Vigor

Hidden gem. Very underrated. Not for people who can't handle being at a disadvantage as a new player. It has some flaws of course but I haven't had a game keep me playing as long as Vigor has in a long time and it's free to play so it deserves a 10. $10 and a little planning and you can easily get every season/legacy season.

I really enjoy the game play. Pretty easy to get going, get an ok gun, and put up a fight against others. Wanna run and gun? Go for it. Wanna loot quietly and get the hell out? Done. So far, the games biggest weakness? The servers, holy crap batman. Literally lost dozens of valuable guns and loot to dropped servers. Virtually makes the gun unplayable some times. Other then that, it's a nice break from Warzone :).

this game had a very strong start. all elements that made it good had been there when it came out for open play testing in 2018. since then, not much had been added aside from micro transactions and a few new maps. the map design and asthetics of this game are exeptional. vigor is one of the best looking games of its time, and still today is one of the best looking games aviable on xbox. the gameplay was buggy and janky at the start, some of which has been fixed. gun balancing is absoluteley horrible and has only been made worse with every consecutive update. i have spend 4200 hours in this game, so two hours every day for the last 5 years. what kept my in the game for so long was an idea of where it could go. not a lot was needed to make this a game of the decade, but that was never added. ultimately i had to admit to myself that all this is is a good looking but cheaply made tarkov clone with the singular goal of making money. is it fun to play? yes absolutely. the game looks amazing, gameplay is hard and punishing, there is a strong skillcurve to the gameplay. but there is nowhere to go. there are a lot of cosmetics in the game, every single one of which comes with a pricetag, so prepare your wallet if you dont want to be a greencoat for the rest of your time, or try for one of the two outfits that can be gained via shootout and elimination crates. shelter building is nice, but not worth the effort. there is no noteworthy player interaction aside from a discord server and the ability to shoot each other. it should also be said that pricing is inconsistent. the same jacket can cost you 5€ one day, and then be on discount for 7€ so do keep that in mind. seasons were an interesting concept, but with legacy seasons there is no time pressure on them. and all season cosmetics can be bought in the shop after the season is over, so there is no "item prestige" as there would be in similar games. there is no rarity balancing, even though guns are colorgraded in rarity grades. gold and purple guns are the most common guns in the game, and even though they are referred to as the rarest, are actuallly the easiest to get from the environment. blue guns are the hardest to get usually, but even they are commonly found. your stash will quickly overflow, so one good thing is that there is no maximum cap of how may guns you hoard. i had 11000 guns, at least 100 of each, before i turned them all into resources and uninstalled the game. in short. visually it is exceptional. one of the most beautifull games i have ever played gameplay is hard, punishing, now sort of fixed, and also very pointless. you are playing towards nothing and even though your loadout disapears when you die, there are few loadouts that you could not regain in 1-2 rounds of looting. the microtransactions are some of the most annoying ones i have ever seen in any game. sometimes i install it to look at it, but then i uninstall it again because i dont want to play it. this game had an ambitious start and then did nothing with it. 5/10 i love it, dont play it, and dont buy anything so that you dont encourage bohemia to think that they should do this with any of their other games too.

Vigor is a gorgeous game, with a concept that in theory could work very, very well. It offers three game modes: Shootout (death match), Elimination (capture the flag), and Encounter (the main looter/shooter/extraction mode which sets Vigor apart from other games; or, well, it could). Sadly it is also janky, buggy, full of abandoned promise, equally full of cheaters/exploiters (rampantly increasing over the past year or so), frequently suffering (major) server issues, and essentially without any meaningful updates (mostly just skins or in-game currency inflation, and the occasional but rare new map) or support; e.g. Bohemia seem more concerned with having evidence of cheating taken down from facebook, Reddit, etc. than actually dealing with the cheating. Heavy (increasingly so with each update) on the micro-transactions, pay-to-win, seriously degrading over time, and without an end game. This last part is an important one, because it seems Bohemia either never expected people to play that far, or failed to consider this aspect of the game: once you finish your shelter, the game is essentially over and turns into a shooter without the looter, turning the Encounter mode into a big-map single-round Shootout. This also means that new players who need to loot are up against those who treat the game as a shooter because they have no interest, nor reason to have it, in the looter aspect. Sure, you still have the Shootout and Elimination modes, but they are essentially only there to pad the game and serve as training grounds for Encounters. On their own, Shootouts and Eliminations just lay bare how janky a game Vigor really is, once you look past its promise. Tragically, but utterly understandably, the player base is very small, as most veteran players have left or rarely play as there are far better pure shooters out there, that don’t suffer the same bugs and shortcomings that have been around for years without (despite persistent and vocal feedback from the shrinking community) receiving any credible attention from Bohemia. Consequently you end up playing the same players over and over again, and despite featuring a skill rating that goes up and down depending on how you play, skill based matching for games is not a thing and you can end up losing skill points despite slaughtering a lobby, because you were unfortunate enough to load into a lobby full of bad players. Tl;dr: So much potential, from what seems to be a studio that either simply isn’t capable of executing, or simply does not care to do so.

Ive given the game two installs and that's two uninstalls. This game just isn't fun at all. Everyone plays like a wimp, and despite Vigor's recent attempts to bombard camping enemies, it doesn't help anything. The game looks good for a free game. The gun control in this game is HORRIBLE. It's impossible to control your gun no matter what stance you're doing, but everyone can get an easy headshot behind your back. I heard the recoil wasn't like this a year or so ago, and I wish it stayed that way. I don't expect Vigor to improve at all during its lifespan. I don't recommend this game. Get Escape from Tarkov instead.