I started playing video games in my early teenage years, and a genre that I became addicted to was opened world survival. Now, this wasn’t any ordinary opened world survival; it was the DayZ Mod. If you are an avid PC gamer like I used to be, you’ve heard of DayZ. DayZ consists of being a lost survivor in a post-apocalyptic world based in Chernarus. You can loot cities and towns, build bases and communities, fix up vehicles, and meet other survivors. DayZ was so special to me because you got to make your own journey; nothing held you back. Sadly, due to cheaters and developers shutting down most of the servers, DayZ Mod lost its popularity and player base. I have been looking for a replacement game for a while. Don’t get me wrong, the developers did make DayZ Standalone years ago, which is thriving. But, I wanted something similar and new. That’s when I ran into Vigor on the Xbox Store.
The best way to explain Vigor is to combine DayZ and Escape from Tarkov. Vigor is an online looter shooter game that is strictly PVP with no real survival elements like DayZ. To note, the same developers developed Vigor and DayZ, so they’re a lot of similarities. But, what did I think of Vigor? I think Vigor is off to an excellent start for a free-to-play shooter. It has excellent gunplay and PVP elements. It can become face-paced very quickly, so if you’re into something like that, give Vigor a try. But, like any other game, they have their flaws as well. First off, Vigor doesn’t have the most outstanding graphics for consoles. On the Nintendo Switch, it is just mainly pixels that you see, and the FPS drops a lot. Next, while the gun play is excellent, the character’s controls are pretty choppy and sometimes make you frustrated. But, even in DayZ, the controls were just like the ones in Vigor. Finally, I think that it can get repetitive very quickly. Unlike DayZ, you survived for as long as you wanted to. It could take weeks or even months until your character died. And it was always a new journey whenever you respawned. With Vigor, there are only three maps, and they put you into matches so you can loot and shoot other players. Vigor doesn’t have the same feelings as DayZ had.
Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate them bringing a game like Vigor to consoles and the Nintendo Switch. But, the biggest killer to any video games on consoles is the FPS. If you don’t have good FPS on your game, the community will die off quickly. I think they need to make some graphics and performance adjustments, and maybe this game can have a long shelf life.
