Vandals

I went into Vandals expecting a throwaway mobile port dressed up for PC, and what I found instead was a surprisingly tight turn-based puzzle game with more conceptual ambition than its two-hour runtime lets it fully explore. The core loop is clean: move one tile per turn across a grid, tag the designated wall, trigger a guard alert the moment you spray, then plot your escape before the converging patrol routes close in. Every action you take, whether whistling to redirect a guard, hurling a bottle to open a corridor, cutting a fence for a shortcut, or ducking down a manhole, moves all officers simultaneously on the next turn. That synchronised movement is the whole game, and figuring out how to chain distractions while pre-calculating the escape geometry is genuinely satisfying when it clicks. The five cities, Paris, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, and Sao Paulo, each represent a distinct era of street art history, and the developer made a deliberate design choice to let the local culture shape the mechanics. Sao Paulo features more vertical climbing routes to reflect how artists work those walls in real life. Scattered across levels are hidden postcards containing real historical context about graffiti pioneers like Blek Le Rat and Keith Haring. The educational layer is lightweight but earnest, and it gives the game a cultural texture you rarely see in this genre. Each level also ends with a freeform tagging tool where you draw your own piece using about ten colours and adjustable spray size, complete with realistic paint drip physics. It is a gimmick, but a charming one. Where the strategy-puzzle brain starts to groan is the three-star rating system. Stars are awarded for completing a level without being seen, finishing within a move-count limit, and collecting a bonus pickup, and you must earn all three in a single run to bank them. That is a respectable design choice, and the late-game levels genuinely demand careful mental planning to land a clean three-star run. The friction comes from the lack of an undo button. Miss a step near the end of a ten-move sequence and you restart from scratch. On PC with a mouse, that restart cost feels steeper than it does on a touchscreen, and the game's roots as a mobile title show in the occasional unresponsiveness of the input. The AI patrol patterns can also feel inconsistent until you have played enough to internalise the rules, which the tutorial does not fully explain. From a pure decision-depth standpoint, Vandals is closer to a logic puzzle book than a strategy game. There is no build variety, no branching progression system, no mod ecosystem, and the AI is scripted rather than adaptive. What it does offer is sixty well-constructed spatial puzzles with a coherent aesthetic identity, an electronic soundtrack that earns the headphone recommendation, and a respectful historical throughline that most games at this price point do not bother with. It is a lunch-break game, not a weekend game. Completionists chasing three stars on every level will squeeze more time out of it, but the average player will see credits in roughly two hours. One notable flag for Mac users: the game is not compatible with macOS Catalina or later, so check your OS version before buying.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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