Recent reviews by Man's Best Friend

A decent enough isometric brawler/explorer game about a robot trying to repair itself after becoming corrupted. The story of what is going on in the moment is a bit shallow, but learning about the world of before was interesting enough, and the game ends with a bit of a twist. Well drawn, well animated, and smooth gameplay.

An ok concept for a game, marred by dodgy physics, frustrating jumping puzzles, ladders that may or may not work for you, and an announcer that by the end I absolutely hated. Like, cuss you too dude. I admit, I didn't actually finish the game because I got to chapter 8, and was presented with a long winding platforming segment with flaming rocks raining down, and if you fall off or get hit by one of the rocks, it sends you an obnoxiously long distance back for no reason other than to be frustrating. And all that on top of the fact that there are so many ways to get stuck, it's not even funny.

Golf note #72: Everything is golf.
There's not a whole lot of replayability since a lot of the silliness is only effective the first time you play, but I spent 7 and a half hours doing the main campaign to 100%. Was it worth it? Yes. Will it be worth it to inflict this upon my friends at a later date? Also yes.

The game is clearly still balanced around being an arcade game where you are expected to keep feeding it quarters. Most of the game was fine. I enjoyed it, but then I got to assaulting the final stage, and the difficulty (on easy) suddenly increased by a factor of about 10. What was once "doable if careful and cautious" became "you are dead. There is nowhere to run." Exhausted all my lives without being able to exit the spawn area due to extremely overpowered enemy units and complete lack of cover. You're told to seek objectives on the map to make the final encounter easier, but in doing so you make literally everything else harder. It's a lose lose situation, and there's nothing you can do about it.

0.3 hours. I'm sure some will say that's not enough time to have a valid opinion. I'd say just look at the achievements, and just maybe I'm not out of line. This game is not that good. The controller support is a joke, broken in the menus half the time. Playing with keyboard and mouse is only marginally better, but only after you unlock the turret to rotate 360 degrees instead of the normal ~30 degrees from center.

But then it doesn't help that the car still handles poorly, the AI will start shooting you while they're still an indistinguishable spec on the horizon, you get ONE life per game (and purchasable continues), heals are all but nonexistent, your shield is a joke, items will sometimes be dropped but not actually appear, and the game maxes out at 1024x768 resolution (so all the screenshots and videos on Steam are currently lies).

But don't take it just from me. Take it from the achievement list that as of this writing 80% of owners have been wrecked once, 40% of players have finished a single battle, 26% of people have wrecked 10 opponents (a little over one battle), 21% of people have been wrecked 10 times, and 11% have survived 10 battles. It's not unusual for people to not finish games. But these stats should tell you that something isn't right with this game. If you buy this game, there's a decent chance you will not like it.

You've probably heard this in many other reviews, but here's another. Game's not that bad, until the final encounter. You spend the entire game poking at terminals, with the odd environmental puzzle. There's math, morse code, networking, a few other things. Then it takes a complete nosedive. You're given an objective, no hint as to where it is or what to do, but that isn't out of place for this game. It's par for the course. Explore, find information, and go at it. Oh, except this time there's a lunatic with a gun who will one shot you. That's new. And terrible. And really ruins it.

I've played for 35 minutes as of the writing of this. I've completed chapter 1. I'm already sick of the game because it drags so much. An AI that has to pause every few words, a main character that has to block interactions and movements so he can complain. Literally every single thing going wrong. Chapter 1 is where you get players interested and invested. All chapter 1 has done here is bore me to death. Maybe I'll try and play some more. Maybe not. For now, can't recommend.

Might have been interesting, but SO FLIPPIN SLOW! Everything takes forever to do. Any run that you need the phone, you MUST drink the coffee first because for some reason you can open the panel without knocking it over, but you can't answer the phone without knocking it over. Find the object in a 20x20 grid, by the way, the detection radius is ONE, and you can't move vertically and horizontally at the same time. Messed up on an ending? Takes seemingly forever to run its thing with no apparent way to skip. Oh yeah, and the dossier pictures? They might look like they match, but they don't because the quality is crap. Utter waste of time. Don't bother.

GUNS! GLORIOUS GUNS!
Hotdogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades is a fantastic way to go to the range for people who haven't got the ability to actually go to the range. Hundreds of guns including pistols, shotguns, rifles, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, all lovingly lovingly rendered into VR, and fully functional. No detail too small to include. Did you know that the SPAS 12 can toggle between semi-auto and pump action? I didn't, but it can, and it's an option in H3VR. How about the M249 feeding from STANAG box mags? That too is an option, even if realistically it's for emergency use only.

And if paper targets aren't your thing, there are several modes where you'll be under fire too. Personally my favorite is the improved Take and Hold mode where you wander an endless underground facility acquiring new guns and defending control points from murderous hotdogs.

Still in development, and getting updates almost every week, if you want to hit up the range in VR, check out H3VR.

"Do you mind? I'm trying to THINK over here!"

Do you like VR?
Do you like digital logic puzzles?
Do you like math?
Do you like cyberpunk?
Do you like trying to do digital logic puzzles and math in a VR cyberpunk setting while people are SHOOTING at you?

If you answered yes to all of those, first of all that's a weird thing to be into.
Second of all, check out The Technician today!

It's currently in alpha, so there's no story as such. The setting is that you're on an elevator trying to get to the top of the stalk. What's up there? No idea. There are a lot of angry people who would rather that you not get to the top, and a bunch of digital logic puzzles in your way. The guys are infinite, but they can be persuaded to at least give you a moment's reprise by offering them some high speed lead. It starts off simple, with simple logic, but eventually you'll be rewriting flash cards and jacking into the panels yourself. Just don't ignore the grenade that landed at your feet.

It's stressful, trying to balance shooting and hacking. Sometimes it's useful to just stop hacking and shoot everyone. They'll be back, but you can get yourself up to 30 seconds of quiet to think before they do return.

Fun game, and I'm eager to see what comes in the future.