Vorp feels like it could have been released 10 years ago. We don’t mean that in a bad way at all; rather, it’s an indication of how far this sort of team-based space battler has come over the last decade – that is, not very far at all. The moment you jump into Vorp, it feels sort of familiar and safe, and for this reason the game never really reaches lofty heights.
Vorp feels like it could have been released 10 years ago. We don’t mean that in a bad way at all; rather, it’s an indication of how far this sort of team-based space battler has come over the last decade – that is, not very far at all. The moment you jump into Vorp, it feels sort of familiar and safe, and for this reason the game never really reaches lofty heights.
Having said that, Vorp is an entertaining game that had us blasting players online for hours. It has a sort of depth that isn’t so obvious at first, but gradually exposes itself. If you can grab some friends and jump online, you’ll no doubt have a ton of fun.
You are the commander of an armada spaceship, and your capital ship is under attack. By working alongside your fellow commanders (or otherwise), you need to rip the enemy ship apart piece by piece, and then destroy its core right at the back of the map.
Everyone starts at level 1, and as you make kills and collect atoms that are dropping in the level, you’ll level up and be afforded better guns and general upgrades. However, the higher your level, the longer you’ll be forced to wait between respawns when you die.
Vorp feels rather random and all over the place when you first play. Everyone is usually in the middle blasting rockets at each other, or peeling off to the side and trying to have a crack at shield emitter here, or a turret there. Destroying these allows you to move further into the enemy ship and reach the core, although you’ll need to whittle your opponent’s shields down before you can lay into that sucker.
There are plenty of interesting ideas thrown into the mix. For example, you have a single energy bar that acts as your health, your weapon energy, and your boost energy, meaning that you have to watch out that you don’t use up too much energy before you get into battle, otherwise you’ll most likely die instantly.
As you play through the game and level up your overall Commander rank, you’re also afforded special operations and tech modules to tack onto your ship, giving you an advantage over other players (although balancing procedures make sure that it’s rare for players to have hugely unfair advantages over others).
Vorp is good fun, but nothing hugely special. We enjoyed bombing around and clicking on enemies, but after a while it all gets rather samey, and there isn’t really a huge amount of tactical play to it.
This may be due to the fact that a lot of players don’t really appear to know what they’re doing. At one point we were able to move all the way to the back of the enemy’s base and start taking out their core, and no one even came to stop us as the opposition wasn’t exactly sure of what was going on.
This may have to do with how the gameplay is taught. A tutorial video at the start is hugely long and dull, and we quit out of it before the end, as we just wanted to get into it. Then there’s a long “How to Play” page that you really need to read. Vorp is a title that truly needs a real tutorial, as from what we saw, there’s a fair number of players that don’t know what they’re doing at all.
It’s also notable that games can be rather long in length, and can become pretty tedious by the end. One game in particular lasted nearly 30 minutes, and long before the end came, our minds had wandered to other, more interesting things.
Vorp is free-to-play in a browser, and you should definitely give it a try, especially if you enjoy team games online. Just be aware that you really do need to read over the tutorial material thoroughly before play, and that it’s not going to blow your socks off at any point.
