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Ever since Grand Theft Auto 6 was formally revealed, I’ve been yearning for a new city-sized sandbox. But Rockstar’s latest crime epic is still months away at least, and outside of GTA, the industry doesn’t really make games where you can lead the police a merry dance through a chunk of Urbania anymore. The last true open-city game (as opposed to an open-world game), was the disappointing Saints Row reboot from 2022. I suppose Cyberpunk 2077 also counts, though its priorities are very different from a GTA-style simulation.
Steam’s algorithms must have sensed my longing, however, as over the last few weeks they’ve repeatedly recommended a game to me called Vivat Slovakia. Set in 1990s Bratislava and currently in Steam early access, it’s basically a Slovakian studio’s attempt to create their equivalent of Grand Theft Auto. Having passed on it numerous times already, this week I finally took the plunge. I’m not sure it was a good city break, but it was certainly a memorable one.
Vivat Slovakia places you in the role of Milan, a middle-aged guy who looks like he moisturises with wet cement and has a past more chequered than a lumberjack’s shirt. Milan is introduced in a prologue tutorial working as a guard on the Czechoslovakian border, which teaches you how to move and shoot. This starts with you shooting some beer bottles, but quickly escalates to blasting someone trying to sneak across the border using “Comrade sniper rifle”.
The game then fast-forwards to the early post-Soviet era, where Milan is working as a taxi driver, an assumed identity for his true role as an undercover cop. It’s a confusing opening mission.
Your first fare is a possible pimp who immediately starts talking about bribing the police to spy on his ‘girlfriends’. Your next passenger is a journalist called Laura, who instantly decides to go for a coffee with you because she’s working on a story about taxi drivers. Once this segment wraps up, you’re then recruited by a gangster—with his own sinister theme tune—to steal some secret files from a place called the ‘Agricultural Research Institute’.
Frankly I struggled to wrap my head around what exactly was going on. But I at least enjoyed driving around Bratislava. The driving model is similar to more recent GTA games, with enough simulated weight and inertia to the vehicles to make it feel like you’re pulling them around a corner when turning. And while Team Vivat’s Bratislava is hardly the prettiest virtual city ever created, it’s surprisingly detailed, with lots of winding roads and twisting backstreets that make for entertaining navigation.
When I threw a paper over the fence onto a neighbour’s car, it utterly destroyed it.
The simulation of the city is less robust. Traffic AI is pretty braindead, resulting in frequent pileups and cars mowing down pedestrians. Wandering civilians will collapse like puppets with their strings cut at the slightest bump, while their responses to being knocked down are weird and alien, often apologising for having their pelvises smashed into powder. There’s also one bizarrely jaunty walk cycle among NPCs that implies one third of Bratislavans in the ’90s walked like a cartoon cat.
If anything, though, this wonkiness made me more eager to play. After finishing off my taxi round for the night, I took on a side-gig helping a man residing in what he referred to as the ‘House of Joy’ (which isn’t a brothel, as the game itself jokes) deliver homemade newspapers to nearby houses. It’s basically a bicycle short of a Paperboy reboot, even more so than I think is intended. Due to some sort of bug related to the simulated weight of the newspapers, when I threw a paper over the fence onto a neighbour’s car, it utterly destroyed it. Windshield smashed, doors falling off, I may as well have lobbed a brick at it.
Naturally, I spent the next five minutes throwing newspapers into traffic, until the game unsubtly suggested I dump all the remaining papers in a nearby bin. For this absolute hash of a job, I made enough money to buy an assault rifle.
The game’s filled with oddities like this, and it isn’t limited to the systems. The second mission requires Milan to intimidate a journalist, which involves following them to their flat, kicking down their door and waving a gun in their face. This brutish behaviour suddenly gets Milan thinking about Laura, and he decides to check on her. Y’know, just to ensure she isn’t being threatened by some other bald, leathery thug.
