A retro-styled scrolling brawler with an interesting premise that unfortunately fails to evolve its gameplay at all beyond its initial moments.
| Developer | |
| Publisher |
QuByte Interactive; Strictly Limited Games
|
| Franchise | N/A |
| Genre | Brawler |
| PSTV | Yes |
| Physical English |
Yes – EU only (SLG)
|
World-building & Story
The 99Vidas is a powerful artefact with the ability to grant the user 99 lives – it’s protected by a group of four warriors, but when it falls into the hands of the nefarious “boss”, it’s up to the warriors to fight his armies and recover it.
There’s definitely a story here, but it wasn’t in the forefront of the game. I’m led to believe that 99Vidas is based on a podcast and so all of the characters here are modelled on real people although this went completely over my head, so it’s safe to say that unless you’re familiar they’re all just colourful avatars for you to bash bad guys as. You’ll come across a variety of henchmen – from talking gorillas to someone who looks suspiciously like he’s just come out of a gay fetish bar, but other than their appearance you don’t really get to know a whole lot about everyone here.
The world is an interesting mix of city streets, subway trains and high-tech skyscrapers – you’re not given much in the way of exposition for why you’re travelling from place to place (other than to find the artefact), but it’s nice enough all the same.
Presentation & Sound
Surprisingly, 99Vidas is a beautiful pixelart game both in stationary screenshots and in motion that really pops on Vita’s screen.
The place this is really noticeable is with the animations – everyone here has a brilliant sense of style, whether it be the brutes whose bellies wobble as they lurch forwards you or the punks who strut around and stab at you with their combs. There’s a load of detail gone into everything – I particularly liked little touches like the football-playing kids signalling for a foul when they get knocked down or the punks combing their hair on the way back up. The bosses have received the most attention, with a tonne of flashy moves which light up the screen.
The backgrounds are no slouch either – again, they’re filled with little elements like people stumbling out of bars to throw up on the streets or shopkeepers peeping out of their blinds at the brawling happening outside. They’re just generally pretty too – you’ll see tonnes of neon signs, beautiful sweeping views of far-off cities and things like spotlights that help highlight the action. Special mention needs to go to the bonus stages, which are hand-drawn (like Drawn to Death) and sci-fi (like Tron) respectively and look absolutely brilliant.
There’s no voice acting here but there is music – it’s quite catchy but seemed to be on really short loops which made me get sick of it extremely quickly!
Gameplay & Content
99Vidas certainly had an uphill struggle to impress me – I find traditional scrolling brawlers an inherently limited genre and sadly the game did nothing to change this perception, leaving a disappointingly shallow experience.
So you make your way through a series of linear stages as one of four characters, each with slightly different movesets which are all based on the same inputs. After a lengthy non-interactive tutorial that bored me enough to skip it, you can dive straight into the action which usually involves a brief conversation at the start of each stage before you face wave after wave of foes.
Initial impressions are fairly positive – a dedicated jump button helps you get out of the way, you have limited-use magic on the circle button and can expend some health to knock your opponents back when in a grab. Enemy variety also seems solid for the first half an hour or so, each needing a different strategy to defeat – frog men guard so you’ll have to wait for the right moment to strike, while the footballers slide at you meaning you have to jump then lay into them quickly.
The problem is that 99Vidas does nothing to evolve beyond this – new enemies stop appearing quickly meaning you’ll just have to fight different combinations of ones you’ve seen before and although these require slightly tweaked strategies, it mostly just boils down to desperately running to one side of the screen so they can’t flank you then hitting them with the same combos. Weapons seem to do little to help either (it’s almost counter-productive picking them up as you’ll likely get hit in the meantime).
There is an upgrade system at play here – you get points for defeating enemies and these can be spent in a shop after each level, but only to upgrade the moves you already have as there’s nothing new in the way of skills to unlock. You’ll also need to spend these points on extra lives as 99Vidas has a fairly punishing difficulty, but this exposes the big flaw in progression here.
See, I started the game on normal difficulty – which is what I always do. I quickly hit a roadblock where I couldn’t progress, a combination of not having enough lives and not upgrading my skills enough because I’d been buying lives (that I was then losing because I hadn’t upgraded my skills). This meant I had to start again on easy just to earn enough points to upgrade my skills to take on normal mode – which seems particularly counter-intuitive and frustrating to not be warned of beforehand.
After that, everything turns into a massive grind – it’ll take you around an hour and a half to see all the levels then you’ll be expected to play through with the remaining characters to unlock new stuff (as well as complete on higher difficulties which can only be done once you’ve stockpiled lives). This wasn’t something I was particularly keen on doing so I dropped it after my first playthrough – perhaps this would be much more enjoyable in co-op, something I didn’t get to try out.
99Vidas successfully apes old-school brawlers, but that doesn’t make it a particularly enjoyable time – if you’re in for a grind it could be fun, but otherwise I can’t recommend it.
Conclusion
A quirky premise and some gorgeous pixel graphics mask what is otherwise a frustrating and grindy brawler – 99Vidas delivers some fleeting fun, but it’s forgotten too quickly under layers of mediocre repetition of the same content.
4.5/10
kresnik258gaming 