Vilde review – Great Guns Can’t Overcome The Issues

Vilde, as an absolute base explanation, is completely all over the place. Honestly, it’s one of its more charming qualities. It is a manic pixie dream girl in video game form, if you are into that sort of thing. Starting, you think you are going to have a clear idea of what to expect. Gun in hand and waves of enemies that need to be mowed down by any means necessary, simple enough. Bullet Hell would be the term that comes to mind right away, and there are so many elements that are straight bullet hell, frantic. This is right up until the game decides that, in fact, it does not want to be that, and suddenly you feel out of sorts and out of place. In terms of Manic Pixie, this isn’t Romana Flowers, but not quite Sam from Garden State either, and it’s subjective how long being quirky can go from cute to grating, but you will get there eventually.

The game has about two minutes of story set-up that, let’s be frank, you will forget almost immediately after, but the story serves as a tool for endless death loops, not something to be invested in particularly. The brunt of the game is rushing through Roguelike levels that are designed to be randomly generated as you play, but serve as linear paths through individual levels, rather than choosing a room to move onto or having a hub you can traverse at leisure, a la Returnal. While doing this, you are fighting enemies to what I can only describe as Norse synth rock. In fairness, it’s more Norwegian folk rock, but each song has a background beat that sounds like what you imagine Thor might twerk to in his dance club of the gods. The music is enjoyable but repetitive, and more variety would have been welcome, but it’s not like this negatively impacts the experience overall.

Music serves as a bright spot in the combat experience, which goes from fun to anything, to engaging, to outrageous in the blink of an eye. As stated, the player uses a gun, or at least starts with one, but there is a large swath of weapons you can acquire, including a lot of melee weapons. This is where it gets weird because the game structurally has two types of enemies. They are melee and ranged, which isn’t odd, but what it feels like is that one type is designed to run straight at you, while the other exists just to prevent you from standing in place and just mowing them down. This puts forces on what is usually a fast-paced movement-based genre to have brief moments of this, juxtaposed with moments of headshotting enemies that have decided to conveniently get into a single file line to be fodder for your bullets.

There is also the level design, which, as stated above, is linear and is also far too tight to properly allow for the ducking and weaving that the game clearly expects. The first level, for instance, has several parts that are literal hallways with draugrs charging you with melee weapons at the read while AOE fireballs are being dropped at you. You have a rapid dodge, but as it is impacted by objects, the number of times I ate three or four hits on a bad dodge since the hall was too small to get around the charging enemies is baffling. You’re stuck in place on two falling fireballs and right in front of a slash with little more to do but back off and clear space one bullet at a time. The game has more open space areas, but even they can have odd design choices, like a camp surrounded by a wooden fence in the center, breaking up a big area into, get this, several small hallways to traverse.

This can be compounded by the game’s design, making even the more open levels hard to traverse as well. Players have a double jump, but most platforms that actually require you to use this to reach them are on the upper threshold of this radius, forcing you to almost fight them. Rocks and the like can also serve as extremely sticky textures that your character gets stuck on all the time, either unable to move from incoming attacks, or just having to spin the controls until you are able to break yourself free and keep moving, which is about as annoying as it sounds, which serves as another flow break. Enemies tend to fall into basic types, with even progression seeing you dodge the same types of enemies just in different forms, but Vilde does manage to mix it up enough to keep it fresh. A difficulty slider you unlock later on should create a new enough challenge if you find yourself enjoying the runs enough to keep going back after completion, though I can say that I did.

Each area is capped off with a boss battle, and unfortunately, they proved to easy to be a milestone to really feel like the proper send-off the stage needs. They also exemplify some of my least favorite aspects of the game. Far too often, off-screen damage feels like the go-to to get you. The first boss, for instance, has a move that uses trees in the area to send out shockwaves and hit you. Is it hard to dodge? No, but if you are attacking the boss, you really can’t see these attacks, so you have to stop what you’re doing, look, then return. Or, you might just walk into damage cause you just can’t see it. This is an aspect in pretty much every stage. The second boss does a similar thing, spitting fireballs that stay on the ground and chase you for a while, making it hard to shoot at a boss you need to look up at.

All of this fighting, though, is done with an insanely cool roster of weapons to do so. Guns fall into several elemental types, each mixing up combat with a style of ammo and element effect they can inflict. Seriously, there is a Jack in the Box-type object that fires pins that bounce off of walls. There is a market for purchasing weapons as well as a level-up function, beyond just earning them as rewards after areas, but annoyingly, these can have high purchase costs that take a long time to finally earn even just one. You find them enough on the pathway to not need to backtrack, but that is an option to backtrack if you need to, and finally have enough, but on a few rounds it wasn’t till mid area two I earned enough to buy one. Standard leveling is another story, your character is another story, usually earning enough for a level or two in one run. It is a concise but impactful menu to do so, with each level earned absolutely having a positive impact on your next run.

Audio design in Vilde is the biggest stumbling block in the overall experience that can actually impact gameplay. For starters, most guns have light noises that feel off-putting, but this becomes way more noticeable when firing, say, a rocket launcher that barely has a noise, and you question if it actually hit despite clearly seeing it did. Enemies can make almost no noise running and attacking, meaning I got blindsided a lot from behind by people I never even heard coming, which is very frustrating. When this is the thing that ends a run, you feel it directly in your souls. This is offset by jingles, such as a noise for completing an area, which is bizarrely loud by comparison.

Verdict

My first few runs across Vilde and its absurd Norse-inspired setting and combat were enjoyable. There were issues, but my hope was that the enjoyment would win out in the end. This was not to be. With each run, the noticeable issues became more and more so the longer it went on, souring everything in the process. Great guns feel handicapped in tight and congested hallways. Fast-paced combat feels uninspired when you constantly bring it to a halt through either intentional or unintentional design, and all of this funnels you into bosses that aren’t as rewarding as the fights to get to them. The roguelike genre is crowded these days, and while there are things that you could recommend here, not enough compared to its contemporaries.

Remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Bluesky to keep up to date on everything we have going on!