GDC 2015 hits record attendance with 26,000

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - March 10, 2015

Develop GDC announced that more than 26,000 games industry professionals were in San Francisco for last week's Game Developers Conference hitting an all time record high. GDC 2015 announced some big news with Epic Games and Unreal Engine 4 becoming free to all, and Unity 5 launching. In addition Vale announced their Source 2 engine. Valve hit the virtual reality scene with HTC Vive, and Project Morpheus release some updates, and AM

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Blizzards Overwatch address female diversity

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - March 09, 2015

Ever since Blizzards FPS: Overwatch was announced we've been on the edge of our seats watching the awesome cinematic and arguing over who looks coolest. One issue was raised where it was observed that female characters lacked coverage of all roles. Blizzard has answered with Zarya. Announced at PAX East 2015, Zarya, is a Russian soldier who is one of "world's strongest women.": We've been hearing a lot o

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Valve announce Steam Machine details

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - March 06, 2015

Valve's have announced their new Steam machines, designed in taking PC gaming into the living room and will cost as little as $460 (£302). The Steam Machines have been detailed on the Steam website, and shows multiple suppliers from Alienware, Asus, Gigabyte, Origin, Zotac and more (up to 15).  Does Steam and their design of living room boxes appeal to the average gamer? Will this re-introduce living ro

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Battlefield 4 - Mega patch improvements!

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - March 03, 2015

DICE has released a huge mega patch today, with updates to Battlefield 4 to make the multiplayer experience stellar. Improvements to the netcode have been a welcome bit of news with new game modes, improvements to spawning, combat, health, new graphic updates and ui changes. You can check out the full blog announcment in the battlelog, where you can read all about the PC, Xbox and PS updates.    

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3DRealms is back with Bombshell

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - March 03, 2015

From the creators of Rise of the Triads, Duke Nukem and Max Payne, comes Bombshell, an isometric action role-playing game for PC and consoles. Bomb disposal technician turned mercenary for hire, Shelly "Bombshell" Harrison must strong-arm her way across 4 planets in an Unreal Engine-powered galactic adventure to rescue the president from an apocalyptic alien threat.  The trailer (available on youtube) reminds me of Alien

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We Happy Few, new crazy indie title.

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 27, 2015

Compulsion games have announced their title: We Happy Few, a game they've been developing since early 2014. With a very special theme and artwork the game feels freaky and I'm eager to get more information! We Happy Few will be at PAX East 2015 with a playable "build" for anyone to have a go. Check out the trailer here, its crazy, awesome and I cannot wait to get my hands on it!

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Warhammer 40,000 announce their PC MOBA

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 26, 2015

Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 is at it again, Whitebox Interactive announce their latest game devloping Warhammer 40k: Dark Nexus Arena. Stated to have the heroes such as Space Marines, Orks, and the Tau in an assortment of four vs four player battles. Other races such as the Sisters of Battle, Dark Eldar, Eldar, and Chaos Space Marines will be added in the fullness of time. It is interesting to note the four vs four bat

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GTAV Heists releasing March 10th

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 25, 2015

Rockstar Games announced two updates yesterday with a date of March 10th for Online Heists and another delay for the eagerly awaited PC version to be released April 14th. Online Heists We are excited to announce that the launch of Heists for GTA Online is scheduled for March 10th. We know it’s been a wait, and appreciate your patience. Heists will bring a brand new 4-player cooperative gameplay experience to GTA Online, giving pl

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Steam now has over 125 million active accounts

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 24, 2015

Steam released a press release with the Steam VR.  GDC 2015 will mark the 13th anniversary of Valve's first public announcement of Steam, which has since become the leading platform for PC, Mac, and Linux games and software.  In the last year, Steam added new services and features - including In-Home Streaming, Broadcasting, Music, and user created stores - as it grew to over 125 million active accounts worldwide.  S

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Updates and Fixes

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 23, 2015

Hello all, Thank you for your continued support, reports and emails about errors, bugs and features. We take everything on board and strive to build the best service for all.  We've been busy this last week fixing some glaring bugs involving: Landing page game art. Landing page graphical bugs fixed and load speed improved. Game Library now pulls games correctly. Footer layout bugs fixed. Subscription displaying incorr

