Vecitas

I'll be straight with you: my first instinct when I pulled up Vecitas was to check the player count, and that told me everything I needed to know before I even launched it. This is a top-down, twin-stick-inspired space shooter built around online PvP, released back in April 2017 by a small indie studio out of Argentina. The bones are clear enough: you shoot ships, collect XP, and work your way through eight spaceship upgrade tiers, each tier handing you a new weapon with its own stats for power, cooldown, cost, and reach. On paper that's a functional progression loop. In practice, the whole thing depends on other humans being online, and that's where Vecitas has a serious problem. The singleplayer mode exists as a feeder system. You hunt enemy ships to earn their hulls as cosmetic skins, which you then carry into multiplayer. It's a reasonable design decision for a low-budget title: give solo players something to do while the multiplayer population (hopefully) grows. The problem is the multiplayer population never grew. With only a handful of Steam reviews ever recorded, finding an active lobby in 2025 is a long shot at best. The p2p protocol was reportedly overhauled during beta, which shows the developer was paying attention to netcode, but you can't fix latency on a server that nobody joins. The twin-stick inspiration is apparent in how the movement and firing feel: you're maneuvering in open space, managing your plasma reserve while trading shots with opponents or AI. The weapon tier system does give you something to chase. Each upgrade is genuinely distinct, with cooldown and reach values that change how you play rather than just inflating a damage number. That's a more thoughtful design than plenty of bigger releases bother with. But there's no ranked mode, no structured matchmaking, no real meta to engage with beyond the eight-tier ladder. For a shooter specialist, the ceiling is low. Controller support was a community request that apparently went unresolved, which matters for a game explicitly inspired by twin-stick shooters. Playing something designed around dual-stick input on keyboard and mouse is friction you shouldn't have to accept. The system requirements are light (an i3 and 1GB GPU gets you in), so hardware is never the barrier. The barrier is population, and in 2025 there's no honest way to pretend otherwise. Vecitas reads like a student project that hit Steam before the multiplayer had critical mass. The upgrade loop has merit, the weapon differentiation shows genuine design thought, and the singleplayer skin-hunt gives you a reason to stay in between sessions. But a PvP-first shooter with no active player base is functionally a singleplayer game with a lobby screen attached. If you're hunting a retro arcade space shooter to play solo, there are better-supported options. If you want online PvP in this genre, look elsewhere. Fred, Scout Team