Vultures - Scavengers of Death Review

Vultures - Scavengers of Death is an interesting game. At its core, it’s a survival horror, but it blends the resource-intensive horror with a tactical RPG combat loop to varying degrees of success. I’m a pretty big survival horror fan, but tactical RPGs are a genre that I have often really wanted to enjoy, but despite trying a fair few, I’ve never been fully invested.

The story of Vultures is one I didn’t really care for. It’s tropey and a little bland, but it equally matches the classic PlayStation aesthetic the game is going for. A mysterious virus breaks out, causing a zombie apocalypse, which seemingly is orchestrated intentionally by a powerful corporation known as Eugenesys. We find out early on that there’s a cult involved, too, which is the primary way Vultures diverts from the atypical “evil corporation” cliché, but it didn’t draw me in too much. Unfortunately, this ties into the writing too. By no means is it bad, but it’s unremarkable, and this leads to most of the story and character interactions being simply boring.

The aforementioned aesthetic, though, is really damn good. While it falls into a common trap of being a modern game that looks like a PlayStation game, but clearly isn’t, it does a great job of hitting many of the same notes. The visual design, combined with the very solid sound design, leads to a palpable atmosphere. It’s what initially drew me to the game, and it’s what made me stick around, despite the issues I had.

The combat is where things get messy. I want to preface this by saying that, at its very core, it’s not bad. Despite that, there are a lot of awkward design decisions and an unfortunate amount of bugs that began to break the combat wide open, for better and for worse.

Combat is grid-based, and you have a multitude of options, from different weapons to movement, healing and positional manipulation, such as pushing enemies around. Weapons each have utility, and due to the survival horror aspect, ammo is limited, so smart usage of them is important. You’re also restricted by AP and MP: Action Points and Movement Points, respectively. MP is for any movement-related action, while AP constitutes everything else, from attacking to reloading and healing.

Managing these resources in combat is important, but only really in groups. Fighting singular enemies often feels like mindless resource dumps (outside of special enemies and bosses), instead of interesting encounters. Enemies can be perfectly stunlocked by repeatedly pushing them into objects, stunning them and stopping any chance of retaliation, which takes them from being a bullet repository to being nothing noteworthy at all.

Despite this, there are a lot of moments that feel really damn good. The ability to the grid positioning of explosive barrels and enemies, along with the existence of traps which can be used to your advantage makes the combat have these very interesting moments where an entire room can be solved in an instant.

Occasionally, combat can be avoided, but avoidance as an option is fundamentally broken in some aspects. The level design is punishing and can make running from combat equivalent to suicide. Due to the grid-locked movement, some enemies can be physically unavoidable, leading to forced combat encounters, oftentimes in rooms that are mandatory to traverse. Leaving these rooms during combat to reorient yourself or attempt to find more ammo and resources will lead you to a very quick problem: enemies crowd around the door you exited through, and will engage in combat as soon as you enter, even getting the first turn, leading to completely unavoidable damage scenarios, and incredibly bad positioning. It feels like punishment for playing the game like a survival horror title, rather than a tactical RPG, which is frustrating.

There are two playable characters, Amber and Leopoldo, who have some differences in tools, but nothing super distinct. The main difference is Amber has a grappling hook, and Leopoldo has the ability to vault over some objects. This most notably alters the level design in Amber’s stages to allow for some more creative uses of the grappling hook both in and out of combat, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter how you’ll play the game.

The combat had some janky aspects too; during my early time with Vultures I was concerned due to a pretty heavy presence of bugs and general stiffness, but I can say for certain that a lot of this has been smoothed out. While it’s not perfect, the improvements during the run up to launch have been very notable.

Vultures - Scavengers of Death is a game that’s drowning in potential, but has a few issues that stop it from really reaching the heights I think it’s capable of, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy my time here.