At first glance, Volume looks like a very uninspired stealth game. After playing for a while, I enjoy it quite a lot, but there are several issues holding it back from being a fantastic game.
Volume is an indie stealth game by Mike Bithell (Thomas Was Alone) that takes place in a near-future England. You control Rob (hearing the game call me by my own name was a very odd experience), a character shrouded in mystery. You’re also joined by a sentient computer named Alan, who provides some comic relief throughout. According to the game’s Steam description, Volume is a futuristic retelling of the story of Robin Hood. I’d tell you more about the game’s setup and story, but to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t follow it any further. Volume has a very disjointed and confusing narrative that I eventually gave up on to focus more on playing the actual game.
Gameplay is really where Volume shines, even though it doesn’t shine too brightly. The game is played from an isometric view and the goal is simple: Avoid guards, steal treasure, and get to the end of a level. Rinse and repeat 100 times and you’ve beaten the game. The game gradually introduces new concepts, enemies, and obstacles as you go on, keeping the game fresh and interesting. You’ll use the environment and gadgets to distract guards, turrets, and bloodhounds to safely steal treasure and progress through the game. The nice thing about Volume is that each level is completely unique — they all present a new challenge that you must overcome. Though some may be similar to others, the levels never really felt repetitive.
The downfall to Volume’s gameplay is the resoundingly ignorant AI. You’ll encounter various types of enemies throughout the game, but the most common are pawns. These are your standard patrolling guards, and they are so easy to take advantage of it’s more sad than funny. The fact of the matter is: the AI is not smart, and it never gets smart. At least, it didn’t get any smarter within several hours of me playing the game. Rob is given the ability to hug walls in order to break guard’s line of sight over smaller walls. If you come to a corner whilst hugging a wall, you will be able to quickly move around the corner to the other side.
This is where the exploitation comes into play. Guards chasing after you have a small meter over their head; rather than dying upon getting touched by a guard, the guard will simply shoot you after the meter diminishes. This is a good mechanic, as it decreases the hassle of running around endlessly trying to break a guard’s line of sight on you — you just get killed within seconds. It’s more punishing. However, if you quickly turn a corner before you are killed, the guard will break line of sight and go looking for you.
What makes this so exploitable is that they won’t walk around searching for you for a period, rather they’ll just stand in place and then go back to their normal patrol. The problem with this is that a guard could see you, you could turn a corner immediately, no matter how close you are to them, and they will never catch you. They just walk to where you were a few seconds ago and stand around like idiots. The first time this happened I thought it was hilarious, I figured I had just gotten lucky. As it kept happening, I kept thinking “Is it really this easy to avoid the enemies?”
Another aspect which I dislike about Volume are the copious amounts of checkpoints. I’ve never seen a game use checkpoints so darn frequently. Checkpoints are gates which you walk through, and your location is saved to that gate. They can be used any number of times, which means they work again while backtracking through an area. The issue is that this eliminates almost any hint of risk vs. reward. You don’t have to be careful when trying to avoid some guards, because if you die, you’ll respawn at the nearest checkpoint, and there are so many that you barely lose any progress whatsoever. While having to restart an entire level is incredibly frustrating and checkpoints are a welcomed sight, this is just a little too much.
As I’ve said, the story in Volume is one I just cannot follow. The way the story plays out is actually during gameplay. There are absolutely no cutscenes. This is an issue because while I was concentrating on playing the game and completing a level, I had Rob and Alan talking away about some important plot points that I couldn’t focus on. So, either you sit around and listen to the dialogue (which can last several minutes), or you ignore it completely because there’s no way to have it both ways. In addition, if you’re going for beating par times, you can’t sit around and listen to the dialogue. Overall, it’s just poorly implemented. Atmospheric? Yes; Easy to follow? No.
A very interesting aspect is that if you beat a level before dialogue is over, it will continue right where it left off in the next level. That is a very good idea, and keeps the flow of the game going. The story is also presented in occasional text boxes, but these are generally so long and vague that I ended up ignoring them. I usually love reading backstory in games, but something about the text in Volume just bored me stiff. It wasn’t interesting.
By far the best part of Volume is the voice acting. Charlie McDonnell, AKA Charlieissocoollike on YouTube, does a great job in his role as Rob. Rob and Alan (played by Danny Wallace) have a humorous chemistry together, and what dialogue between them I did catch was fun to listen to. The game’s villain, Guy Gisborne, is also well voiced by Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit films.
Volume is a fun game, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s only fun if it’s played in very short bursts of maybe 30 minutes. Otherwise, the game’s problems end up dragging you down; I got burnt out after playing for just an hour. While the voice acting is great and the characters are interesting, the story is just too difficult to follow and the AI is horribly stupid at times. While it is a challenging game at points, it was more due to me slipping up from getting so burnt out on the game, rather than the game actually being challenging.