▼ Not recommended
4 hrs
Given I paid $3 for this game it's unusual that I am giving it the thumbs down as value for money is usually my primary criteria for recommending a game. Game development is a creative medium and as long as I'm not being ripped off I prefer to experience as many different creative works as I can.
The issue here isn't that the game lacks content for your money... It's just that minimal effort has been put into preparing the content for consumption. It's not buggy as such... The one actual bug I encountered was two layers of text overlaying on top of either other so neither was readable... But in some ways it's worse then buggy.
When I came to write this review I went back to the store page to make sure the game wasn't actually in early access. When doing so in addition to seeing it wasn't, I also noticed that the "about the game" section on the store page details the back story for the game. If you plan on getting into it make sure to read it there as you wont see anything to do with the story within the game itself.
The game is utterly useless at communicating anything to the player. The tutorial is full of floating lines of text which are writen in broken and at time incomprehensible english. That's if the game attempts to communicate to you what you are supposed to do at all.
A complete lack of forethought means it's possible to get stuck and unable to proceed in the tutorial in the process of simply trying to figure out the controls. As an example, midway through the tutorial you will enter a room upon which a text popup will tell you that you need to use night vision to proceed. There are sever things wrong with this. The first is it is a completely arbitary requirement for proceeding, you can clearly see the path to the exit without nightvision and nightvision doesn't do much to improve the visability anyway.
Dumber then this is the fact while you need to use night vision to proceed, the game does not tell you how to use night vision. I'll save you some time, it is a secondary ability bound to the right mouse and you need to switch your secondary ability to nightvision to use it. The game will not tell you it's a secondary ability, which controls to use, or even that you need to switch to it from the default ability.
But here where it really gets stupid, using your secondary ability uses up "battery power" using the wrong secondary ability 3-4 times before switching to night vision means you wont have enough power to activate it and unlock the door to the next room. For added irony it is the next room that you can no longer access which is the first place where you can recharge your battery. So you have to quit and restart the tutorial.
As a VR experience all these frustrations are amplified by the fact text is hard to read in the first place, you can't see your actual controls when trying to figure out what button does what and parts of the UI are blurry and vague. I never figured out how to properly inturprate what I can only assume is the health meter and I still don't know what the majority of the secondary ability icons were supposed to represent as you just can't make them out. The low fidelty of the models and textures in the game certainly doesn't do it any favours in obscuring the distracting screen door effect either.
The look to aim works rather well but I will say games doing this need to allow you to select which hand you hold the gun in or more to the point which eye you hold it up to. I am utterly right handed but I am however left sighted. This means I hold scopes up to me left eye, use a left handed bow for archery to sight the arrow etc. and this made it super painful to aim the ironsights/scope of the gun given it used the right lense as the center of it's pespective.
That all said I think I need to express what the game did do well. The scoped "visor" display effect is an interesting and apparently effective way of making a more immersive first person pespective VR experience. Also props to developer for having the courage to actually make VR experience based around standard and proven WSAD keyboard and mouse control mechanics. I didn't experience motion sickness and if more people are going to get over VR sickness they need more experiences like this that allow them to to get used to it. The game does however need more controller support. No keys are rebindable in any control scheme and it would be nice if you could use the vive controllers even without motion tracking.
The fact that I'm qualifying the positives with "but it still needs" really says it all... For $3 it's hard to complain, expectations are pretty low for that price point... But this title still deserve the complaining not due to lacking content but due to lacking any level of polish. It needs QA testing and heck, proof reading. You can play it without VR but even at $3 I wouldn't waste my time with it. As a VR experience it has some value, mostly due to the lack of competing products at time of writing... But it still needs a lot of refinement, both as VR product and simply as a product.
The issue here isn't that the game lacks content for your money... It's just that minimal effort has been put into preparing the content for consumption. It's not buggy as such... The one actual bug I encountered was two layers of text overlaying on top of either other so neither was readable... But in some ways it's worse then buggy.
When I came to write this review I went back to the store page to make sure the game wasn't actually in early access. When doing so in addition to seeing it wasn't, I also noticed that the "about the game" section on the store page details the back story for the game. If you plan on getting into it make sure to read it there as you wont see anything to do with the story within the game itself.
The game is utterly useless at communicating anything to the player. The tutorial is full of floating lines of text which are writen in broken and at time incomprehensible english. That's if the game attempts to communicate to you what you are supposed to do at all.
A complete lack of forethought means it's possible to get stuck and unable to proceed in the tutorial in the process of simply trying to figure out the controls. As an example, midway through the tutorial you will enter a room upon which a text popup will tell you that you need to use night vision to proceed. There are sever things wrong with this. The first is it is a completely arbitary requirement for proceeding, you can clearly see the path to the exit without nightvision and nightvision doesn't do much to improve the visability anyway.
Dumber then this is the fact while you need to use night vision to proceed, the game does not tell you how to use night vision. I'll save you some time, it is a secondary ability bound to the right mouse and you need to switch your secondary ability to nightvision to use it. The game will not tell you it's a secondary ability, which controls to use, or even that you need to switch to it from the default ability.
But here where it really gets stupid, using your secondary ability uses up "battery power" using the wrong secondary ability 3-4 times before switching to night vision means you wont have enough power to activate it and unlock the door to the next room. For added irony it is the next room that you can no longer access which is the first place where you can recharge your battery. So you have to quit and restart the tutorial.
As a VR experience all these frustrations are amplified by the fact text is hard to read in the first place, you can't see your actual controls when trying to figure out what button does what and parts of the UI are blurry and vague. I never figured out how to properly inturprate what I can only assume is the health meter and I still don't know what the majority of the secondary ability icons were supposed to represent as you just can't make them out. The low fidelty of the models and textures in the game certainly doesn't do it any favours in obscuring the distracting screen door effect either.
The look to aim works rather well but I will say games doing this need to allow you to select which hand you hold the gun in or more to the point which eye you hold it up to. I am utterly right handed but I am however left sighted. This means I hold scopes up to me left eye, use a left handed bow for archery to sight the arrow etc. and this made it super painful to aim the ironsights/scope of the gun given it used the right lense as the center of it's pespective.
That all said I think I need to express what the game did do well. The scoped "visor" display effect is an interesting and apparently effective way of making a more immersive first person pespective VR experience. Also props to developer for having the courage to actually make VR experience based around standard and proven WSAD keyboard and mouse control mechanics. I didn't experience motion sickness and if more people are going to get over VR sickness they need more experiences like this that allow them to to get used to it. The game does however need more controller support. No keys are rebindable in any control scheme and it would be nice if you could use the vive controllers even without motion tracking.
The fact that I'm qualifying the positives with "but it still needs" really says it all... For $3 it's hard to complain, expectations are pretty low for that price point... But this title still deserve the complaining not due to lacking content but due to lacking any level of polish. It needs QA testing and heck, proof reading. You can play it without VR but even at $3 I wouldn't waste my time with it. As a VR experience it has some value, mostly due to the lack of competing products at time of writing... But it still needs a lot of refinement, both as VR product and simply as a product.
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