I may have played the Playstation 2 version of Vexx, but everything about it screams 'early Xbox'. During the early 2000's there was an odd trend in the industry where everyone seemed to want to make 'edgy' platforming protagonists, sort of like with the endless Sonic clones back in the 90's except with a bit more of a 'mature' feel to the humor to make them more appealing to adults as well as kids. The Playstation 2 tended to get protagonists which leaned more towards whimsy, such as Jak and Daxter or Ratchet and Clank, while the Xbox got the more 'twisted' characters such as Blinx and Voodoo Vince.
Vexx is a game which tries so hard to be edgy that not only does it have two X's in its protagonist's name, but every single letter ends in a sharpened edge whenever possible. Vexx himself never speaks a word, but the basic plot is one of revenge and Vexx's weapon of choice is, of course, a pair of ever-so-edgy claws. Of course, all this edginess is, for better or worse, watered down by the fact that very little in the world of Vexx is 'edgy' with tasks even early in the game consisting of things such as fighting a giant sumo wrestler on top of a giant tree and playing a game of Breakout on a giant 'not-Xbox'.
At its core, Vexx is a Super Mario 64 clone. Players gradually unlock new worlds, each of which contains eight to ten 'Wraithearts' (stars); it comes as little surprise that one Wraithheart in each world is obtained by collecting 100 fragments (coins) while another in each world always appears after finding six jars containing ancestral spirits (red coins). Unlike stars in Super Mario 64 it doesn't matter which one the player selects to go after as the only thing which changes is a set of arrows which help point the way towards the selected heart. The clues for hearts are also written in the form of four-line rhyming poems which sometimes are clever, but which usually feel forced and hilariously bad.
Vexx can perform some very basic ground and air combos, but he never learns new attacks and the enemies rarely pose much of a direct threat (the threat of being knocked into a bottomless pit is almost always present though). Vexx can also fill up a sort of 'rage meter' by performing air juggles and this will let him briefly move much faster and shoot projectiles, but since the game itself focuses far more on platforming than upon combat, it is rarely useful and even less so as it takes a second to activate, meaning any combat-intensive situation would likely lead to Vexx simply getting hit while entering this state. This isn't to say that Vexx never gets any new abilities at all as he gets two, both early in the game; a molten armor upgrade(metal Mario) can be used for a few seconds after stepping on certain pads and makes Vexx very slow, but invincible and able to rapidly build up momentum while a flight upgrade (flight cap) lets him fly for a few seconds. Neither upgrade is particularly fun to use, but it hardly matters as they are used for a combined total of only slightly over half a dozen times throughout the game anyway.
Otherwise, Vexx has a fairly standard array of platforming protagonist abilities, just as wall jumping (so rarely used that I forgot it existed for most of the game), long jumping, high jumping, an aerial kick which serves as a sort of double jump, swimming (there's quite a bit of swimming in Vexx, but the controls are surprisingly decent after a while), and, of course, climbing. Yes, Vexx must absolutely love slowly climbing up walls and hanging from ledges as the game constantly has players climbing up one thing or another without anything in the way of danger. While the odd obsession with 'verticality' in the video game industry didn't truly take off until later on with games such as Assassin's Creed and Uncharted, the beginnings of this trend are clear to see in Vexx as aside from the excessive amounts of tedious climbing, platforming tends to move in an upward spiral far more often than not. Yet, Vexx could have been a fairly decent Super Mario 64 clone if it wasn't for one overarching issue - the pacing.
In a previous article, I discussed how pacing is an important element of games which is easy for developers to overlook and which often leads people to describe games which handle it poorly as 'just being bad' without quite being able to place what it is about the game which makes it that way. Such is the case with Vexx as it fails at pacing in quite possibly every way possible.
