[i]Vendir is a turn-based, isometric RPG, set in a plague-ridden, medieval, strangely millennial world.[/i]
[h1]Flows[/h1] [list]
[*]You are pretty much given free reign on how you will build your party. Though the characters themselves are fixed (for a total of 4 by the end), you can assign their points as you like, including a skill tree that's genuinely interesting.
[*]Building combos with your party to maximize damage or your survivability is how the game is the main focus of Vendir. Each character will have a lot of skills available relatively early on, and choosing the correct ones per occasion makes or breaks the fight.
[*]Encumbrance is an interesting system, where, depending on the weight your character carries, they either get to fill their mana bars faster, or get more health, or a combination of the two.
[*]Plenty of puzzles, most of which are centered around finding password combinations. More on that later.
[*]The aesthetics intentionally bring Diablo to mind.
[*]Plenty of optional, brutal bosses and encounters, offering unique weapons and armor as rewards.
[*]The game is relatively (mercifully) short for a turn-based RPG.
[*]There are practically no consequences to losing. You immediately resurrect in the nearest town and have to pay a very meager amount of gold to heal. Travel distances are relatively short as well. I would complain that this cuts on the game's immersion, but that ship has already sailed, and considering how much bullsh!t the game throws at you without regarding the intended level of the area, I'm fine with such conveniences.[/list]
[h1]Flaws[/h1][list]
[*]There are lots of choices to make in the story, it's just that none of them have impact. Sure, maybe you'll get an NPC killed or spare them, but it doesn't actually matter. In the very same quest chain, no other characters will likely react to said NPC being alive or dead, and he will have no significance going forward. There is not even any hidden karma system, punishing you for being a complete psychopath (or just lazy).
[*]The millennial Marvel writing makes the game unplayable. Every single medieval peasant, monk, knight, doctor, etc. has to have some moronic joke or ironic quip built-in, or otherwise their plans are so irredeemably idiotic that you are just meant to shake your head. This [i]absolutely[/i] does not match the tone the dark 3D graphics suggest. On the one hand, the world is littered with corpses, mutated monsters, etc, on the other you have a village called "Shut Up Dad" that's going through a feminist gender cleansing because the men were lazy. I am not making this up, that's an actual event the very Swedish writers of the game came up with.
[*]And on that note, expect some small doses of liberalism in the millennial writing package. They are not too overt with it, most of the time, but it's definitely there.
[*]The game includes keyboard input only at the very start, when you first make your character. ALL the password puzzles require you to manually make a choice linked to a specific letter of the alphabet from the RPG-style dialogue tree. A tree which can only have 5 branches at a time. So as an example, "[i]1)previous letters 2)D 3)E 4)F 5)next letters[/i]". Imagine writing two whole words like that. And now imagine that you will have to brute-force a few of them. Have fun with that.
[*]Some quests do not have a tracker built-in on them, and the quest log is very poor in descriptions, so they are practically unsolvable.
[*]Some quests require you to dress up in very specific gear. Finding "where" you can get that gear from is anyone's guess, as, as we've said, the quest log is terrible. At one point right before the end I had to disguise myself as a knight, with 4 very specific pieces of equipment. I traveled around the whole map TWICE while inspecting the inventory of every merchant, looking for the right pieces of gear. And after roughly two hours of my life lost in that, our character gets caught immediately anyway and we just fight our way through. Piss off.
[*]As I neared the end I was just skipping dialogues, unable to bear any more Marvel humor in the otherwise depressing setting, so this might have been my fault, but things escalate really quickly. The whole game was building up to you storming the dead king's castle and exposing the imposters, but instead you just summon them in a random town you had visited earlier. After a pretty easy fight the credits started rolling, and I was just left with a "heh?" expression.
[*]What few enemy designs are in the game are great, but the emphasis is on the "few". You will be facing the same-looking abominable horrors again and again for 23 hours (and you will have seen all of them already by roughly hour 5).
[*]Gear is meant to be enhanced with gems. Gem availability is deceptively short (we're talking less than 25 or so in the whole game), which does not match how minor their bonuses are (we're talking +3 vitality and the like, when the basic piece of gear offers +60 vitality). Worse, once you enhance them into a piece of equipment, they are bonded with it. I suggest keeping all the gems you find until the end of the game, when you finally have the most optimal gear for each character. Sure would have been nice if the game had told me how finite gems are though.[/list]
[b]Thumbs down for purchase. Vendir has enjoyable, meaningful combat and character building, but the millennial, Marvel-styled, swedish-written story completely ruins your experience, paired with a severely lacking quest log.[/b]
