Recent reviews by Honest

Yet again, the limits of the Steam Review System forces me to write a long explanation that boils down to "I'm lukewarm but ultimately positive about the game, but your milage may vary and your expectations may betray your enjoyment of this game"

So you see the steam page and think "Oh! It's like a De-make of Dark Souls! I like Dark Souls and crunchy graphics." and while this game does have some parallels to Dark Souls, it's roguelike and procedurally generated nature really torpedo a lot of what makes Dark Souls great.

Let's start with exploration. Rooms are procedurally generated so the layouts change from run to run, but there's so little variety in the rooms and how they are attached together it hardly matters. Each room will have at most -2- enemies. That's just a rule I guess. No thought put into their placement in the room, that seems to be random too. So Dark Souls carefully laid out maps are a no-go here, as well as enemy placement and numbers. Every room is a known variable. There will be 2 guys at most. You go through the map, collect weapon/armor/shield blueprints and gold, and spend that gold between levels on permanent upgrades and the ability to unlock those weapon/armor/shields in future runs. Pretty standard Roguelike stuff, though the gear is not well balanced and you can pretty quickly find gear that cheeses the entire game. You pick a level, beat the boss, and choose between 2 routes to continue on. Though I mostly stuck to the same route, because some of the level choices are just miles worse than others. Like the Royal Hunting Ground is FILLED with traps, but other levels just don't have any.

Combat is...sort of Dark Souls. In theory, the game expects you to parry to create an opening for big damage or for an instant-kill if your parry meter is filled, but in practice you take no damage through block as long as you have Stamina, the dodge iframe window is H I L A R I O U S L Y long. Like, genuinely, did someone add an extra 0 somewhere or something because this dodges as you're getting back up from the dodge, it's insane. And parrying is actually the only thing that requires decent timing and guarantees a good reward, or you can equip one of the many armor pieces that give you a ranged option or a way to stagger the enemy and not bother with that nonsense. Hell, if you just want to beat the game the Chain Dart armor is a 100% stagger chance for free. Pair that with the shield that gives max HP on kill and wow you're unkillable

The game has 3 difficulties, and if I'm being honest it does a terrible job of presenting them. It's supposed to get harder as you go, obviously. But the way they decided to do that is by taking away chances to replenish your heals down to once per run and buffing all the enemies into Elite versions, and requiring you to find a key drop from 1 enemy on the map to progress. It's cranking the difficulty by yanking stuff out of your pockets, not by making the game progress organically. I'm not a fan.

So this all sounds...pretty negative. I didn't hate the game, and I enjoyed playing it enough to see it through to the true ending that requires you to beat the boss on 3 difficulties. Though I can say by the last run I did I was pretty honed in on the cheesiest strategy I could think of just to be done with it.

Updated March 15th

17 hours and I'm about ready to stop, sit down, and have a nice long think about Trials of Valor. That, and I'm bored waiting for the rice cooker to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at me. I said a lot of positives in my first impression of the game, and honestly most of that is still true now. The combat in this game is genuinely fun, you get into a nice flow, and you need to at least be, to some extent, reactive in order to survive. But the game has a lot of limitations and cracks that show once you put more time into it.

The method of equipping items (New gear replaces old gear, old gear is permanently deleted) means your gear becomes rather interchangeable and loses a lot of its impact. Especially when 2 separate relics encourage you to equip every single piece of gear you come across, the optimal strategy seems to be ignoring whatever the gear does and just slapping it on for a few rounds.

Hell, build variety in general in this game suffers after repeated play. The pool of Artifacts, abilities, and gear sets is just too small and you don't seem to unlock any more at all. Your only meta progression is the 5 characters and a series of unlockable starting relics you can begin a run with which don't seem to appear in the main run. So those are their own thing and once you've played a few times you'll figure out which are the best to start with. And then optimize your runs with the limited pool of abilities and, if you cheese runs with all the gold you can squeeze out, buy nearly every artifact in the game every single run.

