Steampunk dungeon crawler Vaporum slashes out this month
Grim rocks
Grid-based dungeon crawler Vaporum [official site] first blipped our radar in 2015 when the team were looking for funding, and now the steampunk RPG is all shined up and ready to go. You can get your finger-less gloves on it on 28 September.
The team at Fatbot Games say they were partly inspired by the Legend of Grimrock games, and it's hard not to draw comparisons. Both are good-looking first person dungeon crawlers with a real-time combat system that sees you skip between squares as you try to bring your enemies down. But where Grimrock had ogres and angry crabs, Vaporum has flamethrower-wielding robots and mechanical spiders.
You'll be solving some simple puzzles but the meat of the game will be its combat and customisation. You control a lone character wearing an exo-rig that you plug gadgets into to access new attack types or buff certain attributes. You can remove or replace these gadgets at any time to give on-the-fly changes.
The premise is a bit bland: you're stranded on a small island with a giant mechanical tower, and you have to delve in and uncover its secrets. But I like the look of the rest of it. The environments are suitably moody and the enemies seem like they would be fun to fight. As you can see in the trailer below you'll be battling multiple foes at once, which could lead to some tense moments. Plus, I was a fan of the Grimrock games so I know the grid-based stuff works for me.