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UK's first dedicated eSports arena: The Gfinity Arena revealed

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 20, 2015

Next month the UK gets its first dedicated eSports Arena at the Vue Cinema, Fulham Broadway London. Within the Vue Cinema, the Gfinity Arena hosts three custom-built stages with capacity to house over 600 gaming fanatics, offering the comfiest seats found in eSports. Get your tickets through the Vue website when they go on sale, and what a better place to take your special someone on a special date. eSports Arena to watch our f

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GamersGate celebrate 10th Anniversary

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 19, 2015

GamersGate are celebrating 10 years of trading with exclusive 48 hours deals. You can pick up Valkyria Chronicles, Company of Heroes 2, Defiance, and Tom Clancy's games for 50-75% off. We always like to see successful gaming ventures last a while, and we'd like to salute GamersGate for 10 years of -as they call it- awesomeness. Some cracking games ideal for co-op play, and some amazing rpgs.

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Grow Home patched

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 18, 2015

Grow Home has been one of those games that slips easily under your radar. You play as BUD (Botanical Utility Droid), a robot on a mission to save his home planet by harvesting the seeds of a giant alien plant. Sure, sounds a little... dry, but it's a great 3D platformer with charm, and taste. With the latest update: Some rare flora and fauna has been recently detected on the alien planet. M.O.M has a new side quest for B.U.D to inv

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New Colorblind Support in WoW Patch 6.1

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 17, 2015

World of Warcraft patch 6.1 has revealed that you’ll find a new user interface system that we’ve designed to assist players who have common visual issues related to colorblindness. In the new ‘Accessibility’ interface configuration section, you’ll be able to enable both text and color enhancements that may improve your visual experience while playing WoW. ‘Enable UI Colorblind Mode’ (which was pre

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ESL reveals biggest UK tournament for CS:GO and LoL

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 16, 2015

The ESL UK Premiership, the company's largest tournament since 2010, has been announced today for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends players to win £12,000. The tournaments will be spread over two months of online brackets to culminate in an offline finals at London MCM Comic Con over the 22-24 May weekend, in front of an expected 110,000 spectators. The first qualifiers are scheduled to begin on 23 February. Y

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Silly Stereotypes that Surround Gamers

Posted By: Melissa - February 15, 2015

When I opened my eyes the other morning to a pounding headache and an empty bed, I was instantly in a grumpy mood. Jordan had been out of bed for a couple hours, from what I could hear, his cough was getting worse. Now, I feared I was in the virus’ sights. Thoughts of having an excuse to make chicken soup would usually at least make me a little happy, but today would be a long day with no extra bandwidth. Sitting up, my fears were confirmed

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Why Super Mario 3D World might quite possibly saved my love life.

Posted By: Lacey - February 15, 2015

My husband doesn’t get me. I’ve known this… I’m a complicated stress ball of a woman and at times a bit demanding. Like any woman I appreciate romantic gestures or thoughtful gifts. Which is why last Christmas when my husband gifted me with a Wii U I was honestly a little confused. Please don’t get me wrong I knew how great of a gift it was! But I don’t game… I should have kept my confusion to myself

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GamerDating Launch

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 15, 2015

GamerDating has launched, congratulations and welcome to GamerDating.  To get started fill in your profile to reflect you, the person behind the screen. Hang up your gaming persona, because here we are all gaming fanatics, but we are people! Once you've finished filling in your profile (and remember the more detail, the more success), search the matching system for like minded people. If you like the look of someone, get in touc

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Why you need a picture

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 15, 2015

Yes, you will need to upload a picture of real-life you. Because you are awesome. Because you are beautiful. Because real people have real faces. Because relationships happen between people, not avatars. We created GamerDating.com with one goal in mind: to help gamers find other gamers to love them in game and out. To achieve this goal, we feel it is important that our community be made up not of anonymous avatars, but the amazing

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Ian's Story Part 1 - Success of Online Dating

Posted By: Ian - February 15, 2015

Hello, My name is Ian, and happily married to my wife Anne, whom I met through online dating. If you had of asked me some five or six years ago about online dating I may have scoffed at the idea and said it was for either sleazy men and desperate old women. However, times have changed and I now believe it to be one of the best ways to meat like minded individuals and some genuinely nice people. I've never been one for night clubs and

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Vaporum: Lockdown Review - Steampunk Dungeon Crawler

Posted By: Ryan - October 26, 2020

Game

Dark, grimy and constricting, take a break from all of the problems of real life in this polished dungeon-crawler.

