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Vultures - Scavengers Of Death is a turn-based roguelike that looks like a vintage Resident Evil game

Regretfully, you do not play a bird

Turn-based battling against a zombie in Vultures - Scavengers Of Death
Image credit: Vultures Games

Crow Country, Conscript, and now Vultures - Scavengers Of Death. We really do seem to be living through a craze for PS1-style horror games. Vultures is different to the others, though, in that it's turn-based zombie crunching combined with roguelike scavenging to survive and get more powerful. It's arriving on Steam sometime soon and it's probably worth a looksy if you're after biohazard disposal with a tactical twist.

In Vultures, you play as a Vulture. No, not a grizzled bird that picks apart corpses with its beak and sits atop rocks for the vast majority of its lifecycle, but a human special operative - an operative who must clean up an infested metropolis through the power of turn-based clicking.

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Vultures is neither a linear story like Resident Evil nor an open world. Instead, it's a roguelike where you're attempting to survive increasingly difficult scenarios and "get out alive with the target". At the beginning of each mission, you'll choose from a number of agents with their own combat styles, customise their loadouts, and grow stronger by scavenging things along the way. From my experience with survival horror: take the shotgun and everything will right itself.

Going off the trailer, it looks like blowing off limbs to thwart zombie approaches in tight spaces is the move. Otherwise, there's a strong Resi feel to the item rotating, keycode smashing, and inventory Tetris. I'd imagine with this roguelike, the horror element lies more in the fear of impending death by turn-based RNG or a gaggle of zombies you can't quite outmuscle. If you're after genuine scares and persisting in a space that only gets spookier and scarier, I can't see the bittiness of a roguelike being conducive to that. But then again, I don't think this is what it's going for and/or I'm very happy to be proven wrong!

You can keep up with Vultures - Scavengers Of Death over on its Steam page.

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Ed Thorn avatar
Ed Thorn: When Ed's not cracking thugs with bicycles in Yakuza, he's likely swinging a badminton racket in real life. Any genre goes, but he's very into shooters and likes a weighty gun, particularly if they have a chainsaw attached to them. Adores orange and mango squash, unsure about olives.
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