The PS Vita game, escapeVektor, doesn’t seem to have a lot of substance at first glance, but I decided to look a little further.

When you start, you have an arrow you move around on some lines. This arrow is Vektor, a sentient computer program that is trying to escape from the evil CPU inside your PS Vita.

…Vektor has been trapped inside your CPU for longer than he can remember. What seems like weeks to us can feel like years when you are held captive in a cell within the CPU.

He desperately needs your help to break free and only your games-playing expertise can save him. But be warned, this CPU is smart. It will detect your movements, adapt its behaviour and send out its troops to destroy Vektor.

With Vektor’s coding skills and your gaming skills, you might just make it far enough for him to escape. And maybe during the journey he will remember what happened to him.

Show the CPU what you’re made of and help Vektor get out of there. But how will you do it? The fastest route possible holds the promise of an early escape, but the more you search the CPU, the more memories Vektor is likely to uncover.

If you really want to show the CPU who’s boss, you can retrace your steps and nail these levels. Earn medals for fast times and badges for completing challenges. Collect them all and you will truly have unleashed Vektor’s combat power…

Check out this video to get an idea of the game play:

There are 150 nodes (levels) in the game that are spread across 18 zones (worlds) that comprise the main story of the game, and 9 bonus zones that are unlocked by finding secondary exits in some nodes. These second exits can be short cuts to a more advanced node, or will lead bonus zones.

To play, you basically move Vektor along the lines of a maze, avoiding enemies and traps as you go. This is where a comparison to Pacman has been made. As you move along the lines, they will change to a different color. Bordering all the visible cells in a node (changing the color of all the lines), causes an exit to appears and then entering the exit will complete the node.

Each node has bronze, silver, gold and platinum medals to unlock by completing the node within a certain time or by attaining a certain score. Some nodes contain secondary exits which are harder to reveal and require more time to get unlocked.

The more you progress, the harder the puzzles get. The mazes become larger, and you will come across enemies and traps. If you touch the enemy, it is game over and you will need to restart the level. Some of the enemies will have a set path, while others can hunt you down.

As you gain higher and higher scores, Vektor will grow in version number. There are also four abilities in the game as well as many upgrades which are unlocked based on Vektor’s version number. The four abilities are shown in the image below.

Each node has a leaderboard which can be viewed both before and after each level. escapeVektor also uses the Vita’s ‘near’ ability for location based leaderboards and to drop ‘near’ gifts, and the gyroscope to allow the user to tilt their device to see more of the game world. This can be turned on/off in the pause menu.

Although escapeVektor is a rather simple game, it is a lot of fun and extremely addicting. In fact I think I’ll go play it some more right now.

[review score=”88″ pros=”Fun game that is easy to play.

Leaderboards.” cons=”Can get aggravating towards the end.”]

Disclaimer

This review is based on a PS Vita copy of escapeVektor provided by Nnooo.