All joking aside, the rather well-timed, in the UK at least, release of Vaporum: Lockdown proves there is still life in the niche dungeon-crawling genre.

Eschewing the usual confines of the dungeons from which the genre gets its name, Vaporum: Lockdown is a prequel to 2017’s Vaporum and, as such, requires no previous knowledge of the series. Where other dungeon-crawlers may have you exploring dark stone tunnels or crypts full of undead monsters, Vaporum: Lockdown instead embraces the steampunk aesthetic and has you explore a warren of tiled, pipelined corridors where the bloom of electric lighting reflects from almost every surface to some degree. Visually, this game is a delight to look at and draws immediate comparisons with Bioshock.

Loading Screens of Vaporum

I think Hydroponics, with its white aesthetic, was my favourite area to explore.

Level elements are clearly distinguished (once upping the brightness on my monitor, at least) and the creature design is spot on; whether it is mutated rats, errant drones or twisted test-subjects, there is something to delight any fan of gorgeously-modelled NPCs. Everything that you are intended to see is distinct, eye-catching and well-rendered. The numerous hidden switches, puzzle hints and breakable walls on the other hand are not, and will require some careful exploration on your part if you want to a) progress at certain points or b) find everything Vaporum: Lockdown has to offer. The eye for detail presented here is impressive and each different level of the tower you are trapped in during the titular lockdown is visually distinct, whilst also retaining enough unifying elements to construct a believably connected ‘dungeon’.

It is a shame, therefore, that this attention to detail didn’t carry over to the sound design. At best, I would describe it as serviceable, at worst as headache-inducing or distracting. The music is atmospheric, full of danger and warning, whilst the ambient sounds are layered in such a way that you will generally be able to hear, and identify, any NPCs approaching you before they become a problem. With the exception of some sound effects, the audio is good but ultimately not memorable. Believe me when I say that those effects that have stayed with me, have stayed with me for the wrong reasons.

Something about the sound used for fire hits just the wrong pitch and lingers in the ear far longer than it ought, resulting in several puzzles that left me with a headache entirely from the audio effects alone. Several of the traps found throughout also made use of similar headache-inducing sounds that, admittedly, did encourage me to solve the puzzle/pass through the area as swiftly as I could. I should, however, point out that I do have sensitive ears and am prone to sound-related discomfort, and that the game does have a decent audio slider system for tweaking it to your preferences; I just couldn’t find a balance that prevented the headache.

Vaporum Review

This is the one exception to my enjoyment of this game’s visuals. It’s a nightmare to play through this section.

Fortunately, the sound design was the one low-point of the user experience for me. The UI itself is wonderfully minimalist, allowing me to fully immerse myself in the world and check things like health, ammunition or remaining energy only when I wanted to. It’s also easily readable, both in terms of glancing at it for the pertinent information as well as in terms of font size, something that is customisable via the in-game options. You can also turn things like headbob on and off and, for those hardcore veterans of the genre, the game even lets you play without the map, meaning you’ll have to make your own as you go, as in the days of yore. I… well, I didn’t do this and found myself using the in-game map a lot. Fortunately, it’s easy to read, lets you check things on other floors with a couple of clicks and, most importantly, allows you to add a note if you encounter a puzzle you want to return to later.

Believe me, you will be returning to places. If you don’t like backtracking in video games, you might want to stay away from this one as there is a liberal amount of it. I have mixed feelings about the backtracking on display here; on the one hand, the narrative has been constructed such that it feels organic and justified (in a vaguely metroidvania way) but on the other hand, the player character doesn’t move quickly, it’s easy to get lost if you aren’t checking the map after every room and, if you’ve passed through an area more times than the plot expects, there is an eerie emptiness to the dark chambers. Enemies will only reappear when the game requires you to backtrack and you can usually tell if you’ll encounter something on your way back through environmental clues.

Vaporum and the inventory

Look at all those numbers!

