Review by: Chris Robertson
Twitter: SouthernGamer
Website: www.SouthernGamer.net
Do you hate scrolling to the last paragraph of most reviews in order to quickly grasp whether or not you might enjoy the game in question? If so, I’ll make this one fairly quick and straight-forward for you instead. Veks and Silence, an Xbox Live Indie game, shares a lot in common with old-school games like Contra and Metal Slug. If you happen to like games like that, then I strongly suggest you play one of them instead.
Still here? Okay then, let me elaborate.
Veks and Silence is, as you may have guessed from the previous comparisons, a side-scrolling shoot-em-up based in a world overrun with zombies, robots, aliens… and, of course, sharks with butterfly wings. You control Silence — one-half of the titular combo, though you likely won’t discover that until halfway through the game when Veks is suddenly mentioned for the first time, but still not revealed for several more levels. Therein lies one of my biggest complaints — the lack of any sort of cohesive story. There are short semi-animated cut-scenes in-between each level, but they do little to provide any motivation for Silence’s bag-headed mayhem.
The game is broken into thirteen levels that offer increasingly difficult enemies and terrain. Silence is equipped with four weapons: a pistol which is fairly weak but fires rapidly, a shotgun that shoots four projectiles in a fan pattern, a laser-sighted sniper rifle that is powerful but slow, and finally a gatling gun that, while devastating in strength, is rendered almost useless since you can’t move and shoot at the same time. Unfortunately, the game never truly challenges you to switch weapons for different combat scenarios, and can be blasted through fairly simply by using only the pistol. Silence can also lob bombs, but they have such a small area-of-effect as to be almost useless. Aside from the myriad of small enemies that serve as cannon-fodder in most levels, you’ll occasionally encounter bosses that prove to be remarkably more difficult. This difficulty, however, does not lie in complicated pattern-recognition, puzzling weak points or any other conventional boss-fighting-tactic, but instead comes down to lousy hit-detection and poor in-game communication of what tactic you should use.
The art also does little to propel the game forward, varying in levels of apparent completeness, with some looking like they were contracted out to a five-year-old and others almost resembling a decent coloring book you might find crammed in back shelf of a magazine rack. This isn’t to say that the game is completely displeasing on an aesthetic level though, as some of the stages’ backgrounds look quite good. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the game’s enemies and explosion effects, with those falling back into the eye-bleeding former category. The sound effects and music are serviceable, but you’ll also likely tire of Silence’s not-so-silent insane cackle after every other trigger-pull.
In short, Veks and Silence is a somewhat competent “old-school” shooter that could have used several more passes of polish, both on its art and gameplay mechanics, and I can only truly recommend it to someone who just can’t get enough of the genre and has exhausted every other option.
This review is based on a copy of the game provided by the developer to SideQuesting.
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