Vultures – Scavengers of Death PC Review
Summary: An interesting amalgamation of two genres not commonly seen together, that, despite some bugs, does a great job of evoking the past while still feeling modern.
3.9
Tense!
As someone who is getting uncomfortably close to 40, I spent many of my formative years glued to the original PlayStation and, as such, have quite a lot of nostalgia for the era, and more specifically, the presentation quirks that came as a result of the limited hardware.
It seems as though I’m not alone in this regard, either. There’s been quite a renaissance as of late, with many games mimicking the style of Sony’s 32-bit game-changer. This is where Vultures – Scavengers of Death comes in, a love letter to the survival horror games of the PS1 era.
Team Vultures has gone through a lot of effort to get the low-poly, low-resolution visuals, looking like they’re straight out of the 90s. Unlike survival horror games of the time, though, Vultures is 3D rather than relying on pre-rendered backgrounds. There is a reason for this, however. Rather than being a straightforward survival horror game, it’s an interesting hybrid of that and turn-based tactics akin to XCOM and the Jagged Alliance series.
It’s an interesting combination that I wasn’t sure would work at first, but Vultures mostly pulls off merging the two genres.
Gameplay is split into two sections, namely, navigating the world and combat encounters. The former plays out like a typical survival horror game. You hunt for keys, solve puzzles, and generally follow most of the tropes of the genre. Where this aspect stands out, however, is in its execution. Vultures is more like a point-and-click adventure game in this area. Characters aren’t directly controlled, rather moved around by clicking on the area of ground that you want them to move to, clicking on items and points of interest to interact with them.
This sounds like a substantial change to the typical survival horror experience, but in practice, it works just as well. The perspective of each area has to change somewhat to take this form of traversal into account, but beyond that, it functions more or less as you’d expect.
Combat, as mentioned before, takes place XCOM-style. Approaching enemies will trigger the encounter to start, locking the player into a turn-based system, where all actions, from moving to shooting and reloading, have a cost, with only a limited number of actions being possible per turn.
Classic survival horror titles often took advantage of the technical limitations of their platforms to create tense, claustrophobic environments, often with fixed camera angles to further up the atmosphere. The shift in perspective and control style moves away from this somewhat; however, the tension is kept high by knowing that once you’re in combat, every decision counts.
Resources are very limited, enemies can easily overwhelm, and it’s incredibly easy to get bogged down and stalled out, especially in the early game. Encounters can be escaped, but that usually requires moving beyond the enemies in an area (who can interrupt you as you pass!), getting to a door, and passing into another room. It’s not a risk-free strategy, and anything you don’t dispatch is going to be waiting for the next time you come through.
It’s surprisingly effective.
From a presentation standpoint, Vultures is a gorgeous, low-poly, pixelated, love-letter to the titles that so obviously inspired it, complete with (occasionally janky) simple animations, and voice acting that can be charitably described as a homage to the English translation of Resident Evil.
Where things fall a little, however, is in the technicals. I encountered a substantial number of bugs during my time with Vultures. Everything from resolutions being incorrectly set, a soft-lock in the tutorial, to weird animation and sound errors, and gameplay mechanics just not working properly. To Team Vultures’ credit, they’re diligently updating the game, and many of the issues I faced have since been resolved, but the game still feels like it needs a little more polish.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, Vultures – Scavengers of Death is an interesting merge of turn-based tactical combat and classic survival horror. It evokes a bygone period in gaming that hits the nostalgic part of my brain just right, despite having little to do with that era mechanically.
Despite the bugs, the occasional jankiness, and the frustrating difficulty spikes (the first mission is easily the hardest in the game), there’s a very fun game here. The visuals won’t be for everyone, but anyone with even a passing interest in the genres that Team Vultures has Frankensteined together should check this out.
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