Vandgels: A Flawed Fantasy? Weighing the Pros and Cons of an Open-World Adventure

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Vandgels is an open-world fantasy adventure game. Its mainly focused on beautiful sceneries and exploration. But it have some significant issues. Lets find out how good it is.

PROS

1. Fantastic Scenery

Vandgels have great graphics, specifically for the mobile devices. It have water reflections, something alike ray tracing, so when you look at the sun you can see beautiful effects. Overall the world around you looks great, but somewhy characters look very outdated.

2. Some good story twists

As you progress the story in Vandgels you will get some very unexpected story turns, that actually surprised me. Somewhere around 2 hours into the game story begins to unfold and become interesting to read and follow.

CONS

1. Too much walking around

I understand that Vandgels is an adventure game, but most quests just make you run around from one point to another and back. You can run, fly, mount, skate and hover around. It feels it was made to make the game artificially longer. This leads to it feeling boring and lacking the actual gameplay.

2. Story takes too long to unfold

Because of the first con, it takes about 1.5 hours into the game full of running around to start getting interesting story twists. Sadly by this point into the game I was bored to death and could barely continue. But yes, at some point game intrigued me and I wanted to know what will happen next.

3. Poorly made combat

I was surprised that there is combat in Vandgels, since I got my weapon only after 1 hour into the game. Well fighting is pretty boring, you just mash the attack button and can hold it for some sort of ultimate attack. But you win every fight anyway. Moreover in 2.5 hours of gameplay I had about 4 or 5 fights overall, so it could be replaced with cutscenes easily.

Conclusion. Is Vandgels Good?

No.

Vandgels have a promising graphical engine, but it falls apart to the amount of unnecessary running around. If game would unfold its story faster, and make all the content I've seen in 2.5 hours fit in 20 minutes it might be a nice game, since the plot is actually interesting. Combat and technical issues are still there to make your experience worse and they need to be addressed as well.

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Comments

Protopop

This is some very insightful feedback - thanks. Im amazed you got all of this gifs from the game, and I have to say this is my first time on TapTap and im surprised to find all of this about one of my games. thanks for taking an interest in it. yeah I see it about the slow start. I think it was less streamable than Nimian Legends BrightRidge because the initial pacing is so slow, so not very many people know about Vandgels. But I'm glad you appreciate the twists. This was my second open world game and I wanted to tell a story about religion that took different sides into account and I hope I achieved that. I made it at night on my couch with no funds really and that contributed to all of the rough edges. Im just glad people play it and im still kind of amazed that people do. I just updated it with a few quality of life changes like improved controls (the 2.0 version which I think is the one you tried) and I have learned a lot since I made this game - I started back in 2016 or so - and currently I work on a game called Wilderless. And I would like to remake Vandgels with more modern characters and better pacing too. Anyways thank you for the insight and I have to say someone said TapTap was a good place to share games and I was so shocked to see this, it was a. nice way to get to know this site.

04/25/2023

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