Volume Review

After 10 hours of very entertaining gameplay I now achieved 100% completion on Volume, an isometric stealth/puzzle game from the developer of Thomas Was Alone. Thus Volume becomes the 52th game I got 100% completion on (53 if we count Fallout 4 base game without the DLCs).

I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Volume. It felt more like a puzzle game than a stealth game though. On certain levels you are forced to get detected and then lose the enemies in order to progress. Therefore Volume can't be fully ghosted; however, majority of it can certainly be ghosted. 

One of the things I loved about Volume was that it supported a full pacifist playthrough. There are no weapons and it is completely impossible to kill anyone. But there are quite a handful of very useful gadgets that have to be utilised to either hide/disguise yourself or to distract enemies in various ways. You can create clones of yourself to set enemies on a goose chase while you sneak, you can set off loud noises to lure enemies away or in levels that don't have any gadgets you can simply whistle!

There is a nice difficulty curve in Volume. The game starts off being easy and then introduces new enemies, much more complex levels, new concepts and new gadgets. At the start, the game introduces a fairly easy enemy to evade called Pawns with a very limited field of vision, then you are faced with Snipers who has a very far vision but they fire slowly, then you get Turrets, Dogs, Knights (who can even see behind them) and they all require a certain gadget or strategy to evade.

Art style in Volume is certainly impressive.. The level design in all 100 chapters is absolutely gorgeous and graphics are fantastic. Chapters are quite colourful and they are stunning. I have one complaint though; as enemies are white, certain levels that have bright and light colours make it a bit tough to see which side the enemies are facing and how far their visions go. 

Apart from art, I was also mind blown by the amazing Volume soundtrack! I wasn't much of a fan of Thomas Was Alone soundtrack but music in Volume feels like heaven to my ears!. However, I absolutely hated how loud the notification sound is when you're detected. I even turned down the "volume" but despite me doing so there were still moments of jump scares when I got detected.

Subtitle window is huge....

Just in case I don't miss anything related to the story, I always turn on subtitles in games. Even though I can perfectly understand what is being said, I just enable them on purpose so as not to miss any details. Volume made me deeply regret this! The subtitle screen takes lower half of the screen and some chapters have insanely long dragging dialogues. There was one time I actually just waited before finishing the mission cause dialogue wasn't done by the time I completed the chapter. As subtitles cover a major part of the screen, it becomes insanely difficult to see what's really happening on your south side. Camera can't really be dragged either so on certain chapters I just had to wait until dialogues were over to progress cause otherwise I'd be running in blind to my certain death. If I'm on a suicide mission, I'd prefer to at least see it happen!

My final complaint will be about the game not giving the player options to finish the level in different ways. Most chapters only have one gadget (except some that have multiple) and almost all these levels don't give you multiple gadget options to finish the level. There are 9 gadgets in Volume but you are forced to use only one gadget per section of a level. Only a very few chapters give you 2 options to use.

In short, Volume is a very enjoyable game. I'd suggest Volume to anyone who wants a nice challenge without it being impossible or annoying. Chapters are a lot in number but quite short in content so it's a game that can be enjoyed even if you find 10 minutes of free time. I want to thank Mike Bithell for this amazing game and I can't wait to play his future games.