ASSAULT RIG VAPORUM SERIES

Or so I thought before this bulky customer showed up. The BioShock comparison is really only skin-deep. Teller quickly finds herself trapped by the sudden disaster and works to find a way off the island. Lockdown is set between his departure and return (thus technically a prequel) and follows a new character: Ellie Teller, an idealistic post-grad prodigy poached by Lora Rike, the facility's head scientist and wife of Marcus, to work on her team's inchoate teleportation technology division. The first game follows Marcus Rike, the director of the facility who was called back to government HQ to answer for some unorthodox experiments performed under his watch, as he returns to find Arx Vaporum in complete pandemonium and fights his way through legions of hostile creatures to uncover the truth of what happened and rescue any survivors. The Arx Vaporum is a towering state-of-the-art research facility built on a remote island close to something called the 'fumium core': an underwater depository of an unknown mineral that has proven very adaptive to the current era's steam-powered technology. The story of Vaporum: Lockdown is straightforward enough, though it might require some familiarity with the first game.

Vaporum also happened to be one of my favorites in a very packed year of instant classics, so I've been itching to play this 2020 follow-up for some time. It's some BioShock by way of Legend of Grimrock, if you were looking for the reductive elevator pitch. A steampunk-themed, first-person, single-character dungeon-crawler with real-time combat and movement and an emphasis on using weapons and cooldown-based gadgets to defeat a bunch of mutated drones and lab rats all hopped up on some uncanny alien substance fished up from the bottom of the ocean by now-dead scientists and engineers who should've known better. Vaporum: Lockdown is a sequel (or prequel, or interquel, or something) of 2017's Vaporum by Slovakian studio Fatbot Games, which I covered a couple of years back ( IGotW #155).

ASSAULT RIG VAPORUM SERIES

Prepare all your best Xbox Series X hardware jokes because we're gonna get vaporous this week.

Assault rig vaporum