Vandals is a simple and fun game to play on your phone. The concept of traveling around to major cities just to graffiti is pretty cool, mixed in with the gameplay makes for an enjoyable game, but there are some issues. Vandals starts off hot where you can easily fly through levels and have a natural difficulty progression. This sounds fair, but the problem here is, getting all three stars (100 percent) for a level became nearly impossible and downright frustrating.
Bottom line: Vandals is a fun game to have on your phone when you are trying to pass the time. Not a game where I am dying to play at any moment.
Have you ever wondered what it is like to be a graffiti artist? Yea, neither have I. But thanks to Vandals you can become one. Not only a graffiti artist but one who tags in large cities like New York and Paris. In this mobile game, you take control of a character attempting to leave his or her mark on various walls through aforementioned places. Easy right? Well, the cops are always hot on your tail as you make your attempt. Naturally, you must whistle or throw bottles to distract them or attract them to other places on the map. It is a very fun game, but if you start to play it to get 100 percent completion, it will become aggravating.
The idea is simple. Swipe or tap to the spot you want to move to. Don’t get caught and make sure to spray paint the walls. Clearly, the game isn’t always that straightforward. Sometimes you whistle to move the police, throw bottles to get them to go to a specific area, and cities have special features too. The coolest feature is in New York, you can use manholes to quickly move across the map.
The challenge of the game comes from the stars. Each level has an opportunity to get 3 stars. One for being undetected, another from a bonus star that you have to grab in the level, and the last from completing the level within a certain amount of moves. You could easily go through the game and not care about those whatsoever, and more power to you because this is where I started to get angry. When I play games, I enjoy going for 100 percent so I attempted to do this. What I was finding was that it was super hard to complete the level undetected and get the bonus or finish it with not exceeding the move count. Or I could not grab the bonus without going over the move count. Vandals became frustrating once I was only getting one or two stars each level.
There was one feature of the game that was really strange to me. The zoom didn’t really work. The buttons were small and hard to use and when you did, the zoom barely worked. If you let go, then it would go back to the normal view. This got annoying because I wanted to be able to see the whole level grid, yet I was restricted by this zoom feature.
When I first booted up the game, I opened the settings to see what there was and noticed that there was an option to change it from right-handed to left-handed. That was pretty cool to see, even though I am right-handed so it did not affect me. Still, it was nice to know I had that option.
I think I should preface this section with I am not an artist and cannot draw, on paper or on a phone. If you can though, then you could definitely have some fun. This aspect of the game actually came with a bunch of options. Way more colors than expected and different sizes for nozzles. Together these choices serve the potential for some very cool graffiti work. It would be exciting to see a page on the app where people could submit their best artwork and share with other Vandals.
