Last updated on December 8th, 2025 at 12:22 am
Vandals – Strategy Game Review
Vandals is a Strategy/Puzzle game from ARTE France Apps, first launched in 12th April 2018.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 43+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Vandals Stand Out
Vandals is an infiltration game that will transport you to the most emblematic cities of street art. In this turn-based game, the goal is to sneak around police surveillance and spray walls that grow harder and harder to access.
From Paris to Tokyo, via São Paulo, Berlin and New York, follow in the wake of ultra-famous street artists like Blek Le Rat and Keith Haring.
With Vandals, you can bomb your alias on the walls of New York like Lady Pink, paint childlike characters like Keith Haring, or get inspired by the poems of Miss.Tic and write your own.
After Type:Rider, Vandals is the new project by Cosmografik. It's a video game published and co-produced by ARTE – the European cultural TV and digital channel – and Ex Nihilo. Developed in partnership with Novelab.
It is easy to learn, and the puzzles promise hours of immersion and pleasure.
• Share your most awesome creations on social networks
• Rock to the rhythm of an original soundtrack: headphones recommended!
• Play in portrait or landscape mode. Left-handed / right-handed option
The game includes:
• 60 puzzles to solve
• 5 cities with original graphical worlds
• 40 backgrounders on the evolution of streetart since the 1960s
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Vandals is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 6th September 2018
Recent improvements include:
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.
• Fix : Hidden article in Berlin_04
• Compatible with iPhone 5s and newer, iPadAir / iPad mini 2 and newer
Download & Availability
Vandals is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Good pre-order. Great game, we love turn based games, and this one is pretty challenging, needs some bug fixing though, and hopefully some more levels please. Developer Please check Tokyo level 8 steps, 20 steps? Cannot be achieved. Berlin picture missing between lvl 3,4,5.
Wasnt even planning to buy something. Got the game, and immediately was dissatisfied. The controls are horrendous. Half the time, the game will lag, and it will ignore your original swipe, and about 40% of the time, the game wont respond, you will swipe again, and it will move you twice. Honestly looking for a refund. Would ramble on, but the rest of the people have said it. For reference, we are running on a 64g IPhone 8, only 2 days old.
This is quite a fun, challenging and original game! We would recommend it to anyone who enjoys puzzle games or the GO series. Definitely a top 10 app on the IOS store. Some of the puzzles were very challenging for us though and we had to google how to complete one or two missions. Furthermore, it is a fantastic, mind bending experience for any puzzle game fan. 9.5/10.
Highly recommended, very hard to put down, every level is well designed and becomes more challenging as you play on. Such a high quality app… Well worth the money.
Was on a 14 hour flight played it tell the end!! Super fun and addicting!! Really enjoyed it wish it did end.
Its a really good game it just wasnt what we were expecting. If you are over 10+ you should get a better game like this, but if youre 9- you should definitely get this game.
On iPad this is great! Also working on a like this for fun and this game gave us a lot to think about.
We absolutely love this game we just wish we had the ability to zoom in or get a picture in picture view of the area Im tagging so our big fingers dont get in the way.
Tokyo level 8 step/move counter is wrong, as it cannot be done in 20 moves (Ive 3 starred all other levels); and we also confirm with the other reviewer that the book for Berlin (level 3-5) is missing and theres no pickup. The recent update has improved performance greatly, but just a couple things like this and Game Center still need to be fixed. Thank you, for the hard work to the developers…it is ALWAYS much appreciated Update: so the Tokyo move counter was fixed (thanks), but the Berlin secret book has still not been fixed so that it can be collected and Game Center still doesnt work which means no achievements after we had already achieved so many…is there any word on this, devs? Whats going on? Is it just not going to be fixed.
This game is very similar to the deus ex and Lora Croft Go game. It is fun to play, however, the game randomly shuts down, and constantly kick us back out to the Tutorial. When replaying levels, sometimes the art we have done is there…sometimes its not. Very inconsistent and has some major bugs to be worked out. Asking for our money back.
We didn't mean to buy this!!! How can we get a return.
We absolutely love his game! The puzzles are fun and challenging enough to want to continue, and we found it very informative even being someone who is very well educated on graffiti history. Awesome job guys.
The concept is awesome …the art tool could be a lot better it's hard to make something look detailed or nice …a zoom feature for linework some color shades and maybe some stencils would make this amazing …the old graffiti wars art tool combined with this would make it perfect.
So this game is a clone of Hitman, Lara Croft, and Deus Ex Go. Not a bad thing as those games are some of our favorites on iOS. The problem here is the execution and just general lack of polish. Let us elaborate. So the game looks great. Nice animations, awesome environments and the graffiti twist is cool on the typical puzzle element. Makes us want a Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure port but we digress. The issues Im having are the constant crashing (iPhone 8 here), random difficulty spikes, and just overall difficulty in the controls. None of the options work smoothly and a lot of time there is some massive slow down. Our other major gripe is the enemy AI. It just isnt consistent and in a turn based strategy game the AI must follow rules to make it fair for the player. Bottomline is that we love the idea and concept. Overall graphics are gorgeous and the custom graffiti tags to add to your black book is a great idea. Its everything else that makes this a disappointment.
Gets to opening movement tutorial and crashes after a few seconds on the iPad 4 30GB WiFi-only model running latest iOS available (10.3.3). Tried restarting and closing all other apps with same result.
We had recently gotten an apple gift card for Easter, and downloaded this app because it looked fun to play. Although it says it is available on our device, crashes shortly after the beginning the intro. Don't download this app until a further update.
We couldnt even move in this game.
It crashes everytime we open it. Please fix it.
When we first got into the game we saw the graphics and stared in awe at how amazing they were. We love the gameplay too! Great job.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.1.4
- Size: 298.22 MB
- iOS: 8.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: ARTE France Apps
Last updated: 6th September 2018 | Genre: Strategy, Puzzle | Developer: ARTE France Apps