Recent reviews by rek

This game is good. It runs super smooth, the gameplay is engaging and fun, and there's a ton of content with things to unlock. The difficulty scaling seems really interesting with tons of reasons to keep running the same missions as they actually changing substantially - it doesn't just get "harder" there are new enemy types, new areas to unlock, and various interesting mechanics.

I expected this game to be pretty bad, it's reviews are pretty bad, and it's store page looks pretty bad. I was surprised that it is in fact not pretty bad.

This game is impressively bad. Like "if I designed an entire interface for a mobile game in one night it'd still be better than this" level of bad.

I assume that you might be able to extract some value from enjoying the multiple systems and leagues which apparently exist, if you are capable of putting up with it long enough to figure any of that out. I can't, but I'm honestly impressed how awful this is.

Tons of negative reviews with under an hour played, probably haven't even cleared the first boss yet. If this was a $60 game some of the complaints would be valid, but it's half that.

Is the combat simple? Yes, but it's fun and has some interesting mechanics.

Does it start out slow with just a few items like every similar game? Yes.

"Oh no I have to use mana to play cards!" True, there is actually a cost/benefit balance to actions in this game and you can't just instantly become godlike every run.

I'm enjoying it and look forward to seeing what more there is - I haven't even gotten that far yet. I'm giving this a positive review primarily because the existing reviews are idiotic. If you need the $30 for eggs or something then you can skip it. If you like this kind of game and you aren't broke then get it.

It's a solid 20 hour game if this is your type of thing. There's apparently no level cap but you can pretty easily beat the game around level 25 and there's nothing left to do after that (besides quests you skipped). Do you NEED to play it? No. Is it a solid game worth playing given the price? Yes, if you like fun combat and good music.

VR Headcrabs.

Not a ton of hours yet so I can't speak for lasting appeal, but this is a good game that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend already at the current price. Looks good, runs great, fun mechanics, engaging gameplay. It's "souls-like" in some ways but far less tedious, and I'll always prefer shooting things in the face with my mouse over memorizing controller based dodge mechanics.

Most the negative reviews seem to boil down to the game being too hard, and while some complaints may be valid it's early access and not intended to be perfectly balanced yet. That said, it's not too hard. The easiest difficulty is pretty damn easy, but like most similar games you should expect to die as you learn and unlock things (expecting to beat hard without unlocking any minions isn't a great plan).

I'm giving this a yes mostly because neutral isn't an option. $18 or whatever I paid isn't a lot, this is very close to a $20 game but right now it's more of a $9 game. Whether or not it's worth this price depends on how much you care about the money and how much you'll keep yourself entertained.

Why? Because the mechanics are really cool and the ship builder is pretty good. You have a ton of possibilities with different ship pieces, including adding logic gates and sensors to automate certain things. The "Sumo Arena" is a cool idea - basically you have to build a ship that controls itself, without any weapons, and you try to see which ship can stay inside a closing circle the longest. Awesome idea, but very lacking in implementation (at least for now). With a few more mechanics it could be a really interesting mode, but it ends up being entertaining for a few minutes and that's about it right now.

The main quests are fairly boring and repetitive. The planets are visually different but effectively the same. There's not a ton of quest types. The quests are pretty boring.

So why positive not negative? Because the ship builder is really cool, it's cheap, and it's early access. If you'll have fun with completely overbuilding your ships purely for entertainment you can get some value out of this, but there's not a lot of real "game" here (yet).

If you have a Vive and don't have this game you are doing something wrong. Very wrong.

UPDATE:
Finally got my Vive setup at my new place and was excited to try out all these big updates. A lot of big improvements have been made in many areas, but most importantly of all they have fixed melee in a way where it is still strong and fun without ruining the rest of the game. You actually have to swing now, enemies actually block now, and that means it's no longer just mindlessly teleporting to victory with your sword pointed out in any random direction. Switching this to positive now as my primary complaints have all been addressed, excited to play more and see how it stands up with time.

OLD REVIEW (negative):
This game is okay, it's almost really good. I like the movement, the jump mechanic, the menus, and a lot of the general ideas. It has one flaw but that one flaw is so huge it really kind of destroys the entire game for me: it's absurdly easy. I don't just mean it's not competitive or challenging, even on the hardest setting it seems impossible to ever die.

I'm sure you could lose if you stood next to a couple enemies and refused to take out a weapon, but I can't imagine anyone with any experience in playing a VR game would ever die once on any mission unless it was intentional. That flaw makes the itemization completely irrelevant. It makes using any of the guns completely pointless. It means there is never any strategy or any skill involved in the gameplay at all.

To make it worse you don't really even need to hit anything with melee: you just point a controller out in a general direction and the monsters effectively kill themselves. Imagine having a lightsaber that instantly killed anything within a foot of it, so powerful you accidently killed people more often than you did intentionally. Now remove how fun that sounds and what you have left is the melee combat in this game.

At half the price I'd likely recommend it for all the things I do like about it, and I hope that at some point I can switch this review to positive because the game has potential, but until it becomes actually possible to lose a mission at least once on the hardest settings I just can't see any replay value beyond a couple hours of screwing around. If you at least had to swing the absurdly overpowered swords around it would at least be entertaining, but as it is you just kinda stand still and win by default.