Vigor is a brand new survival game set in post-war Norway developed by Bohemia Interactive. We all know Bohemia Interactive from their long-running ARMA franchise which is a solid shooter set in various timelines. However, with Vigor, the developer has jumped in the territory of survival shooters and although the game’s idea is brilliant, it lacks in certain departments in certain departments. Vigor is an Xbox One exclusive title and this is our review of the game.
Starting with the concept, Vigor is much like DayZ and PUBG combined but without any zombies and you get a safe location where you can upgrade and manage your own safe house. The game is set in a post-war Norway where the radiation still lingers but most of the areas are clean from radiation and in these areas, you must venture and try to find as many supplies as possible so that you can ultimately build and upgrade your own shed.
Your safe house or shed is a safe location and unlike DayZ, where enemy players can get inside your constructions, you are in solo in Vigor and you can chill as much as you like here. This is your permanent residence in Vigor which comes with its own shooting range, a charity box, and options to build tons of facilities to help you gather food, materials, and crowns on a regular basis which is the in-game currency.
Your upgrades not only provide you with resources but they also make you better such as certain safe house upgrades will make your crafting more efficient and other upgrades like the generator will allow you to have more than 1 upgrades in process at the same time. As you continue to build facilities and upgrade them, you level up your shelter which ultimately makes it better in look. However, the level upgrades are only aesthetic and they make your shelter into a pretty little estate at the end when all the facilities are in place.
Before going out to explore, you can craft ammo, weapons, and supplies at your shelter using the crafting table which can be upgraded further to unlock new weapons. While you can find weapons in the wild too but you cannot craft their ammo or the weapon themselves until you find their plans and level up your crafting table enough. Also, all your build facilities keep refilling after a certain time so you can visit them regularly to collect all the materials, crowns and food that they have gathered.
When you are ready to head out, you can go inside the shelter and use the whiteboard to select a location and find a match to join in. This is where Vigor stands apart from games like DayZ. There is no open-world here. Your Shelter is a small closed map while all other locations that you can go to and explore for supplies and killing other players are also medium to large-sized maps. After selecting a location, the game will search for a party, match you up with other players and let you loose on the map.
Before the game starts, you can spend crowns to purchase certain boosters such as the Insurance which ensures that you bring back home all the supplies and loot even if you die and the Better Loot which gives you better loot in the matches. If you want to skip them, you can. They are not required for every match. Once all players are ready and matched up, the game starts and you are now on your own. Also, you can jump in a Solo or Team-Based match depending on your mood.
Vigor plays out like any other survival game. The tactics are the same here. You must explore the map and collect as much loot as possible by exploring the map’s different locations and sites. As you continue to explore the map, you will encounter more players on the map which will be hostile so it will up to you whether you want to engage them or avoid them. The game gives you the freedom that you can jump in a game, loot a few areas and leave even before the match officially ends.
There are no penalties here for leaving the game early. If you have raided a few sites and want to head back with your loot, you can simply head to an extraction point and leave the area before the match ends officially. The main goal of any match in Vigor is to survive long enough until the drop arrives on the map. After some time has passed during a match, a plane will fly over the map and drop a massive box of supplies on a random location.
As soon as the drop lands on the ground, players must head to this drop and collect it. Whoever collects it first, becomes the target of all other players on the map. I never got to the drop first but I managed to kill the players carrying the loot quite a few times and then escape with the loot. After picking up the loot, the ultimate goal is to leave the area as soon as possible because a special timer also initiates after which a radiation cloud will sweep the area killing everyone.
You cannot simply just pick up the drop and hide somewhere because of this very mechanic and I think it is a very good mechanic. This encourages the players to be always on the move instead of just sitting at one place and camping to kill all the others and then moving to the exit. With the small timer active, everyone will be looking forward to escaping the area with their loot because even if players were unable to get to the main drop, they still collected some loot from random locations around the map.
Players exiting the match with their loot get to keep the loot and use it upgrade their shelters while players who die and do not have insurance, they lose all their loot and must play another game to gather all the loot again. During the matches, a certain part of the map will be a radiation zone which will be dangerous to players and any player who ventures there will die of radiation if their health reaches zero. This is the main crux of Vigor and some of the key mechanics that set it apart from the rest of the pack.
Visually, Vigor is a striker and the maps are gorgeous to look at. At this point, there are six different maps in the game to explore and collect supplies while surviving the action. Each of the map is unique, beautifully designed and comes with its own unique challenges for players to overcome. The maps are not very big nor very small. They are of average size and offers plenty of opportunities for players to try out different combat tactics such as ambushing other players or luring them off hills to their certain death.
However, Vigor comes with some really bad problems and one of them is the weak combat. At this point, the gunplay is very weak and you will most of the times end up spraying bullets everywhere except at your enemies. The crosshair is very big making shooting even a bigger problem. While crouched or in the prone position, it becomes better when in moving and standing up postures, shooting is a nightmare. I hope it gets patched up in the future because of the poor shooting mechanics, I’ve seen many players online simply avoiding gunfights and making mad dashes towards the final drop and then sneaking their way around enemies to reach the exit.
Apart from the poor shooting mechanics, the servers take too long to find matches. Once a match has been found and the game begins, it is a real breeze from there but the initial wait times to find a game averaged around 3 to 4 minutes for me in high traffic times such as night and evenings on weekends. Apart from these two problems, I found Vigor to be a strong contender in the survival shooter genre and it can certainly give DayZ, PUGB or any other survival shooter a run for its money.
Final Verdict
Vigor is a free-to-play title which means that it will rely on microtransactions for revenue and long term support. At its release, Vigor seems to be in a really good and stable position overall however for me, the gunplay mechanics need some working on an urgent basis to make the shooting more accessible for everyone. Not everyone crouches or lays down to shoot every time an enemy is in the sight. The shelter upgrades are a nice addition to the overall survival formula however the long server waits might be off-putting for most players out there. Vigor is not perfect in its current state but it is a lot better than most games in their launch phase. Considering the fact that it is a free-to-play game, it deserves to be on your playlist.
Final Score: 7.5/10
