Of all the role-playing games on the market today, Vigilante has got to be one of the easier ones to review. Why is that, I hear you asking. Well, that's because it takes only six minutes to read through, and nobody can reasonably expect you to playtest it before writing a review.
Vigilante is, as Steve Jackson Games describes it, a "full-color mini-booklet." It's a total of sixteen pages, if you include the pages that comprise the covers. More specifically, it's four standard-sized pieces of paper folded lengthwise. The paper it's printed on (if paper is the right word for it) is a nice sturdy kind that makes a pleasant "wobble wobble wobble" sound if you hold it in one hand and shake it back and forth. It comes in an envelope printed with warnings down the back. The front of the envelope tells us, in part, "This is not a game. It says it's a game. It LIES.... This is a work of art."
Those lines are a pretty accurate description. This isn't really a game. It seems to have been crafted with the intention of making an artistic work (the pages are dark splashes of color featuring the occasional scribble of a murderer or a gun, and the sparse text changes angles and font size,) but the artist didn't come up with anything especially meaningful to convey so instead decided to fill it with a few quotes and some exhortations to kill people.
Kill people? Well, you are a vigilante, after all. The premise can be gleamed from the Introduction Page that you can view on Steve Jackson Games' web site: "there comes a time in every life when you need to kill someone. Sometimes, lots of someones.... Vigilante is a live-action roleplaying game." When I saw that page online, it conjured up an image of something similar to another Steve Jackson game, Killer. The difference, of course, is that Killer is a game you can play.
The "rules" of Vigilante are as follows. This is a LARP where you play yourself. Everyone else is playing. Get a weapon, preferably a gun. Write a letter documenting your motivation. Go outside and kill as many people as you can until you're captured or killed. The people you kill are theoretically "bad guys" (the name of the game is "Vigilante," not "Serial Killer") but there are a couple rationalizations given in case you can't find any actual criminals. The goal of the game is to get a higher body count than anyone else.
That's basically it. Now you can see why there are warnings on the envelope. And why it's only sold on Steve Jackson Games' online store. And why I'm wondering why I spent ten bucks on it.
I was going to try to be a little charitable and give Vigilante a substance rating of 2, but then I realized I couldn't think of a single gaming product that had less substance than this. TWERPS supplements have more substance. I think the insert with the "Zocchihedron" 100-sided die had more substance than this. This was more or less substanceless. So, I guess I really better go with a 1. The style I decided to give a 3. I rather liked the artistic style of a couple of the pages. But a number of the pages have scribbly drawings that I didn't think were as evocative as they could have been.
In short, I found this a rather disappointing product. Now, you might be saying, "maybe this guy just doesn't get it." Well, part of the reason I bought this product was that the aforementioned sample Introduction Page amused me. But there wasn't much more of a joke there. I just didn't find Vigilante as a whole to be that amusing. The only people I could really see wanting to pick this up would be collectors. And maybe people that find homicide particularly funny. Everyone else would probably be better off steering clear of this one.
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)