Laura, it turns out, is fine, and the pair go on an unofficial date to a nearby horse racing track. This might sound like an odd choice of location, but it’s Laura’s decision, with Milan conceding he’s more into fish than horses. Here he clearly means ‘fishing’, but the way he says it makes him sound a bit Troy McClure. This may explain his painful attempts at conversation at the track itself. When Laura talks about how much she loves horses, Milan launches into the topic of how they shoot the injured ones. “What’s the old saying, that when a horse stumbles, it immediately gets a bullet between the eyes?” Oh, Milan, you old romantic.
It’s often hard to tell whether Vivat Slovakia is being intentionally silly or not, partly because beneath this goofiness is (allegedly) some very serious history. At the end of each mission, the game cuts to a severe black screen where text from different sources reveals its historical inspiration. Some of these are mildly amusing in a ‘wow, that’s wild’ sorta way, like the one explaining how Slovakian state security of the era would communicate on unscrambled radio channels. Others are much bleaker, such as the one following the prologue that lists the number of Slovakians killed crossing Soviet borders, or another that details the horrendous crimes of Bratislavan gangster Tuti a Papas Danišovci.
I know little of Slovakian history from this era, so I can’t verify the authenticity of these stories (though the gangster was a real person). Whether or not these historical vignettes are true, Vivat Slovakia doesn’t do the best job at adapting them for fictional purposes. The story is just poorly told, while the tonal inconsistencies also lead to uncomfortable moments. Cutscenes, for example, are presented as static renders. Combined with the basic character models, this makes them resemble the many cheaply made 3D porn games that clog up Steam, especially when Milan seemingly leers at Laura’s chest following their trip to the racing track.
I must also mention one especially bizarre incident where Milan speaks to his dispatcher over the radio, and she mentions a gang meet taking place at the “Auschwitz restaurant”. I ran through this section a second time to make sure I wasn’t hearing things, cancelling my doctor’s appointment when I noticed the subtitles unequivocally read ‘Auschwitz restaurant’. For a while I assumed this was an inexplicable attempt at a joke, some GTA-esque satire gone badly awry. Later, though, this place is mentioned again, this time spelled as ‘Aušvic restaurant’. After a bit of Googling, I deduced this is either an accidental or deliberate misspelling of ‘Aušpic Restaurant’, a real eatery situated along the Danube.
My working theory is Team Vivat fed their Slovakian script into an AI translator and failed to check it properly, rather than deliberately naming a riverside bistro after history’s most notorious concentration camp. But the tone of the game made it hard to be sure. What is certain is this wouldn’t be the only area Vivat Slovakia deploys generative AI. The game uses AI tech to modify real-actors’ voices (presumably to sound like different characters), and for the music on some of its radio stations, which explains why I kept hearing rock riffs that sounded strangely familiar. I only realised this after playing, and while it’s a relatively small part of the overall game, it nonetheless left a sour taste in my mouth.
The biggest problem with Vivat Slovakia, however, is that it failed to provide the one thing I wanted most from it: simulated police chases. I tried everything to get the cops on my tail, from ramming their cars to blasting through crowds of civilians. The police will eventually respond to a killing spree, but they always seem to spawn in on foot. Perhaps cars eventually turn up if you can survive against the on-foot patrolmen long enough, but I was always overwhelmed before that happened.
Even putting aside my distaste for generative AI, Vivat Slovakia is just too rough and undercooked to make it worth playing right now. That said, it reminded me how much I miss games like it. Not necessarily Grand Theft Auto itself, but games like Watch Dogs, Mafia, and Sleeping Dogs, the B-tier GTA clones that maybe didn’t have the largest worlds or the best stories, but portrayed cities as culturally specific spaces where a multitude of different systems intersect and collide. While I wouldn’t lump Vivat Slovakia in with those games quality-wise, virtual Bratislava does, in its quieter moments, rekindle those same feelings.
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Kurt Indovina
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