And when I say 5 characters, I really mean 3. Warrior, Mage, Rogue, The Assassin and Templar ended up just being the same as the Warrior and Rogue, only with slightly tweaked abilities you can find and different passives. They do play relatively differently, and keep the combat pretty fresh. Though I do stand by my initial impression, the game is way too easy. Granted, I have some fighting game experience, but this game only killed me once. And truthfully, that was only because I was fixated on unlocking the Assassin and wasn't paying attention to my health while trying to hit 100 poison stacks on a guy, because everything kept dying before I could get 100 stacks.

I still feel exactly the same about the UI as I did initially. Combat feels geared towards a controller since it's an action brawler, but map navigation with a controller is just not great. There's no snapping, if you want to check items or abilities you have to move the cursor to the top corner. It's not horrendous and it gets the job done, but it is kind of a lightly grating point of interaction. Also I didn't feel like doing another few runs to check, but I think the map isn't actually randomly generated? I kept seeing the same elite fights in the exact same spots, but maybe that was just me making stuff up.

The last thing I'll focus on is the biggest glaring issue with the game where all of its small flaws focus together, Ascension. Same as most roguelikes, you beat the game, you get some meta currency, and you unlock the next difficulty level. Woo! The problem is really a few things at once: Ascension is per character, there are 5 characters, and there are 10 ascension levels per character. Meaning, in theory, to do all the ascension levels for each character you'd have to have 50 successful runs. 45 minutes~ per run is already a lot for a roguelike, but the thing that sours everything is that the fights, the builds, the artifacts, the gear, it's all too similar. It all bleeds together far too quickly so every run feels the same.

So, Trials of Valor. It has the bones of a great brawler and is worth the price for the slick combat, but it will quickly show its limitations once you dig into it for an extended period. Also maybe it's harder than I think idk I can do a frog loop with Zato-1, don't ask me.


[Posted March 9th]
Trials of Valor is, so far, an interesting take on a few different genres. They aren't exactly frankensteined together, but boy they aren't fully in harmony either. I'll probably expound on this after some more time, but after a few runs in the demo and 2 successful runs, I've got a good impression but some nitpicks that I hope the dev will address.

The moment to moment gameplay revolves around 2 things: Combat is something between Guilty Gear Strive and Devil May Cry and map navigation is just Slay the Spire. Genuinely, I think the combat in this game kicks ass. 5 classes, each with 2 weapon types you swap between for different abilities, abilities you acquire and slot in as you progress so your build changes with each run, and skills / perks that can let you lean further into those builds.

The fights are 1v1 2D things, which is where I draw the fighting game comparison. You don't need nearly the same amount of skill or timing as a fighting game, so if you've ever done a quarter circle without pooping your pants you may find some of the fights a little too easy and the perfect block a little forgiving. Though, adjust your expectations, don't assume you're buying a 1000+ hour ranked mode grind and instead a neat little indie 2d fighty-brawly-thingy, and combat does have its own entertaining flow. It's genuinely satisfying, though I will say so far I haven't had much of a struggle playing. There are ascension levels that may prove more challenging, but in all my demo runs AND my 2 main game runs I did not lose. Now, maybe I just kick all kinds of ass but it could also mean the base game is a little easy.

I said navigation is just Slay the Spire and, as much as I hate being reductive it's just Slay the Spire. 3 levels, levels are just branching paths of interconnected nodes, nodes are either heals, events, chests, fights, or boss fights. You pick starting artifacts and gain more as you go that alter your build. It fits fine with the combat, though there probably could have been a wider variety of events. I'm almost certainly wrong in this statement, but there seemed to be more unique shopkeepers than there were unique events. I ran into The Orb event like 5 times, but only ever saw this Dwarf Blacksmith once. It just seemed like events were quick to repeat, and the random events were almost always a shop.

