We root for the little guys and love a good underdog story here at Gameffine. Budget and polish mean nothing to us if a game is made with passion and has redeeming qualities that put it above its big-budget contemporaries. In the 10+ years the bossman Ayush has run Gameffine, we have covered a plethora of underdog projects that gave its competitors a run for their money. Games like Gothic, Boiling Point, Disco Elysium (before it hit big), and many more received special love from us. So, whenever we come upon a promising indie game with more passion and ambition than budget, we (or more specifically, yours truly) pounce on it as my kitten does on my gaming mouse (pictured below). Thus, it should come as no surprise that we decided to check out Vivat Slovakia, an ambitious open-world crime drama set in Slovakia in the “wild ’90s”. Seemingly inspired by real events and featuring a story “as sharp as if it were written by life itself,” Vivat Slovakia has been out on Steam Early Access since April 2024. As a keeper of anything Eurojank, I’ve been driving around Slovakia’s corrupt streets for a few over two months now and I can’t wait to tell you guys all about it.
You do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out from where Vivat Slovakia takes its inspiration. It’s nigh-impossible to make an open-world, action-adventure game without looking up to the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Mafia. Vivat Slovakia goes one step further and inhales some vibes from The Getaway as well. The more, the merrier, I say!
The story of Vivat Slovakia revolves around Milan, aka Trotter, an undercover officer in the Slovak Secret Service who doubles as a taxi driver. While in most countries, undercover officers infiltrate illegal operations to uphold the law, Trotter often finds himself working with shady government officers to do their cleanup work. Despite the shoddy production quality, Vivat Slovakia starts with a cold opening following a brief tutorial involving a young Trotter shooting down refugees trying to cross the border illegally. For a while, I thought I was in for a foreign movie screening at a film festival, thanks to a well-directed shot of the camera panning over the Bratislavan cityscape while Trotter provided a philosophical narration about wretched humanity or something like that. I suppose he’s just as good with words as he’s with a gun.
The rest of the story isn’t as strong as the opening, but I’m sure I must be missing out on some important cultural context. The early access version features half of the main story and various side activities around the city, like taxi fares, fishing, etc. Most of the missions either have you driving someone from point A to B or committing crimes in the name of national security. The narrative is not anything new, but it’s not bad either. Trotter himself is a very huff and gruff, unlikable fella whose character perfectly fits in with the awful stuff he’s tasked with doing.
One thing that caught me off-guard is how semi-decent the voice acting is (considering its indie nature). The game features both English and Slovak voice acting, and both are just as serviceable. In most of the European Indie games, you can expect meme-worthy, “so bad it’s good” type of English voice acting, but not Vivat Slovakia. Sure, you can tell that most of the voice actors aren’t acting professionals (except Totter who’s voiced by Majo Labuda) , but they deliver their lines without resorting to exaggerated accents and goofy intonations. Personally, I’d just keep the Slovak audio just for that extra bit of immersion. Moreover, the game features 6 radio stations with licensed music, and you can also add custom music tracks like the old GTA games.
The gameplay of Vivat Slovakia is also… serviceable. Like any other modern open-world game, players can explore the city freely on foot as well as in vehicles, cause mayhem, and overall, be a total jerk. The gameplay is far from polished and features all the jank and bugs you’d expect from such an ambitious yet modest-budget title. But everything just works, kind of. The city is well-detailed with lots of civilians, shops, banners, billboards, and period-appropriate props. The driving is fun (when the NPC drivers aren’t being total douchebags), and there are around 50 period-appropriate vehicles to drive around in. Digging around, I came to know that Vivat Slovakia is the successor to Vivat Sloboda, a prototype-ish open-world game from the same developers released in 2019. You learn new things every day!
So, you guys probably figured out by now that I like Vivat Slovakia and want it to succeed. However, there is one aspect of the game that I just can’t get behind. I can enjoy the jank and excuse the bugs, but by the Eldritch Gods, the optimization of the game is terrible! I could barely run the game on my 3070 last month, and even with some performance optimization patches, I can hear my GPU crying for mercy while running the game. No matter what settings you pick, the game has a hatred towards 60 fps or higher.
According to the developers, the game is heavily CPU-bound. But there is no way that a game that looks like the way Vivat Slovakia does should have trouble maintaining 60 fps on a Ryzen 5 5600x. Even though the developers claim that they’ve hit 72 fps using the same CPU as mine, paired with a 3060, the fact of the matter is that the fps keeps jumping around more than people at a swinger party. Vivat Slovakia is plagued with microstutters, making it hard to find an excuse to keep playing. This aspect alone can kill many players’ potential interest in the game. To their credit, the developers have been hard at work, delivering performance fixes and content updates quite frequently. If you ask me, optimization should be their utmost priority right now, because they’ve got something cool in their hands.
INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
So, long story short, I really dig Vivat Slovakia. Despite its rough gameplay and crude visuals, I find myself going back for more. It’s truly the Chuck Norris of video games. At the same time, I feel like this game is made for Slovakian natives and can be quite a tough sell to outsiders. Unless you’re like me and fancy everything Eurojank. I really hope Team Vivat puts some more focus on the optimization side of things, as it’s the main barrier that’s stopping me from having fun with Vivat Slovakia.
