Vivat Slovakia Early Access impressions for PC

I’ve been trying to come up with the best way to describe Vivat Slovakia for awhile now, and here’s what I’ve come up with: it’s like Grand Theft Auto, if GTA were reimagined through the lens of post-Cold War Eastern Europe by developers with a fraction of the talent and the budget of Rockstar.

In other words, Vivat Slovakia is not, in the strictest sense of the term, a good game.

In fact, in many ways, it’s straight-up bad. The voice acting and the cutscenes are horrible. Its characters look absurd. The physics are ridiculous. It’s not very well-optimized. It’s insanely buggy. The game is still technically in Early Access, so some allowances need to be made, but by any reasonable standard, Vivat Slovakia is kind of a mess.

But that’s also what makes Vivat Slovakia kind of fun.

Take the voice acting, for example. On the game’s Steam page, it says that “(p)art of (the game’s) English voice cast is created by using AI to modify the live actors’ voices.” This might explain why so many characters have English accents, despite the game taking place in Bratislava (a mere 1,100 or so miles away). It wouldn’t explain, however, why the characters don’t move in cutscenes, even as the game zooms in on their faces. It feels like the developers put static characters in as placeholders, and then forgot to take them out.

And yet, at the same time, the absurdity of it all works. It’s the same sort of enjoyment you can get from a terrible b-movie, where the actors are genuinely making an effort: somehow, by sheer force of will (and maybe a little pity), it becomes watchable/playable, if not quite competent.

And that carries over to the rest of the game. Again, there’s little in Vivat Slovakia that could be described as good, but that makes it fun. There’s the way that the game claims to incorporate a wanted system, yet you can mow down as many pedestrians as you like with zero consequences. On a similar note, there’s the way that the cars and pedestrians seem to exist in entirely different planes: the pedestrians walk everywhere with no concern whatsoever (and, weirdly, about half of them are constantly and enthusiastically waving briefcases around), while the cars fly down the roads, screeching to a halt at every intersection but thinking nothing of taking out streetlights and road signs.

There’s the way that cars are both indestructible and incredibly fragile. I found that my character could shatter his car windows just by walking into the car, but at the same time I could launch myself into walls and be able to drive away (albeit missing a door or two).

And there are the bugs. So, so many bugs. Like the time I sideswiped a car, and it abruptly blinked out of existence. Or the time I was driving down the road on a mission where I couldn’t damage the car I was driving, and a streetcar suddenly popped into existence right in front of me, causing me to total the car and fail the mission. Or the time I ran over one of the game’s big gangsters moments after he got out of my cab, and his body just instantly vanished. Or the time I drove down some stairs and got stuck, tried the “unstick” button only to find that it simply added my original car on top of the car I was driving, tried standing up only to see my character’s disembodied head floating atop the car, and then I finally restarted from the last checkpoint…at which point the game respawned me inside a car, underneath a building, trapped until I managed to find a wall I could drive through.

LIke I said, it’s buggy. And simply being an Early Access title doesn’t explain the state Vivat Slovakia is in – the game is aiming for full release sometime in the next couple of months, and it’s hard to imagine it being in a state that could accurately be described as “finished” any time soon.

But as long as you’re willing to embrace the bugginess – which is to say, if you’re a person for whom “Eurojank” is a term of affection, rather than derision, and if you’ve ever wished to see what a GTA Eurojank game might look like – then I wouldn’t say that Vivat Slovakia is without its merits. I doubt the final version will make anyone forget GTA (or even any of its lesser clones that came out back in the day), but even still, this game has a certain charm. A messy, buggy, absurd charm.

Team Vivat provided us with a Vivat Slovakia PC code for review purposes.