I have a few minor complaints, but ultimately the package is pretty damn solid, the combat is genuinely fun, and the flaws are very minimal.
For one: Please activate Steam Cloud Saves. I wanted to play on my laptop or my Steam Deck but my saves are stuck at home.
Two: The gameplay seems to be catered to using a controller, but the UI is actively fighting against using a controller. Only the most basic commands on the overworld map are bound to buttons (Like making choices during events, but NOT accessing your equipment, menus, etc), otherwise you have to scroll over the screen and click on them. This is incredibly annoying because you just have to navigate the map like this. It's slow and unintuitive.

And it's not really a complaint, but a funny thing you'll notice, since the game is 1v1 and some fights are against multiple opponents, you'll encounter a band of feral wolves out in the woods that very politely decided in advance their turn order and agreed to attack one at a time. How nice of them!

So I'll probably follow up when I finish, but for now I feel like it's worth picking up for the excellent combat alone.

Also is there some kind of character asset pack that's going around or something? Between this, Gah! and Soulstone Survivors I've seen damn near the same character models. I joked about Grant Abbit's blender tutorials in my Gah! Review but I'm realizing the more likely scenario isn't that 3 different indie devs all learned to model from the same guy, but 3 different indie devs all picked up the same asset pack and made some adjustments to it. Not that that's explicitly a bad thing, though it does mean I could put all 3 games side by side and easily convince someone they're all by the same dev.

Did you play through one of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games and come out the other side thinking "Wow, I wish these games were good instead of just making me disillusioned with reality"? For those of us who didn't make a Lucario fursona after PMD, there's good news.

House of Necrosis is a pretty interesting take on the Mystery Dungeon formula, though its difficulty and roguelike elements may end up wearing down your patience instead of being fun or exciting.

Gameplay is very similar to PMD. top down tile movement, hidden traps, multiple floors with increasingly difficult enemies etc. It's set apart from PMD by actually being difficult and requiring you to strategize and take risks. The most exciting parts of this game are definitely when you need to carefully maneuver around enemies while maintaining your health and ammo. It's got a pretty good grasp of both survival horror and mystery dungeon mechanics.

Downsides, the inclusion of roguelike elements including randomized gear and items being lost on death means that you may suddenly find yourself losing hours of progress because of a misclick. It's an incredibly unforgiving game, death means anything you were carrying is gone without any way to recover. Which adds a level of challenge and depth for sure, but if you're like me and you got through the main game but suddenly lost all of your high level equipment during an optional post-game dungeon because of bad luck, you may just not feel up to bothering any further. I had fun, but I don't feel obligated to re-farm my equipment for hours if it'll just get lost again.

So, final word: Good PMD style game with a solid challenge and some fairly punishing roguelike elements that will. at the drop of a hat, beat you down into the dirt for a single absentminded button press.

Gah! Is a Diablo-style ARPG that doesn't take itself too seriously, for better or worse. The light humor is very hit or miss, mostly just leading to the game being a little weird in places.

Starting with the gameplay, Gah! styles itself as a more hardcore style game with perma-death. In practice, Gah! is a tricky and sometimes difficult game for about 10~ hours and then a game of wack-a-mole where you only need to hold one button down for the rest. As stated, it's very similar to Diablo with the same top down view, limited inventory, random named item drops with various stats, classes, and equipment slots. If you've played Diablo, Path of Exile, etc. You will be right at home here.

The difficulty is very much frontloaded, after winning a few missions you gain a currency used for permanent upgrades which are relatively impactful at helping you survive. But the thing that takes the difficulty and snaps it in two is the Vault. Hell, if you scroll down on the steam page the Vault is actually pictured and featured at the bottom. Once unlocked, it allows you to save an increasing number of gear pieces through each victorious run. (Starts with 2 but goes all the way to a full gear set of 8) Which is a nice thing at the start but does 2 things very quickly. It trivializes the difficulty, once you win a run the next one will be easier by a mile due to the saved gear. But it also pigeonholes you into playing the same character in each run, since that's the character who's gear you are saving. I've played maybe...4 of the game's 12? I think 12 classes because I unlocked the Vault and just kept going with that character since my best piece of gear was a weapon that no other class I had unlocked at the time could use. You also unlock classes REALLY late, so unless you're interested in post-game content you won't be using most of them anyway. There's a regular and nightmare difficulty, but due to the vault being such a game breaker I literally did not die on Nightmare difficulty. Hell, I did most of the achievements on it because I forgot I was playing the "Hard" mode.

