Vaporum Critic Reviews

Steampunk dungeon crawler located somewhere between Legend of Grimrock and BioShock - with some newly added options on consoles.

Vaporum with its console port again proves that retro grid style dungeon crawlers aren’t dead yet. It retains core pros of its genre, while masterfully putting the player into eerie steampunk environment.

Vaporum slaps a fun Steampunk skin on an old-school grid-based dungeon crawler, and the results are engaging and fun. With plenty of customization for players to dig into, numerous puzzles to solve, and winning real-time (but pause-able) combat, Vaporum hums along on all cylinders. Though the overly complex control system could be substantially streamlined, the charms of the game overcome the struggle to control it.

There are two things you need to know about Vaporum, first this is actually a great experience! second you need to overlook some issues to enjoy it completely, not a lot of games do what this game does, so why don't you give it a try, you may discover something you like more than you thought you will do.

As a full package, Vaporum is pretty great. A well polished and challenging dungeon crawler set within an exciting world. Although the controls can sometimes be a bit of a pain for the console editions, we see so few games in this genre today that the minor headaches are worth struggling through.

Vaporum is an interesting steampunk themed dungeon crawler that will draw inevitable comparisons to Bioshock, but that's no bad thing.

Vaporum offers an interesting take on dungeon crawling with a concept close to old-school pen-and-paper RPG. The controls on consoles, though, are pretty bad.

Fans of old-school, first-person dungeon crawlers will enjoy Vaporum for its homage to the older mechanics and restrictions that technical limits once placed on games. For the rest of us, Vaporum can feel like a cool concept and visual style straightjacketed by outmoded gameplay. Freed from the grid and with more standard camera and movement, Vaporum might seem more like a copycat game, but would be much more fun to play.

It isn’t normally my style of game but even I was hard pressed to put the controller down at times, some of those nights being work nights. If dungeon crawlers are your thing, buy this game, if steampunk is your thing, buy this game, if both are your thing, buy this game. At $30 rounded up it’s a pretty decent price, for a pretty decent game. Or, play it smart and wait for a Steam or PSN sale and it become absolutely worth it.

If Vaporum was more optimized for consoles then it would have been a must-play dungeon crawler. With that being said, it's still worthwhile if you're willing to adapt to its unintuitive controls and menus.

If you’re a steampunk aficionado then Vaporum will doubtless hold some appeal for you; it’s smartly presented and tells a tantalisingly haunting tale of man’s folly. But for those who aren’t as taken with steam power, Vaporum is a rather average dungeon crawler.