Vendetta Forever Review (Meta Quest 3)
Summary: Vendetta Forever is a unique VR experience in which each enemy is delicately placed and each level is set like a chessboard. The cinematic action and wild variety of scenarios and possibilities encourages arcade veterans to replay each level to get the perfect score and utmost equilibrium between muscle memory and strategic thinking.
3.9
A shooter with brains!
VR gaming space is not the place to search for genre-defining moments. Yet, once in a while, you can come across a game that makes you wonder. A good example of that is Pistol Whip and its action-packed musical shooting experience or Superhot VR’s entanglement of the flow of time and movement. nDreams’ latest title Vendetta Forever blends the best of these two games and brings greatly re-playable and breathtaking moments to VR gaming.
Vendetta Forever is an arcade shooter. That said, there are no stories here! Just arcade-style shooting and pure joy; albeit with a good dose of thinking. Players can wield melee and ranged weapons and use them to deal with a number of pretty well-placed enemies. Up to this point, everything is simple and just like other VR shooters. But as soon as the player eliminates an enemy, he drops his weapon and the world enters into a bullet time phase so that the player can aim for the weapon midair and reach for it. This is how the players can move in Vendetta Forever. Reaching for an enemy’s weapon will instantly teleport the player to that location. Thus begins a game of strategy and lightning-fast reflexes.
The whole point of the game is to eliminate enemies as quickly as possible while avoiding damage as well as hitting a dead-end. Vendetta Forever is not a Spray n’ Pray kind of shooter. On the contrary, shooting here is like a game of chess in which players should calculate their path to the next corridor or room by prioritizing which target to shoot first and which one to leave for the last. Otherwise, you end up standing in a room full of dead enemies without a way out.
Adding a variety of levels, weapons, enemy types, and scenarios to this seemingly basic gameplay loop turns Vendetta Forever into an action game that pushes your brain and reflexes to their limits. For example, one of the very first levels of the game takes place in a pirate ship and thus the player can only use flintlocks as weapons. That means one shot, one kill, and quick reflexes to get the enemy’s gun before it hits the ground! To make the situation more complicated, the pirate captain is standing on the higher deck and can only be accessed if players take care of pirates in a well-calculated order while avoiding their bullets. There are levels with hostages that need to be rescued or enemies wearing armor that need more than one shot to be eliminated as well as lots of different or even weird weapons including a pencil!
Compared to nDreams’ previous title Synapse which was a story-driven roguelike shooter with lots of gameplay mechanics and skills to unlock, Vendetta Forever is too simplistic and feels like a step backward. But this game addresses one of the biggest issues in VR gaming which is character movement. Those who played VR games know that continuous character movement in VR games causes motion sickness for lots of people and adding gunplay and action to that just intensifies the problem. Some of the most popular VR games either completely avoid character movement -e.g. Beat Saber– or use a slow-paced automatic Rail Shooter kind of movement -e.g. Pistol Whip– to tackle this issue. But Vendetta Forever turns this challenge into an opportunity and uses movement as a puzzle mechanism in an action game, adding more depth and replayability to an arcade title; thus, hitting two birds with one stone.
Vendetta Forever is a unique VR experience in which each enemy is delicately placed and each level is set like a chessboard. The cinematic action and wild variety of scenarios and possibilities encourages arcade veterans to replay each level to get the perfect score and utmost equilibrium between muscle memory and strategic thinking. It’s a shooter with brains!
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