Solid little Survivors game that I can absolutely recommend if you tick these boxes.

Do you like:
PS1 graphics
Mechs
Survivor-type games
And uh...the Drum and Bass band Pendulum?

Unlocks are nice and impactful and keep you playing, despite the small number of levels / characters. Music is absolutely fantastic. Entire game should take around 20~ hours to 100% and is worth the hilariously low price.

A game that can best be described by looking at the title.

"What is Jet Island?"

Well there's an Island. And you jet around on it.

Sarcasm aside, few games really do a good job of presenting scale like this. Jet Island is massive, you swing, surf, and uh..well jet across a massive terrain with a surprising amount of verticality. Unlockable powerups and modifiers are spread throughout the area as well as a few bosses and secrets to explore. There's also a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ huge worm flying around overhead that took me a bit to realize was the final boss. I thought it was just for show but nope, you've gotta jet your whole ass island up there too.

If Jet Island did anything poorly, it's the minimalist approach to everything meant it did not really describe -what- your goal actually is in the game. Even a pop up that said "Hey maybe check out those big red lights coming from the ground" would have been something. I actually put it down for a few weeks the first time I tried it, after 40 minutes of flopping around on a hoverboard I got frustrated and assumed I had bought another sandbox game. But no, there's actual stuff to do! The game just does a poor job of directing you to it.

So, Jet Island. If you have strong VR legs, or you're willing to put yourself to the test in a fast paced movement based VR game? This is the one. Love it.

Battle Talent is both my current favorite VR sword fighting game and a bit of a mess. There are some genuinely fantastic things about it that you just do not even come close to in other VR melee combat games, but with that comes some issues you also just don't get in other melee combat games.

For the good, the graphics are actually pretty nice for VR. This is always a point of contention for people because VR just has to sacrifice some graphic quality to run. So when I say it looks good, it looks good for a VR game, not a new game in 2026. Enemys, weapons, and the arena all look pretty good.
Speaking of enemies, the variety of enemy types is surprisingly good in this game. Of the 3 main enemy types, goblin, undead, and human, you have a wide variety of goblins both big and small that all do a variety of different attacks that require different ways to engage. Some throw bombs/daggers, some summon enemies or cast spells, and there are big beefy goblins with giant swords. The undead are a -little- uninspired, as they are half skeletons in armor and the other half are two varieties of floating lich types. The worst are probably the humans, as they don't really have much variety between them except for "Girl with sword" or "Guy with axe" or "guy with katana and big hat". There are also bosses for each of the enemy types but I'll get to that.
I mentioned the variety of weapons and good golly ms molly there are a ton of weapons in this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. Just to name a few random ones off the top of my head: Monkey King's extending pole, a katar punching dagger with two guns on it so you can punch and fire, an electric guitar, a spear that dashes you forward at full tilt, and of course: Gun. And that's just a few.
And the combat HOO boy the combat. Fighting in this game is where it really either shines or struggles, depending on what you are fighting. When fighting basic enemies that don't have a health bar above their head, the game really shines. You get a slew of hilarious abilities that compliment your vast array of weaponry, from simple dodges and parries and kicks to a time slow and what I refer to as the Omnislash where you can launch enemies into the air with an upward swing, jump, and as long as you're hitting them in the air while you are airborne you both stay suspended in place while you cut the unfortunate enemy to bits in midair. The sheer variety of ways you can cut up an enemy or engage in combat is fantastic and completely outshines other VR swordfighters.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuut it's obviously not a perfect game and VR does tend to shine a VERY bright light on any issues or mistakes.
There are a few different game modes. Your generic sandbox, an adventure mode where you do small arena challenges to progress and unlock new abilities/weapons, a challenge dungeon with unique rules and procedurally generated dungeons (Sort of, you'll see a lot of the same rooms very quickly) and multiplayer. Getting this out of the way now, the multiplayer is -okay- but the connection just isn't good enough for a sword fighter of this intensity. The connecting player has to deal with slowdown and sometimes enemies not reacting to being hit. There have been a few updates to the multiplayer since I've tried it so, perhaps this has been improved, but my experience with it was that it was not great.
The Sandbox is a sandbox. Every VR game has to have a sandbox mode, hell a lot of VR games ARE a sandbox mode which is why I consider sandbox modes in games to be equal to watching paint dry.
The challenge and adventure modes are genuinely pretty good and have a good amount of reply value, but their biggest failing is thhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeee
Bosses! Good lord the bosses in this game suck. The goblin bosses are probably the only tolerable ones, because they aren't heavily armored. In theory, you are supposed to deflect their attacks with strong hits to stun them and whittle them down. But once you get to the skeleton boss, his heavy armor negates a ton of damage and stagger, most of your combat abilities just do not work (Anything with a health bar can't be launched or grabbed or manipulated like regular enemies) and the wide variety of weapons becomes a major hinderance because if it isn't designed to remove armor easily, you'll just have to brute force the bosses down which is both a frustrating trial and decidedly not fun. And depending on your weapon, trying to deflect may just end up with the boss swinging through your strike anyway and hitting you. It can get frustrating, especially in the adventure mode. I've not completed 2 missions despite trying over several dozen times.

