Coin-Op Vice is the new game by indie developer Andrei Fomin, and if you’re into ’80s vibes and roguish game design, this CRT-filtered adventure may well be of interest.
Your task here is to steer your playable character, a detective who specialises in arcade games, around neon drenched buildings in search of coin-op machines that he can play to level up his skills and teach him new combat abilities.
There are eight missions all told, but each play through is going to be different thanks to the procedural generation of the maps and the challenges that you encounter along the way.
I found the controls to be quite clunky and it took me a while to get to grips with how it feels to move the little detective around the place. Once I’d got the hang of things, and once I’d unlocked a few special abilities, the combat encounters that punctuated the exploration became more interesting.
As you can see from the screenshots included, Coin-Op Vice has a striking aesthetic. It certainly looks the part, and it sounds the part, too. The soundtrack got a little repetitive but it fits like a glove.
More importantly, I liked how the deckbuilding worked. The items that you collect during your adventures can be combined in your inventory to improve their level, like you can in Brotato. As you play you open up new slots, allowing you to equip even more abilities.
In fact, it was the economy around the coin-op machines that drove me on. I needed to collect gold from fallen enemies in the overworld, then convert that into tokens so I could play the machines, which in turn unlocked new abilities to power my exploration.
Jumping into these mini-challenges momentarily whisks you away from the main map and gives you a tightly focused arcade experience to engage with. I found these little vignettes to be a good incentive, even if some of the mini-games were a little on the basic side (apparently there are over 100 in the game).
If you’re a fan of retro visuals, then Coin-Op Vice has all the neon you could possibly want. It’s a strangely engaging love letter to a bygone era and you can check it out over on Steam if you’d like to know more.
I played the game via access provided by the developer – thanks!
