Recent reviews by Bitvar

Update 3-21-26:
I now have a good 9 hours in this game and let me say WOW. The closest thing I could compare this game to is Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is utter madness how deep the systems are in this game. Everything is interactive and driven by physics. Every object in the world is seemingly interactive in some way. The game slowly introduces systems with the "Abyss" zones much like BOTW. Each new system opens up new meaningful ways to interact with the world. I love how physical the game is. Want to loot someone or pick up an object? Well you can't just press E in the general area and schlorp up all things like 99.99% of games, you need intent behind it! You have to look at the object to interact with it directly. I'm genuinely awestruck with how much love and care was put into everything. This is a once in a generation game and I'm so happy Pearl Abyss decided to share this with the world. This is truly a special game. It doesn't overtly hold your hand either which is likely why "games journalists" are struggling. The puzzles (while so far very easy) are clever and use game mechanics to solve without slapping you in the face to say "hey stupid, stand here and do this" with the exception of the first two that do attempt to lead you in a small way. There are so many ways to approach mundane things in the game. A door is locked/guards blocking you? Find another route in from an open window! A chest is locked and you can't pick it or don't have a key? Try hacking it open or launching it against a wall to bust it open! I appreciate that the developers view the player as a competent person and not infantilize us like most games. Please do your self a favor and give this game a try! You can always refund it if you don't like it. Don't let the drooling brain-rotted neandertals who write "reviews" professionally mislead you because they've had a majority of their prefrontal cortex scooped out of their thick skulls and can't tie their shoes or get out of their home without yellow paint and a mommy to show them how to.

Original text 3-19-26:
Good lord, a game that runs flawlessly at 4K, HDR, ray-tracing and ray reconstruction at launch? That's a hard recommend alone. Getting a solid 100FPS with everything at "Cinematic" which is max settings. Please note that if you set lighting to Cinematic and enable Ray Reconstruction it will change your lighting to Max which will have a 40% reduction in performance but do know that the first 10 minutes of the game with the heavy particle effect usage is a rare scene in the game and once you're out of the brief tutorial prologue the game runs significantly better, so there is a good chance you can run Ray Reconstruction on high-end GPUs.

Booted up to play a little bit to get a feel for it and that's enough for a recommend from me. This game is a systems heavy sandbox. Don't buy this for story. Buy to explore and engage with the mechanics. Think Breath of the Wild. Attached PC specs for context. It is sad we live in a world where a AAA game simply functioning at launch is enough to be considered a masterpiece but here we are. Give this game a shot. There is always the 2 hour refund window. Don't let "journalist" brain-lets sway you because they can't figure out a puzzle or find the combat system overwhelming.

The only annoying thing so far is non-skippable cutscenes (hopefully a mod soon) and the weird magnetizing to a character while you talk to them stuff (also hopefully a mod to fix soon).

Cuh-Ray-ZEE in 2D. Gorgeous. Pixel art character action bliss. Juggle your foes and farm style. 10/10 game, when does it come out?

Great game. Having a lot of fun. Would be a perfect 10/10 but you can't see your legs when you look down so sadly it is only a 6.5/10. A passing grade. Give it a shot!

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Please add standard PC settings like FOV and implement HDR. This game is DARK and DARK games demand HDR. Surely John Carpenter, a legendary filmmaker, doesn't want his name tied to such a subpar cinematic experience!

Otherwise pretty fun.

Pros:
Weekly challenges no longer force you to play Slop Royale

Cons:
Pro tier skips are spent for you and auto-unlock on the path you definitely don't want. Extremely annoying. They should refund people either the 15 dollars for tier skips or the tier skips so people can spend them how they want.

Rad game. It is like Megaman if Megaman wasn't painfully slow. I'd buy this for 20 bucks provided it has a proper campaign and isn't just a survival run mode like the second half of the demo.

Looks great, plays great, but the lack of HDR is mind-blowing for a game that relies on lighting/darkness so heavily in every scene. If you won't do HDR please give us more control over gamma and brightness so we can use RTX HDR to its fullest! With HDR this goes from a maybe to a must buy. A lot of gamers out there are on OLED like myself and thirsty for proper HDR. This game is SCREAMING for HDR.

Additionally there are some issues on the second map with shader compilation stutter or some other phenomenon. When rotating too quickly I get a HUGE lag spike (frames drop to 0 for 100ms). Not sure what this is but it is easily repeatable. On a 7900X3D and 5090 FE so most certainly not my system. Otherwise running at about 190FPS max everything, native 4K with DLAA.

If I had one criticism it would be to increase the movement speed and projectile speed by about 20%, but not really necessary. This game gives me huge Metroid Prime vibes. Loving it. Excited for the full release this summer.

Well this game is certainly something! What that might be I don't know, but it isn't good. Gave it a try because I assumed it couldn't be that bad. I'll try to stay positive and say one thing I like: you can reliably hipfire every gun.

The game is a 3v3 objective based shooter where you attack/defend on a symmetrical map (in that both teams have objectives). There is cookie cutter destruction/reinforcement like Siege, it has a horse to help you cope with the insanely slow movement speed, it has ziplines you can setup that are also very slow, the guns are cool though the Saber does everything better, it looks very generic, there is a sword you can jam into the base to summon a panther headed siege tower (wut), the powers exist exclusively to open walls, there is a hammer that can create a smokescreen (huh), you can mine crystals to buy things from the store, there are chests everywhere filled with weapons/armor/ammo, weapons have rarity for some reason and you equip armor like in Apex. Truly a mindboggling game. It is a shame that developers from Titanfall chose to make a confusing mishmash of Hero Shooters rather than just make a legally distinct Titanfall. The FPS market needs a highspeed arena shooter with movement techs not another hero shooter...

If I had to make suggestions on how to fix the game then I'd double the base movement speed, delete the horse, 3x the zipline speed, ditch the looting/buying mechanic and put the weapons on the map (ditch the rarity too) to make them pickups, make it a 6v6 shooter, significantly increase the time/complexity to ruin the enemy base, and fix your implementation of Unreal engine so that normal computers can run it. But frankly I'd just scrap the project and start over. The game lacks identity and focus.

The game runs extremely poorly on a 7800X3D and RTX 5090 by the way. Oh well. I would give it a shot since it is free, but approach the game with zero expectations and maybe you'll find some joy in it.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game is amazing. I played 2.5 hours of this? It flew by! What a riot!