I got the opportunity to participate in the closed beta of Vroom Kaboom. You read that right, Vroom Kaboom combines a few genres to be an unique strategy game. But was it a success or do they struggle to find their own identity? Here are a few thoughts I had after playing the closed beta.
What is Vroom Kaboom?
Developer: Ratloop Games Canada
A “Tower Rush with Vehicles”, this game combines elements from collectible card games, tower defense and multiplayer online battles. Build a deck of vehicles and deploy them into battle against other players online. It ends in destruction.”
– Steam Page
I’ve played tons of different games on my phone or tablet, where I use cards and points to deploy different kinds of units onto the battlefield. And Vroom Kaboom isn’t that different, yet still is. During my play sessions on my phone everything happens automatically, after deployment everything fights on their own. In Vroom Kaboom we get the opportunity to deploy on different lanes and also gets the opportunity to manually change lanes after deployment. Each vehicle has their own ability as well, such as ramming, jumping, boosting, and shooting.
There is huge potential in Vroom Kaboom by combining these genres, but it might be that I’m stupid or I can’t simply get the hang of it, but the difficulty and the of details in the tutorial lowers the experience a lot. Don’t read me wrong, there is a small tutorial in the game, but it lacks smaller details. I struggled to find out what to do, what my goal was and information about my abilities. After an hour or so figuring out what to do etc I headed out to try the missions.
Even though I managed to complete a few missions, I can’t say that I felt like I’d accomplished anything. I did get a few rewards such as new cards (units – vehicles) for my collection, such as we do in Blizzard’s Hearthstone.
The idea is there, but in my opinion they do have a lot of smaller things to improve. The game needs a fresher reward system, more details into the tutorial such as tips and tricks. I won’t talk about network or server stability as I’m not sure if the server was up during the closed beta. I wasn’t able to connect to a single online match during my time with the beta.
Vroom Kaboom launches 29, May 2018 on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation VR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift
