One game that feels quite different to anything else on the system, while retaining ideas from both survival and Battle Royale genre titles. It might be a little slow for some but if you like the idea of the collect, build and fight plan then it may well be worth a download.
Vigor
Pros
- Interesting shelter mechanics
- Loads of upgrade options
- Solid shooter gameplay
Cons
- Upgrading can take a long time
- Routine may become boring for some