So I do recommend Battle Talent for the sheer variety of crap you can do, even if it does fall short in a few areas and has some Senator Armstrong level boss fights. But if you're looking for a VR sword fighter where you can beat a goblin to death with another goblin, this is the game for you.

Arken Age is a pretty competent and solid VR adventure game that lasts -just- long enough to not overstay its welcome. Story wise, it was decent enough. A step above other VR games, but I genuinely struggle to pay attention to audio logs in games, so some of it was lost on me. Combat is the best part by a mile, and despite trying I couldn't find a singular way to cheese every encounter which shows good design. Enemies would get a few good hits in, even up to the end of the game which kept me engaged. And you will die, a lot. Which caught me off guard, this game really does not pull its punches. The game really came alive during this one area's wave shooter mode, but that doesn't last as long as I'd like. If you're going for 100%, you're looking at 13-16~ hours or so. The climbing with your pickaxes and exploring for collectables and extra gun parts adds a nice touch too. There's a lot of creativity in how you can approach things by utilizing climbing. If I have ANY complains about the game it's the story wasn't enough to keep me paying attention and the gesture for bringing out the climbing hooks seemed tailored to activating when I didn't want it to and refusing to work when I wanted.

TL:DR? Solid VR game, good combat, good exploration. Absolutely worth your time.

1/6/26:

In the interest of fairness, I wanted to swing back to re-review this game because I obviously put about another 70 hours into it and let's be real. Game time played can be a much bigger indicator of someone's actual opinion than the words they write down. DRG: Survivors is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard. It's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard survivors game. I'd say unfairly so at launch. A game can be difficult and fun, I'm still telling people to play Sekiro in 2026 after all. But when a game doesn't give you the tools to combat that difficulty it becomes unfun. A recent-ish update fixed a lot of the problems I had with progression in this game. Legendary item drop rate was significantly increased. I got 2 legendary drops in 70 hours of playing, and then post-update one drops every other mission. A significant improvement to player power, along with another row of permenant upgrades. My gripe with this game wasn't that it was hard, but that it was hard and expected you to cut your teeth to get beyond that difficulty. I know it's a nod to Deep Dives in DRG classic, but having your only guaranteed source of legendary gear be time gated to once per IRL WEEK is stupid. It's stupid stupid stupid.

