VHOLUME

Momentum is the entire ruleset here, and my first hour was mostly spent unlearning shooter habits. I kept halting to look at things, which in this game is roughly the equivalent of dropping your gun mid-fight. The city only opens up when you hold speed, and every ledge, railing and concrete overhang becomes a decision you commit to about a second and a half before you reach it. Once that clicked, VHOLUME stopped being an art piece I was strolling through and turned into a route-finding problem I was solving at pace. That shift is the whole pitch. If it never lands for you, you will bounce off this in twenty minutes and write it off as pretentious. Structurally, what you are doing is paperwork. One task, one office, one clerk who sends you somewhere else, and the dystopian brutalist sprawl in between is the actual level design. The melancholy is not decoration either. The architecture is grey, oppressive and deliberately unhelpful, and the joy comes from the friction between how miserable the errand is and how good it feels to cross a plaza in four movements instead of forty. Nathan Grange and IronEqual clearly understood that a parkour game lives or dies on readability, and the environments telegraph what is climbable without slapping yellow paint on it. Launch week reception has been near-unanimous across several hundred Steam reviews, and having played it, I get why. This is a small game that knows exactly what it is. The part I care about, and the part most write-ups will skim, is what happens once other people are involved. Do not come in expecting deathmatch. The competitive side runs on the same movement system, so it stands entirely on netcode quality and population. Bodies moving this fast punish any interpolation slop, and if the servers hold up, watching a better player take a line you did not know existed is genuinely the best teaching tool in the game. Workshop support is the other half of that equation. Community routes and maps are what keep a movement game breathing past month two, and this one shipped with the door open, which is the right call. Play it on mouse and keyboard if you can. Controller support is there and it is competent, but micro-adjusting a landing with a stick is a handicap you do not need. A high refresh display matters more than usual here, purely because your reaction window is measured in frames when you are threading a gap at full tilt. Cloud saves and achievements round it out. Where it disappoints: the pacing fights itself. The bureaucratic story beats want you slow and contemplative, the movement wants you fast, and the game does not always resolve that argument in your favour. There are stretches where you are walking because the narrative says so, and every one of those felt like a handbrake. The brutalist palette also starts eating itself after a while, since concrete on concrete on concrete makes some districts blur together on a second run. The competitive mode is the bigger risk. A niche indie with a small player base can have the best movement in the genre and still leave you staring at an empty lobby six months from now, and nothing about the design solves that for you. If you are buying this primarily for the online side, go in knowing the community, not the developer, is what keeps it alive. Motion sensitivity is worth flagging too. The camera moves hard, and if fast first-person traversal usually makes you queasy, this will not be the exception. Who it is for is refreshingly clear. If you are the sort of player who reloads a checkpoint because you took a corner two feet wide, you will love this. If you measure a game by mode count, gun list or progression grind, you will finish the tutorial district and wonder what the fuss is about. I came away impressed by how much control it hands you and how little it explains, which is exactly the trade I want from a movement game. It is short, it is specific, and it respects that you can learn a system without being told.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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