I have to praise developers for trying to do something different with a stagnant genre. The tower defense shtick is old and tired, something that was relegated to free mobile games ages ago. So, when Ratloop Games Canada released Vroom Kaboom I was pretty interested in what their take would be.
Unfortunately, problems arose right out of the gate with the confusing way the game was marketed. Steam comments are littered with users having no idea what Vroom Kaboom is, even after playing it. This isn’t a driving game, yet you drive cars. This isn’t a tower defense game, yet you do try and blow up towers.
I love when people try new things but when that new thing becomes so convoluted that it doesn’t make much sense, you’ve screwed the pooch. There is so much going on here that the developers missed out on one of the most basic tenants of making a video game -make it fun.
Vroom Kaboom tasks you (and a teammate(s) if you want) in selecting all sort of Twisted Metal inspired vehicles from a deck that you build, which means that there’s also a little bit of Hearthstone here just to make things even more complicated. During a match you select vehicle cards via earned points as they are drawn and you send that vehicle to go kaboom on the enemy towers.
That part of the equation makes sense and would make for a great little mobile experience, but it’s not very deep or as strategic as the game claims. To address this Vroom Kaboom lets you control each vehicle as they work their way toward the enemies towers. An interesting idea to be sure, but one that complicates the game even more.
You control these vehicles, but you don’t drive them per-say. Each vehicle has an ability attached that you can use to jump, quickly shift lanes, fire guns and so on which is fun, and you’ll have favorites, but it’s the driving part that kills the experience. To move about the track you use the mouse click. This sucks and makes it much harder to enjoy the most interesting part of the game.
And you’ll want to drive as you can collect point and the like that will allow you to do things like earn scrap and draw cards faster as each card has a point requirement to play. You can also take on or avoid enemy vehicles better than your A.I. can. Again, so much is going on, but each part never really feels like a fully fleshed out experience.
As all this in going on the enemy team is also sending their vehicles toward your towers. The jumping between cars is a great idea, but more often than not its better to just send you cars without touching them out of frustration. When you are driving you won’t be doing anything else which means driving too much will hurt you in the end.
One simply can’t keep up with everything going on in the game. The micromanagement doesn’t make the experience more fun, rather, it makes it feel like work. You are fighting against the game and when you factor in the mouse clicking to drive you’ll just want to pull your hair out.
Graphically the game looks fine; just fine. The game features a number of locations to play but each track feels pretty similar. There isn’t a whole lot of diversity and the whole experience feels a lot more like a tech demo for a final product than an actual complete game.
But all that said, Vroom Kaboom does work, just not as a traditional PC game. You see, the game and all its features make a lot more sense when you are doing them in VR. That said, I don’t have a VR device and had no idea the game was built for it, and since you can play this without it that’s how I’m reviewing it.
Playing the game like a normal PC experience just isn’t all that fun because much of the time you won’t know what you’re doing as the game does a really poor job of explaining its own mechanics. There’s also no real campaign or reason for all this madness, and the online multiplayer works, but who knows for how long as the user base is pretty small.
If the controls were better and we had some reason for all the destruction then Vroom Kaboom could be a fun little experience, but that isn’t the case. You’ll spend your time fighting against A.I. for the time being so not having a story or mission that feel rewarding means your time with the game will be a short one.
There is a lot about Vroom Kaboom that could really work with some tweaking. The selection of vehicles is fantastic and it does go a long way to inject life into the world of tower defense, but with so many disparate ideas fighting for dominance none every feels full realized.
But not everything is bad as the game is free to play on Steam. If the idea of Vroom Kaboom peaks your interest then there’s no harm in checking it out. If you do manage to like the experience , and there are a fair amount of people that do, you can drop $20 for the premium version.
Final Score:
2/5
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