Vector Thrust (PC) Review

At first glance, it's easy to assume that Portuguese developer TimeSymmetry has done a great deal of work here, and if it's true that this is actually a one-man company, then the result is even more impressive... but it's all a lie. The offered quantity serves as a façade that hides numerous flaws behind it. In fact, things start to look bad from the very beginning, with a menu screen that is buggy, unhelpful, in some cases oversimplified, and in others needlessly complex. Overall: a big rushed mess.

The wannabe pilot chooses a mode amongst the many, a fighter jet, and takes off to the sky. How does the view look? It depends. The aircrafts are awesome, with an amount of detail that is enhanced by a very fitting cel-shaded effect. Looking down, though, reveals a dull, featureless landscape, with a ground texture that is way too blurred for a modern - indie or not - title. The audio section is also a mixed bag; the sound effects and music range from average to good, but the campy voiceovers in the campaign are god-awful.

Who cares about the audio-visuals, though, right? After all, it's the actual dogfights that matter. Vector Thrust supposedly blends simple, arcade fun with realism, which in theory means that it is arcade when it comes to its relatively abundant ammunition and simplified controls, and realistic in terms of difficulty and missions. In practice, however, this is just a problematic game, and, unfortunately for it, it's easy to forget flawed audio-visuals, but impossible to do the same with bad gameplay, and this title gives plenty of reasons to complain about that.

For starters, the AI is problematic, with enemies that never stop doing "loop de loops," and allied forces that, many times, don't help at all, making each battle session last a lot longer, but certainly not fun or challenging. The missions aren't that exciting, either, not just because the objectives are always the same (destroy enemy jets/AA guns/ships/structures, or defend something/someone), but, mainly, because the stages are always just an open sky without any obstructions, therefore, don't expect to do any shooting inside canyons, near skyscrapers, and so on. At least there is an editor included, and the - very active - modding community is doing wonders with it.

Never mind AI and missions, though. The absolute worst problem here is the way missiles behave. Imagine this: the enemy is at 12 o'clock, doesn't move at all, and the missile is locked on it. The pilot presses fire, the missile thrusts forward… follows the imaginary ghost behind the aircraft in view, and misses. This doesn't happen extremely often, but it happens, and since fights between fighter jets are rarely that motionless, this is a feature that definitely needs some fine-tuning - oh, and note that the targeting system is also broken, since it never focuses on the closest enemy when trying to cycle through available targets.

The controls need work, the missiles are unreliable, the levels bland, the AI flawed, and while there are over 250 jets to unlock, most are variations of the basic 40, the vast majority doesn't include a cockpit viewpoint, and acquiring 99% of the planes requires completing some small, but also unbelievably simplistic and repetitive, challenges - which many times can't even be categorised as challenges; it's just a collection of simple "shoot that enemy down"-type of missions. Why is Vector Thrust so flawed? It's because of the elephant in the room, which is the fact that this is not a completed product. It gets frequently updated with new content and fixes, yet these aren't small patchworks, but things that the developer should already have put in the game - if not out of respect for those who'll spent some money on it, at least for the sake of its own creation.