Galactic Vault – Lock in

Shoot lots and lots and lots of robots in Galactic Vault.

As a resident rogue-lite enjoyer here in the halcyon B3 Towers, Galactic Vault seems pretty up my street. A fast-paced, quick-run first-person shooter with those sweet rogue elements? Sign me up! And whilst Galactic Vault certainly does its job well enough, it’s getting into such a crowded market and does very little to really stand out from the crowd.

The premise of Galactic Vault is that you’re a dude that smashes his spaceship into other spaceships to steal their stuff. I think. If there’s more to it than that then there’s very little that conveys it. I’m not really too fussed though, as I don’t think anyone is throwing themselves into a rogue-lite FPS for deep lore and complex interpersonal relationships, so let’s move right along to how the game actually works.

Once you’ve selected your weapon for the run, you’re dumped into the first chamber to fight off a small handful of robots and drones. Once the room is cleared, you can choose a door that will give you a new attachment for your gun that provides some sort of buff or modification to its functionality. Head into the next room to rinse and repeat until you reach the end and kill the boss or die along the way. Some rooms offer a twist on the “kill everything” motif, with you having to hold control points or destroy specific targets to stop the endless waves of spawning robots, but you’ll mostly just be exploding everything.

The start of each run is pretty disappointing, as the guns themselves feel really quite anaemic. Weak sounding shots that deal a little damage and don’t really seem to have much in the way of impact. Once you’ve got a few mods attached though, things become more enjoyable. You aren’t just getting a 10% damage buff or something along those lines, rather things that can completely change how your weapon behaves. That starting pistol now fires explosives that travel like mortar shots, causing bullets to fly off every three metres it flies before healing you for a portion of damage it dealt. Once you get to the end of a run, you’ll have a monster of a weapon that will be more than a match for the boss. Obviously you’re still beholden to the random nature of the mods you’ll be offered, but generally things can get pretty effective with even a little synergy.

It reminded me of Mothergunship and Vampire Hunters with their gun stacking and modding mechanics, and that’s kind of the biggest problem I had with Galactic Vault. Every time I sat down — and genuinely did enjoy playing a run — I found myself thinking about how other games have done this already and honestly done it better. The rogue-lite FPS genre is increasingly crowded, and it’s hard to stand out in the crowd, and Galactic Vault doesn’t really do much to help with that. This is a good game. It’s well put together, and fun enough to play with fun shooting once things get going. It feels like it needs something more to stop it fading into the storefront though. 

The visuals and sound do little to pull this up as well. Enemies look fine but often blend into the environment, especially in the case of the insanely overabundant drone foes. All the bullets flying around look cool, but the visual noise can get a bit much at times, meaning a lot of mistakes are made. Then there are the rooms you fight in, which are very limited in quantity, meaning you’ll have seen pretty much every environment after a run or two. Weapon sounds are pretty weak, and the music, whilst fine enough, becomes quite repetitive very quickly. It’s just more of the lack of stand out elements that the game has.

There is plenty to like though. Gunplay is enjoyable once you’ve built up a weapon you like. The special abilities you get are fun to play with, especially the one that launches heaps of bouncing projectiles around the room, and the fact that your gun visually changes each time you add a new mod to it is a surprisingly endearing inclusion. I’m a fan of the fact that mods stack too, so getting a new magazine mod doesn’t replace your old one, meaning you can focus on a really specific build if you want. You can absolutely have a fun time with Galactic Vault, but if you’re already a fan of the genre, you’re unlikely to find something that will pull you away from your current favourite.

Galactic Vault is available now on PC.