Vholume review – a headlong rush of parkour perfection in a brutalist wonderland

PC; Nathan Grange, Léonard Lemaitre, Niels Tiercelin, IronEqual Race across impossible dystopian cityscapes in this exhilarating game of wall-runs, death-chancing leaps and split-second improvisation At first, Vholume seems like a quick rush through some smartly selected references.

Has this breathless yet austere parkour game been designed or ingeniously curated? The urban gymnast moveset comes from Mirror’s Edge.

Level names use terms like conapt, first coined by Philip K Dick.

And the environments themselves are dystopian and surreal, Half-Life 2’s City 17 colliding with the blasted avenues and mute archways of de Chirico.

Many games have influences.

Vholume has actual taste.

All the surface stuff fades away when the game is in motion, however.

Vholume’s an on-foot racing game in which you hoof it through spectacularly odd environments, moving from one beam of concrete to the next.

You’re clipping your wall-runs and power-slides together to bridge seemingly impossible gaps between buildings, forever in search of the next stretch of track, the next turn, the next jump that gets you to the level’s exit and the worldwide leaderboards.

And once that’s done, you have a choice: onwards to another gauntlet, or back to the start of this one again to slice a few microseconds off your score? Or maybe you’d rather head over to multiplayer to race against the ghosts of others? Continue reading...