I’d say welcome to the VED, but the VED are not very happy with you. As Cyrus, our hero, you may not know it yet, but the guy who wielded your sword before you sure knew it. Don’t worry, this isn’t a major spoiler; the game literally opens by getting this out in the first two minutes.
VED is a turn-based adventure game with sword fights and fantasy. As you probably expect, there is a gaggle of game gadgets to collect, upgrade, and use in interesting ways to beat the baddies and win the day. A fair portion will be magical attacks, blessings, and healing spells. As you progress through the game, you can select and arrange the spells you have at your command.
Since the combat is turn-based, each small set of actions are available for a turn, then the next set of actions become available during your next turn.
One of the welcome elements of the story is that each decision point you encounter can change the consequential options and the way the story plays out for you. You can play the nice guy, or be a bit of a jerk; how you play the story determines what happens next. This lends the game to a good kind of replayability; it’s always fun to experiment with choices and watch all the “what ifs” play out.
The visuals in VED are manually drawn, so there isn’t a lot of walking around as with most CG games. To get from point A to point B, you get to teleport (the brief animations are well done and look good). While the hand drawn artwork limits how the game presents itself, the artwork has an interesting style and looks rather good.
The audio, however, is a mixed bag. The music and sound effects are OK, and the mix is well executed. The less than stellar portion is the script for the voice actors. The game wants to rely on storytelling, and the main characters, NPCs/enemies, environments, etc. are well developed. The script, however, has room for improvement. In many places (especially the set-up scenes at the beginning), listening to the dialogue sounds a bit like a middle school fantasy piece. It lacks the age appropriate maturity which the characters should have, and the delivery is packed full and delivered too quickly. Things slow down a bit, but the script and its performance never rise up to the game’s ambitions.
As for the combat, early in the game it is very easy to get yourself killed. Don’t worry, you can respawn and try the round again. Sometimes, a slightly different attack pattern can make the difference. Don’t discount the luck of the draw; each attack has a percent chance of either doing critical damage or missing altogether (and a couple misses can really harsh our hero’s day).
As you win encounters, you gain resources to build new structures and expand or improve your abilities. Wending your way through the story is central to the game, but there is plenty of resource management and levelling up so you can defeat bigger and badder adversaries. There is plenty to keep you busy for a while, but the combat itself is not all that thrilling because the animations are brief reactions between foes who are essentially standing there, facing each other, and trading attacks. The combatants don’t do much, but at least they look good not doing it.
VED has an intriguing (if a bit juvenile) story, some fun characters, cool artwork, and a moderately engaging combat system. There is good value for the price given the art, ease of play, and solid replayability. OK, but not great.
The post Review: VED (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.
