Vandals

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Game Details

Title: Vandals
Developer: Novelab
Publisher: ARTE Experience
Website: http://novelab.net/en/project/vandals/
Genre: Adventure, Action, Puzzle
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Audience: 3
Release Date: 25/04/2019
Price: £4.09 – Rapid Reviews UK were very kindly provided with a review code for this title.

What The Developers say

Vandals is an infiltration game that will transport you to the most emblematic cities of street art. In this turn-based game, the aim is to sneak around police surveillance and spray walls that grow harder and harder to access.

From Paris to Tokyo, via São Paulo, Berlin and New York, follow in the wake of ultra-famous street artists like Blek Le Rat and Keith Haring.

With Vandals, you can bomb your alias on the walls of New York like Lady Pink, paint childlike characters like Keith Haring, or get inspired by the poems of Miss. Tic and write your own.

https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Vandals-1542653.html

Introduction

Have you ever had that urge to go out with a spray can and break the law, with some very lax policing going on? No, me neither, if you have, please call 101 now thank you. So I threw on my baggy hoodie and my baseball cap and dived into this world of Vandals.

Starting back in 1960, you travel through and discover this evolving world of wall art in this Vandals Switch Review.

Audio & Visual

Vandals audio is a little lax there is not much to it, plain simple noise. The Snoring of a police officer to the stumped ‘huh?’ when they can not find the Vandal. There is shattering glass a whistle and a most important aspect realistic spray can noise.

The game is not here to wow the player with its outstanding audio. The audio is there for an audio cue to distract the police to be distracted. Along with the cue that the Vandals need to move.

Visually the game adopts an isometric top-down perspective. With a dark back ally, low-poly art style. Along with faithful recreations of classic artwork.

While playing Vandals, it is possible to make your own artwork by use of the touch screen. I tended to draw the Joker from Batman…Not sure what that says about me. Are you not feeling arty? Not to worry, the game asked for a nickname, this can be a tag also.

Gameplay & Replayability

The gameplay is simple enough to pick up and play. It’s a turned based puzzler. There is a marked root with nodes, and it is only possible to move one node per turn, then the police can move one node. Throughout any given level, there will be walls to hide behind or passages to take that will take the Vandal to the other side of the map.

The main objectives are to avoid the police, tag the marked wall and get out of the map without getting caught. With each level, the difficulty grows, and police will have new movement patterns or different ways of detecting the Vandals. The difficulty grew at a steady pace and was not unfair.

There is an aspect of replayability in Vandals, with the quick speed at which some levels can be completed and the load time is tiny. There is no real wait to play a level. Also, each of the 60 levels has three objectives to pass to get stars. They are completing the level unseen, collecting the stars and finishing within a set amount of steps. Getting the allocated amount of stars will open up a secret level.

There are also 40 pictures giving the history of the evolving world of this artwork. I found these to be rather interesting. These are worth collecting.

Conclusion

Vandals does what it needs to do, nothing more and nothing less. It is a puzzle game that starts simple and gets progressively harder as the levels go on. If you get caught, it does not feel cheap; it is all down to how the play planned out their moves.

Rapid Reviews UK Rating

You can purchase Vandals from the Nintendo eShop on the following link, https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Vandals-1542653.html