Vagante review

Indie games, I love indie games… Indie games for me always experiment with creative ideas, passion, and enthusiasm. You can literally feel the hours poured into producing the game you are playing. blood, sweat and tears, you feel it all, packed into an original adventure into the gaming world of the creator.

Don’t get me wrong, triple A games are great, but they often lack originality as their so-called new ideas tend to stem from a tried and tested approach, indie developers. Indie developers are not afraid to try new ideas, tactics in games to draw you in and capture your hearts and the hours you devote to there creation. Whilst Indie developers may lack the sheer muscle power of a fully funded backed studio, they more then make up for it in ideas, brains, and often story telling.

Vagante is an action-packed rogue-like platformer set in a dark fantasy world filled with monsters, demons, and crooks. It features permanent death and procedurally generated levels. Despite these dangers, adventurers commonly travel these unforgiving lands questing for fame, riches, and power. Vagante can be played co-operatively with friends both locally and online, it also offers a single player mode too.

Vagante is published by Blitworks, and developed by Nuke Nine, and harnesses five years of development work to make a tough but fair rogue-lite pixelart platformer/ Choose your hero, go alone or join up to three other friends locally or online and venture into dark dungeons full of threats and fierce bosses.

Nuke Nine’s delightful action-packed platformer is clearly influenced by Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS), and Spelunky. The deep and meaningful character choices, a breadth of combat mechanics, as well as the streamlined balance of the genre of rogue-likes finds its way into Vagante in perfect fashion. The inclusion of God shrines, and the collectible Rune orbs found in the game are a thing of beauty in the Vagante’s branch areas.

Spelunky influence is strong, the founders of Nuke Nine use to play Spelunky classic for hours on end, even trying their hand at speedrunning at times. Parts of Vagante include player platforming mechanics, angry shopkeepers and the existence of intermissions between each floor.

Vagante’s development path led the game onto PC via steam through a successful Kickstarter project, and since its release in 2014, the game has been widely acclaimed, with more then 3,000 player reviews on steam, 90% of them positive. The Vagante community has been on a journey and now finds itself in the world of Xbox via Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S respectively.

Vagante is a very challenging class-based roguelike with emphasis on combat, the art style uses desaturated but warm colors with a bit of a gritty style, influenced by titles like Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre and Vagrant Story. In the search for an insurmountable treasure, players can join up to 3 other friends locally or online, and face the dangerous dungeons inhabited by fierce creatures and bosses.

The quality of the game and the organic growth in the number of players caught the attention of BlitWorks (which has previous experience working on other roguelites with online multiplayer, such as Spelunky 2 and Heroes of Hammerwatch: Ultimate Edition) to port and publish the game to consoles, thus enabling many new players to discover the fascinating world of Vagante.

Vagante presents a world full of unexplored and mysterious areas, wandering adventurers seeking to chart out new zones and investigate strange dungeons and dark ruins.

Vagante’s hero is one such adventurer, joining a caravan to investigate the mystery behind a deep cave filled with monsters and treasure. With all the influences in Vagante I’ve left out a couple until now, and you wouldn’t be surprised if you have played the game, to know that two of the larger influences for the game’s setting include Diablo and the Castlevania series. The dark mood and lighting used to create the games stunning atmosphere is heavily influenced by Diablo, while many of Vagante’s enemies take inspiration from the Castlevania bestiary.  One of the boss designs in Vagante, Chimera, is quite clearly a reinvention of Castlevania’s Manticore.

The Roguelike mechanics are where the game excels. Vagante offers a consistent playing experience in between its playthroughs like a roguelike, but with added aspects of replayabiltiy and modern progression. Vagante does this brilliantly, combining and creating a system which allows the player to unlock new classes and backdrops, thus adding variety to the game, enticing a player’s attention for longer.

Other games in Vagante’s class offer in-game mechanics where the world and game get’s easier to navigate, offering permanent upgrades over time, but this where Vagante truly shines and offers a back to form classic roguelike experience, putting players skill to the forefront, rather than progression factors, such as power ups and skill’s you may obtain.

Vagante offers choice – for each playthrough of Vagante, the player choses a class and a background. Classes dictate the archetype of your character, while backgrounds are further specialisations or modifiers to your character. For example, the Mage class could choose to start with the Heirloom background, granting them a magical ring passed down by their family. After each run, you accumulate a certain number of progression points which unlock new backgrounds or classes. In addition, some backgrounds can only be unlocked by completing certain feats in-game.

Even though nothing persists between each run, your experience changes due to your knowledge and skills improving over time.

Vagante is not for the faint hearted, you will die and die quite a bit at first, but with each death, offers a chance to learn and enhance your knowledge and skillset, which means whenever you triumph over the game you feel like you truly deserve it.

Whilst the game does offer a random feel when producing levels and maps to explore, you do get the sense that although the game is hard as nails, it does it’s best to stay fair. The key teaching from all of this, is fundamentally clear. Those that are willing to learn from their mistakes in the game, are those that are going to get the most enjoyment from Vagante’s cleverly created world. Ultimately the game although appears tough, crafts you into a better player all-round, not just in Vagante, but the next one you play too.

Game Features

• Support for up-to 4 players Local and Online Co-op – Join your friends and jump into the adventure!
• Class-based, Choose How You Play – Choose a unique class, skin, and background, then customize your character further as you play with your choice of unique class skills at each level.
• Procedurally Generated Dungeons – With procedurally generated levels, no two runs are ever the same, allowing for countless hours of gameplay.
• Permadeath and permanent specializations unlock system – As players progress further in the adventure, they will count with a broader range of playstyles, their characters won’t be technically stronger but instead their experience and learnings will make their skills improve over time.
• Enchanted Items – Discover magic items that bestow powerful enchantments and game changing abilities.
• Discover Secrets – Keep track of unlocked classes, backgrounds, music, and more in the Book of Secrets.
• Explore a Rich World – Explore four unique areas each with their own set of dangers such as monsters, unique bosses, and traps.
• Tough, but Fair – Play a game designed for players looking for a challenging but rewarding experience.

Overall, Vagante is a breath of fresh air, it gets the gameplay values just about right, capturing the players heart, set the hook at the right angle, before reeling them in with some classic rogue-like, all action platforming. Whilst the game offers a quite a degree of difficulty, it teaches you skills to combat it’s very challenging nature. There’s a lot of placed value on combat for sure, but it offers an element of exploration, as well as a extremely risky and reward system that’s maybe a little harsh at times, but the biggest thing which is true to life, you will learn from your mistakes.

One thing is for sure, you will be making the right choice playing this game. It works better with others, but that’s not to say you cannot enjoy the game on your own too.