So bravo to the devs, the game is actually enjoyable at Hazard 5 now! And it isn't even a cakewalk either, I'm still getting my teeth kicked in but I'm seeing a lot better gear and a lot more success.

So I can recommend this game a lot more now to those who like survivors games but want a challenge that isn't just learning how to bunny hop in Megabonk.

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DRG Survivors is a weird recommendation from me because like.

As a "Survivors" genre game, it's pretty competent and blends Deep Rock's mechanics fairly well. The use of mining for resources to spend during a run is nice, being able to dig through dirt to escape trouble is thematic and useful, and it's got all the shiny gems you love because we all yearn for the mines. The escort mission is actually pretty good and even the 5 zones from DRG are pretty faithfully recreated.

Though any praise I have for the game kind of...washes away after 50~ hours. So obviously if you just want to play a survivors-type game until you are bored of it and you didn't already buy Megabonk, you'll get what you pay for. But if you actually care about completing all of the content or going for all achievements, you'll find a frustrating and geninely unfun uphill battle. Difficulty in these games is always tricky. Vampire Survivors tackled this by having you meet arbitrary requirements to unlock new things, meaning you couldn't just rely on the same overpowered setup but otherwise VS wasn't terribly difficult. Soulstone survivors added so many modifiers, enemy health scaling, void zones, and other things that constantly moving and mashing the dodge button is the only viable way to play. DRG:S decided to do...both. Every mission has 3 objectives and completing objectives unlocks higher difficulties. But on top of that, once you hit Hazard 4 the sheer amount of enemies, their health, and just how much damage you take makes every mission a harrowing struggle against overwhelming odds. Which could be fun if you eventually had some reasonable way to grow in power and deal with these issues, but player buffs are in the form of finite upgrades that you'll fill out by hazard level 2, and gear that relies heavily on RNG but also doesn't really do enough to counter the enemy scaling. So in the end you'll have spent ohhhhhhhhhhh 70 hours in the game (Just a random number dunno who this could be about), have gear level 80~ dropping but still fail to do the hazard level 5 unlock quest for the 10th ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time. And since runs take 20-30 minutes that's not an insignificant amount of time wasted with no obvious path to improvement. I'm not sure if that counts as a skill issue, it's a survivor's game so it's not like I'm going to get better at WASD. I can't unlock higher level gear, because gear level is tied to achievements and I did everything pre-Hazard 4.

So do I recommend it? Y..yeah? It's a competent, fun little survivors game for about half of the game and then an exercise in frustration beyond that. If you haven't gotten your fill of these games there is some fun to be had, I still would recommend this game much more than Soulstone Survivors, if only because I don't need to mash the space bar every .3 seconds. But my recommendation comes with a very big "YOU WILL GET MAD AT THIS GAME"

[Game Played With Quest 3 using Link Cable/Virtual Desktop]

This game's going to attract 2 kinds of VR players. Either you've played Stalker and want it in VR, or you haven't and are just desperate for any sort of VR story game that lasts more than 5 hours. Personally, I haven't played Stalker and at best watched my roommate play Shadow Of Chernobyl. I'm vaguely aware of the story beats but you aren't getting a review from an honest Stalker Fan if you wanted a 1 to 1 comparison.

ZONA asks the question: What can you forgive in a VR game? The game is made by a solo dev which happens often in the VR space. I'm willing to give some leeway to any VR game, solo dev or not, because VR is still not close to an exact science. Even in games like Alyx, you'll run into some jank. Hell, I still see people glazing Blade and Sorcery when enemies just vaguely shuffle at you and lazily swing 1 of 3 attack animations. It's not great.

