Ether Vapor Remaster – Review
Ether Vapor Remaster is the remastered version of Ether Vapor with a better engine, higher resolution and more effects. Watch a trailer of Ether Vapor Remaster and the first thing you’ll notice are the tons of targets coming your way and the flashing effects they produce. This total chaos looks fun and challenging, but that’s not exactly how it feels when you play the game yourself.
Story
The game starts in Chaldea. Chaldea was once a small country specialized in the manufacturing of precision instruments. But the entire country went through a dramatic transformation caused by a groundbreaking development in artificial intelligence technology. Their focus switched to military technology and in no time, they expanded their influence and became the most powerful nation in the world. You play the game as Luca, a pilot of a single fighter craft trying to beat Chaldea.
The story is further explained during a few cutscenes, but why Luca wants to destroy Chaldea never becomes completely clear. On top of that some key elements get explained textually during the actual game. This is pretty strange because you have no time to read the text while you’re focusing on taking down the enemy. This way you miss some key information of the story.
Graphics
The game looks splendid for a low budget game. During the seven scenes of the game, you’ll find yourself between flashy blue or pink bullets and big firebeams but this is at the cost of playability. You’ll lose your craft more than once in the bunch of explosions resulting in unnecessary game overs. You’ll also get hit pretty often by bullets and enemies which were barely visible because they blend with the background way too often.
All together the graphics and its effects are pretty spectacular and animating, but it would have been better when they’ve paid some more attention on the consequences for the gameplay.
Sound
The music and sound effects in this game are the best this game has to offer. Catchy soundtracks varying from rock to electro fits perfectly in the game. The sound effects of weapons are great. Also the effect of hitting an enemy feels satisfactory, especially the sound when you’re overkilling an enemy.
Gameplay
In Ether Vapor Remaster you’ll fly your craft in varying perspectives: horizontal, vertical, behind the ship view and mixture of them all, 2.5D kind of. In each of them, you’ll have to defend yourself against a ton of enemies and some bosses in between them.
You’re able to use 3 types of weapons: “Gatling”, a concentrated forward attack, “Winder”, a wide-range, spread attack and “Lock-On”, a shot designed to target and attack individual enemy craft. Each of these weapons also have a charge attack. Gatling has the “Pierce” attack, which fires a powerful shot directly ahead. Winder has the “Radiate”, which throws up a shield around your craft, defending yourself from incoming targets. Last but not least, “Lock-on” has the “Cascade” attack, which fires a barrage of Lock-On shots at the target that explode on impact.
This variation of perspectives and weapons creates great fundamentals for the game, wouldn’t it be that everything else is poorly designed. Like mentioned in the graphics part, bullets and enemies will blend more then once with the background, making you almost defenseless if you didn’t study the whole level before. Add a lot of explosions on top of that and you’ll be regularly wondering where you ship is positioned on the screen. By the time you have found it again, you’ve lost several of your very few lives already. Luckily you receive more lives and credits after every game over to make the game a little easier.
Enemies are able to position below you, making you unable to target them directly with Gatling or Winder attacks. You can only target these enemies with the Lock-On weapon. This would be cool if it wasn’t nearly impossible to see whether the enemy is on your layer or below you. On top of that, they can change the layer they’re in while moving. This way you start shooting, stop shooting because they apparently aren’t on your layer and switch to your Lock-On weapon. By that time the enemy has escaped already or switched layer and smashes against you because you thought it was below you. Very frustrating.
To give you some time to breath in between the crazy difficult parts, they’ve added the Multi Lock-On mode. In this mode you won’t control your ship, but only a crosshair to target and lock-on incoming missiles. Once locked-on, they can be taken down by a single shot. It’s a cool idea, but these parts are just too easy compared to the difficulty of the regular parts. It just doesn’t feel to fit in the game, even when it’s just meant to give you a short break from the harder parts.
Conclusion
Sound and graphics are great for a low budget game. The game also has some good fundamentals to be fun, but too much time was spent on visuals and making everything as flashy as possible. This came at a huge cost for the playability. Blending enemies and bullets, weird design choices and having no idea what’s exactly going on on your screen will make this game pretty frustrating.
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