Reviewers Liked
- Inventive level design and tight mechanics combine to create an intelligent stealth game
- Great variety
Reviewers Didn't Like
- Intrusive storytelling gets in the way of gameplay
- Inconsistent AI
Volume
Volume features a level-creation tool that I played with too briefly to critique, but it's likely to spawn many more maps, many more patrols and patterns. I'm looking forward to playing the best of them. Bithell's sophomore effort is a lovely thing made up of spellbinding puzzles that demand the player's attention. Its beauty, wit and intelligence are nicely offset by its quiet anger.
-- As reviewed by Polygon
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Expert reviews and ratings
By PC Mag
on
Volume has an intriguing story and fun stealth techniques, but the game's repetitive mission structure and easy-to-evade enemies keep it from being one of the genre's standout...
By CGM
on
Volume's one hundred bite-sized levels will take a total of five to six hours to complete, with each level lasting about a minute to three...
By New Game Network
on
A stealth game built to satisfy the central tenets of the genre in the most discrete, distilled, trimmed-down way possible. Certainly well-crafted, but simply not that...
By TrustedReviews
on
However, such considerations are minor, and there’s an awful lot of pleasure to be had from Volume. Its uncluttered gameplay emphasises the puzzle-solving aspect of stealth, the level design is brilliant, the gadgets are sometimes clever enough to make you chuckle out loud and the whole experience is both surprisingly meaty and absorbing to the point of distraction.
By DarkZero
on
Volume is the second game lead by Mike Bithell, creator of Thomas Was Alone. Instead of being a purely narrative driven game like his previous effort, Volume builds something that feels much more traditional as a video game. What we have here is a...
By IGN
on
Volume may suffer from a few issues of poorly designed AI and easily exploited level design, but I still found a great number of challenging rooms with an intriguing story to match, and plenty of room to master.
By Polygon
on
Volume features a level-creation tool that I played with too briefly to critique, but it's likely to spawn many more maps, many more patrols and patterns. I'm looking forward to playing the best of them. Bithell's sophomore effort is a lovely thing made up of spellbinding puzzles that demand the player's attention. Its beauty, wit and intelligence are nicely offset by its quiet anger.
By EuroGamer
on
It's this clarity that keeps impressing me. So many games are cluttered these days, piling features on top of busywork. Volume isn't short of great ideas, but it delivers them gracefully, one at a time, layering simple concepts on top of solid mechanics to create the sort of organic gameplay experience that seems effortless.
By PCGamer
on
Fun, not-too-hard stealth puzzles that look great, wrapped up in a humdrum story with a boring protagonist.
By GameInformer
on
Volume’s story levels are designed with the same care that players must use when playing, and I enjoyed the experience from start to finish. With true stealth games a rare breed today, Volume stands as a declaration that the formula can still work.
By VideoGamer
on
Robin Hood via Metal Gear Solid's VR missions crossed with Tron and Trials sounds like the sort of thing you'd expect to hear come out a particularly chemically-assisted game jam, and yet the result is one of the most compelling games of the year. But...
By eurogamer.net
on
One of the most refreshing things about Volume, Mike Bithell's second game after the charming Thomas Was Alone, is that the design is entirely naked. This isn't a game that tries to hide its systems behind a fig leaf of "immersion". It's not a game that...
By kotaku.com
on
Thomas Was Alone, Mike Bithell's charming 2010 platformer about the inner lives of hopping geometric shapes, was an experiment in the power of storytelling to triumph over abstraction. Volume, Bithell's new game, is also a successful experiment in...
By nrsgamers.it
on
Volume è uno stealth game purissimo, privo degli elementi action tipici di Metal Gear Solid, concettualmente vicino a un puzzle game per la maniera in cui dovremo affrontare ciascuna guardia. La storia è gradevole ma non riesce a spiccare il volo, i...