The plot is one of the more obvious, though also one of the least important, examples of something which suffers from poor pacing. Vexx opens with a longwinded cutscene which nevertheless rushes to explain how Vexx's peaceful village was attacked, the villagers were forced into slavery, how Vexx's grandfather sacrificed his life so that Vexx could escape, and of how Vexx stumbled upon the magical 'ancient edgy claws' and seeks revenge; it probably would have made sense to let the player actually play through some of this instead of cramming it all together in a giant glob, but oh well. However, after this cutscene and the tutorial, there is another brief cutscene, then another at the halfway point of the game, and one more after the final boss battle and that's it. While one might say "But Super Mario 64 had even fewer cutscenes than that", that game also had previously established characters in a more lighthearted and simplistic world and, most importantly, still had various NPC's to interact with from time to time while Vexx contains less than half a dozen NPC's in its entirety, none of which get more than one line of dialogue, and this results in the world feeling completely dead and lifeless.
The more serious pacing issues reside within the gameplay itself though. Vexx is not a game which is particularly fond of anything resembling a checkpoint. It will checkpoint players when they enter a structure in one of its levels (i.e. anything which requires a loading screen), but not at any other time. As I mentioned before, Vexx is a game which loves the concept of verticality and this quickly becomes an issue as it also loves excessively long platforming segments filled with traps designed to knock the player off of ledges. These segments can go on for anywhere from five to ten minutes and, while most games with such segments will aline the platforms in such a way that being knocked off of one simply drops the player down a single layer, Vexx is a game where such 'passive checkpointing' is nearly unheard of and instead players will find themselves constantly either knocked off of ledges into instant-death pits or onto a ledge at the very bottom even after making it to the final stretch. Narrow ledges and quickly-spinning platforms which force the player to move at a slow pace in order to not fall are also extremely common and needing to repeat these segments over and over is especially tedious.
The issue of a lack of checkpointing is compounded by the other pacing issue of excessive load times. Never before has a game made me realize just how truly impressive the nearly seamless world of Jak and Daxter was for its time, especially since Vexx came out a few years later. When starting up Vexx, a player must sit through the usual developer and publisher logos before the title loads up, then players must load their actual saved game to be sent into the hub, the hub is a bland and small circular room so players must then sit through yet another loading screen as they choose which world to go through and, since most Wraithearts are hidden inside of structures, players will often need to sit through yet another loading screen a short time later as they enter a structure within the world; at one point there is a cube which must be rotated to enter it through each of its six sides and solve short platforming puzzles and there is a loading screen for each side. Just in case anyone still thinks this is a tolerable amount of loading, getting a Game Over sends players all the way back to the Activision logo so that they can sit through the entire process all over again. These frequent, long loading times and the almost complete lack of checkpoints makes the more challenging later areas of the game simply painful and not even remotely fun to play through.
Boss fights are, of course, also not untouched by pacing woes. Vexx has a whopping four boss fights, two of which are against the aforementioned sumo wrestler. Since this is a game which at least tries to have some sort of combo-based fighting system, one would think that these boss fights would at least be intense and would involve making use of fast reflexes and stringing together combos. Instead, every boss fight is yet another exercise in tedium as, without exception, they are of the 'waiting' variety. In other words, every single boss in the game is impossible to hit for most of the fight, but will occasionally use an attack which will leave it vulnerable for a few seconds; the sumo at least needs to be attacked repeatedly to push him off a ledge, but the other two only allow Vexx to get in one hit before restarting their patterns. The final boss in particular is a nightmarish accumulation of everything wrong with Vexx as his first phase generally lasts for about five minutes and consists of nothing except him sending wave after wave of weak enemies at Vexx and occasionally tossing some fireballs; Vexx can finally directly attack him in the second phase, but he takes off a third of Vexx's health with each hit and it takes a long time to land the five hits needed to enter the third phase (which is, of course, filled with instant-death pits). Dying at any point in this excessively long boss fight will naturally place players all the way back at the beginning.
In the end, Vexx could have been a decent platformer, but the plethora of pacing issues present within it makes the whole thing a chore which starts out 'ok' and which only gets less fun to play as it goes on (the camera's also not so great either, though still infinitely better than Herdy Gerdy's). While Herdy Gerdy is a flawed game which still may prove enjoyable for some, the flaws in Vexx turn it into an entirely miserable experience beyond the first half and it would be hard to recommend it to anyone but the most persistent of players.
Vexx can be found on Amazon or eBay for as low as $0.99 and is available on the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube.
As usual, to celebrate Backlog Bonanza Month, here is once again a link to the Backloggery.
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