ZONA does a lot of things well, though does end up dropping the ball in a few minor ways. Ultimately it's a pretty solid package. For the good, I do genuinely enjoy the environments. I know "atmospheric" gets used to death, but carefully stepping through overgrown brush, dark forests, abandoned bunkers, and bombed out buildings while flicking on your head flashlight and digging up loot is VERY enjoyable. It's dark, there's anomalies floating around sparking and fizzling, and it all creates a nice otherworldly feeling. The cooking minigame is a cute little addition, modding and repairing guns is nice and you can even spray paint them for added customization. The areas are large and decently varied, there's quite a few of them, and I'm 30 hours in and not done yet. It also has, I think, my personal favorite inventory system in a VR game to date. You get a physical backpack and have to just vaguely shove your ♥♥♥♥ in it. As long as some part of the object is "in" the backpack space it will stay, so you end up with a terrible hedgehog of a backpack with cans and book and ♥♥♥♥ sticking in all directions.

In the "Not so bad but kind of meh" side, the story is fairly simple. There are a few different factions and some minor interplay between them, but this is a solo dev vr game so you don't really pick a side or make any choices on who to help so much as do missions and then do more missions. It's video game plot #2 (Amnesiac player character) set in Eastern Europe but with magic radiation. There are a good amount of different enemies, which was great! Honestly, I was genuinely surprised at the sheer enemy variety. AI wise they aren't much to write home about. Zombies shuffle towards you, if it can run at you it will run at you, if it teleports when you shoot it it will do that, if it has a gun it will strafe and fire at you etc. The zombies in hazmat suits are the worst offender, they do this little shout when they notice you which is kind of intimidating the first 2 times, but once you realize it's a 100% trigger on being seen your best bet is to just run at them first and take aim point blank while they do their shouting animation. It IS fun picking off enemies from a distance with a sniper, but the fun does drain out somewhat when you have to engage. Gun handling and aiming is a little hit or miss, though to be fair the dev has pushed a few updates that seem to have fixed the hit registration so that's good.

On the bad side, there are a few issues that do detract from the overall experience, though they aren't SO bad. I do like the little map PDA thing you have to physically hold and click through, but the buttons are fiddly, tiny, and are prone to being accidentally hit if you run with it in your hand because the PDA will lag behind for about 2 seconds and if it lags through your off hand, it will count that as you hitting buttons. The looting is fun, but after about 15 hours you'll realize you don't really NEED to buy anything else besides heals and ammo (unless you just want to try every gun for some reason) so exploring and looting becomes for its own sake. There IS a leader board for whoever's collected the most money in their save, but if that doesn't interest you the game will lose some luster. Adding to this, the most expensive item in the game is a thermal visor thingy that highlights most enemies and lootable objects. It is incredibly useful for finding hidden stuff, but it puts THE WORST bright blue filter over your vision. It physically hurts to look through, but it's so helpful for finding items. On top of that, even though I do like the looting, it's difficult to find anything outside of select houses or shelves, making a lot of the exploration kind of pointless. There is also a LOT of backtracking and just running through open areas. You can fast travel from any main hub town, but getting back requires you to run to the zone entrance which can get very annoying after the 6th time the game makes you go back to Pripyat. The worst offender I've run into in 30 hours is the ice level. It's so empty and barren it's about 5-10 minutes of aimlessly running in a direction in an empty blue field. I said I enjoyed the spray painting guns, but it doesn't really completely work and will often leave visible gaps in the paint or just fail to paint some parts of a gun, like the front grip on the M4. But my biggest gripe is with artifact hunting. It isn't very well explained, and maybe there's some intuitive knowledge I'm supposed to have brought over from the Stalker games, but I can't figure out the rhyme or reason to how to locate artifacts. "Scan near anomalies" is about all I got, except there are a lot of anomalies and there doesn't seem to be any correlation between any particular anomaly and whether or not it will have an artifact. I bought what I thought was the best scanner and I still need to be just as ass up against the artifact and anomalies I may as well just scan literally everything and wave my arm around.

So, that's ZONA Origin. I can't tell you if it's worth SPECIFICALLY your 20 dollars but it damn sure was worth mine, and I'm interested to see what else the dev makes.