To leave the first game world of Forstral and move on to the next planet, you have to win a race from the Incubator (which looks just like an escave) to Podish (a bona fide escave) while carrying an eLeech (don't ask). All the action takes place from a top-down perspective as your mechos travels overland, burrows through the earth, drives underwater, and even hovers and flies.
To be fair, the terrain graphics in Vangers are some sweet eye candy. The ground can be permanently deformed by explosions, and you actually see the surface undulate as other mechos (and God knows what other things) burrow underground. But what good is all that when simply making your way from point A to point B lends itself to neither skillful driving nor exciting combat, and the vehicles handle like souped-up shopping carts?
There are no roads per se in Vangers, and because the surface is multitiered you can wind up driving along a lower level, completely unable to see your vehicle - particularly annoying should you run into another Vanger who decides to open fire on you. There's nothing like a combat-driving game where you can't see where you're driving or who to shoot, is there?
And that's not all. You'll expend a prodigious effort trying to extract your mechos from rivers, hilly terrain, strange buildings, and other places where you can get almost hopelessly ensnared - not to mention being continually forced to use your weapons to cut a path through all sorts of obstacles blocking your progress (these problems are reduced immensely once you earn enough beebs to purchase devices that'll let you hover). K-D Labs obviously created all the weird terminology for Vangers in an effort to make you feel as if you were part of an alien civilization; in practice, it means you're forced to read confusing descriptions for every object in the game. Why couldn't the manual put the phrase "rocket launcher" under "Spreettle System" or "plasma gun" under "ghOrb Gear," for instance, so that you'd know right away what they were without having to endure someone's attempt to be clever and witty? With words like nobool, eleepod, poponka, nymbos, cirtainer, and leepuringa (to name just a few), you wind up walking away from Vangers feeling as if you'd just played a game designed by Dr. Seuss in a hallucinatory stupor.
But let's forget the wacky words: Often you don't need to understand fully what they mean, and some folks might even like the style. Here's the deal - even though I dragged myself back to this thing for hour after hour, I never began to approach a level of fun that would make me want to fire it up for any reason other than to give it a fair shake. A lot of gamers have described Vangers as unlike anything they've played; that's because they paid too much attention to the weird language and didn't notice that fundamentally it's not much different from a dozen other games that put you in the cockpit of a heavily armed car of some type.
Vangers should thrill you with the excitement of vehicular combat while gradually advancing the admittedly unique plot; instead, it bores you to death with a confused story that takes too long to get off the ground and gameplay that would only impress someone who's never played a decent driving-and-shooting game before. Yes, you could easily spend dozens and dozens of hours playing Vangers - but all I can say is better you than me.
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