It is, of course, impossible to talk about enemies in a video game without talking about the combat in said game. Combat here is simple, if tactically challenging at higher difficulty levels. As this a grid-based dungeon-crawler, you can attack in, and be attacked from, four directions by enemies that follow the grid as you must. This produces a predictable movement pattern that, combined with easy to read animations, can be exploited when facing small numbers of enemies. The actual mechanics of fighting for survival are tied to weapon stats.

Each has a cooldown that affects all your weapons (so no switching out to refresh cooldowns), as well as a range (displayed in tiles), ammunition or energy cost (for ranged weapons) and, of course, a damage number. Throughout my exploration I found many weapons with additional abilities (typically these would apply an elemental effect for increased enemy cooldowns, decreased damage taken or damage over time, for example) and I would highly recommend taking the time to find these weapons and the armour pieces scattered throughout the world. This is definitely a game for people who like to tinker with stats; my build revolved around dealing extra damage based on missing health and lowering the damage output of enemies, for example.

Character progression is tied mostly to gathering fumium, a rare element being used in experiments taking place in the facility the game is set in. Fumium is generally gained from defeating enemies but I found a rifle that gave me a small amount of it whenever I hit an enemy and items are hidden throughout that permanently increase one of your base stats. Whenever you reach a certain amount of fumium, you gain a circuit with which to upgrade your exorig (your armour). The whole system is simple and clean, each rank you put into a skill gives you a bonus, until you max out that skill. Fortunately, I realised that the last rank is a choice of two options that you will only be able to make once (meaning you’ll only be able to gain the benefit of one of the two perks) before I clicked accept, but that should be something to bear in mind on your own playthrough.

Rig Choice

At the start of the game, you are required to choose your base armour. This will affect the rest of your gameplay in minor ways.

Story progression is tied, as far as I could tell, exclusively to map progression and not character level, and is pretty well done, if not terribly original. It won’t take long to realise that it’s based on experimenting with something that shouldn’t be experimented with, and is delivered through first person cutscenes (with some pretty good voice acting and camera direction), as well as through notes and audio diaries scattered around the environment (some of which you’ll have to hunt for if you want the full picture). Each is well written and brings the author to life, letting you get a feel for the disparate personalities trapped in the tower before things went south, and some provide clues about certain enemies or puzzle solutions. Even better, however, is the ability to re-read/listen to them at will, although you do need to know which in-game character wrote the entry to make sense of the game’s indexing. Overall, though, the writing brings this small slice of steampunk, morally-grey science to life pretty well.

Button Puzzle or puzzle choice?

You won’t find any overt solutions to the puzzles here, all I can recommend is pay close attention to the environment and read the notes you find carefully.

I’m happy to say that I didn’t encounter any bugs during my time with Vaporum: Lockdown, none that I noticed anyway. The main things that I felt could do with more polish were the puzzles, but this might be something that is a genre-staple, and not specific to this game. With the limitations, and simple mechanics, of the genre, the puzzles here are little more than push buttons in the right sequence, push blocks around, or time your dash between traps perfectly. Occasionally, pressure plates are involved (these come in two varieties: one you can weigh down with anything and on that you have stand on/weigh down with a block) but the complexity here largely comes down to the length of time it takes to solve a puzzle. Having figured out the solution to a puzzle in the latter half of the game (complete with note-taking), I reloaded a save to try it again and, even with the solution, it still took over five minutes for me to solve. This is also where the headache came from; one puzzle involves three flame turrets and the cacophony from all three was such that I decided to skip it after twenty minutes of both button pushing and block moving.

All that said, Vaporum: Lockdown is currently £14.99 on Steam and I feel that’s a good price. Depending on your desire to find everything the game has, it’ll likely take you around 10–15 hours (I’m not getting any more specific than that for my playtime), possibly more if you are intent on finding the myriad secrets yourself. The puzzles are, mostly, entertaining to think through and the world itself is a treat to explore and learn about through the environmental clues of hidden diaries and propaganda posters plastered everywhere.

Poster

Each area has its own spin on propaganda and they’re usually worth checking out.

Would I recommend this game? Sure, there is enough imaginative world-building, well-delivered lore and beautiful environments that I would, but with the caveat that it is slow-paced, requires a lot of backtracking and does feel a little padded towards the end. It is also probably not for you if you want puzzles that take only a few minutes to solve.

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