Recent reviews by voidwolf66

The climbing mechanic is terrible and unfortunately they've made it a huge part of their campaign right at the beginning.

The gameplay is very well done. Combat, exploration, NPC interactions all feel great and are nicely polished. The main story is pretty lame. But there are enough side stories and various adventures to keep me entertained for quite a while even if the central story pillar is more a pile of rubble.

I can't figure out why this game is so popular. I've tried to give it a fair go, but the controls are absolute ♥♥♥♥. I spend all my time trying to make the controls do what I want, which is neither fun nor a good challenge. I'm constantly baffled why the game refuses to do what I ask, and seems to do random stuff instead.

This is a really fun game from a development team that understands how to treat players and their money with respect. It's funny, it's chaotic, it's great with friends or with randoms. Almost all the negative reviews about this game have nothing to do with the game itself. Everyone loves it. It's all about the BS the suits at Sony are doing to screw it up.

For a game with FPS combat being a central part, the FPS combat just isn't very good.

My experience with this is that everything is a little too unrefined, and an endless series of small "WTF happened?" moments and constant minor glitches make this really not a game that can be just enjoyed. The system itself has to be fought against to find the actual gameplay. I'd be willing to put up with all this if the gameplay itself was worth it. Add to that a ton of bugs and characters just doing seemingly random stuff at times (e.g. told a character to shoot a minotaur, but instead she ran up and healed him), and really the only reason I'm still playing this incredibly frustrating game is that Baldur's Gate 3 isn't ready yet.

If you are going to go for it, I highly recommend the Toy Box mod. It's kinda necessary to fix all the game breaking bugs you'll likely run into.

I'm reviewing this pretty close to launch, so parts of this may change.

The biggest problem with the game is network connection issues. Frequently failing to connect or getting disconnected between rounds. Hopefully they can fix this soon.

When the game works, though, it's hilariously fun. Even when I'm losing, I'm laughing at the absurdness of it all. The race scenarios are quite fun, and several of the team games make for sheer craziness. There are a few mini games that do need fixing or just getting rid of. Hopefully these can also be fixed. Overall, they are very fun.

This game is the platinum standard for VR games. The world feels excellent, interacting with objects and UI is fluid and spot on. The weapons feel great in your hands and are easy to use. Never did I feel like the UI got in the way of me having a good time, and it never got in the way of combat.

Valve once again demonstrates themselves to be masters of level design, with enough of the familiar to keep gameplay smooth while introducing just the right amount of strange to keep things exciting and fresh, ending with the truly bizarre and magnificent. They've also done a fantastic job with the characters and story. There are not a lot of characters, but the ones that are there are very well realized and excellently written and performed, giving a much needed dose of humanity in the midst of a world run by aliens.

Now to be a little nitpicky and highlight the less than amazing bits. The game feels a bit hand-holdy a lot of the time. No doubt Valve was very set on wanting to introduce as many new players to VR as possible, which is a very smart business decision. But people with more experience with VR may find themselves at times wanting more. For example the combat feels good and is very fun, but even on hardest difficulty I rarely felt myself actually challenged.

I also ran into some technical issues. Inventory space is limited to 2 objects, so it's very tempting to try to grab one of the many crates and start shoving stuff you want to take in there. It sort of works, but objects have a bad habit of clipping through and falling out. Also I discovered that there is a hard limit to the number of objects you can have in the environment at once. There is one section that has infinitely spawning grenades until you solve the puzzle that requires them. So naturally I took a crate and started filling it with grenades. But carrying around a crate with only about a dozen grenades caused the game to randomly hard crash. No warning, just gone.

But those small things aside, this is an amazing VR title and one every Half Life fan should experience.

First off, to be honest I can't understand why the Walking Dead franchise is so popular. The entire IP seems hell bent on making zombies as boring as possible. This game is really not much of an exception. Zombies are not actually threatening, just an annoyance that stands between you and what little actually interesting gameplay there is to be found. Even large hordes aren't really dangerous, and just add to the tedium. In addition to them managing to make zombie killing not fun, there are several more technical issues that present real frustrations.

The first, and most likely to be a deal-breaker for a lot of people, is the lack of ability to save the game. The player must rely on infrequent auto-saves. Unless you can devote uninterrupted chunks of 45 minutes, don't even bother starting it up. This is a serious, idiotic design flaw as lots of people simply can't handle VR for long periods of time. And even if you can, it's very easy to have real life interrupt you and you lose a half hour of work. I mean, I seriously can't even comprehend why they would do something so completely moronic.

Other issues are less serious, IMO, but still major annoyances. For one, the tutorial is very inadequate. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my melee attacks weren't killing zombies until a hint popup a ways in finally let me know that the game expects very large swings and couldn't care less how fast you swing. That info needed to be in the tutorial.

Another issue is the story. You are plopped down in the middle of a conflict between two factions, yet given no context for why they're fighting, what they're up to, or why you should care. And yet you're told to go murder a lot of them. Sure, they killed some guy you barely knew, but you aren't given any story reasons to care about him either.

For gameplay, the controls are... strange. When I'm trying to aim a pistol, the in-game hand moves noticeably slower than my controller, as if I were waving a heavy bat around. This means that if I'm in a hurry I discover that the gun isn't actually aiming where my real-life hand is. This is not an issue with the controller, as it tracks perfectly for other fast moving games like Beat Saber. It's another inexplicably bad design choice. The only time zombies are an actual threat is when the UI decides not to do what you are very clearly and deliberately trying to do.

In summation, all of these things lead up to a lot of frustration that overshadows the bits of a fun game that are in there. It's frustrating to move about the game world. It's frustrating to stab zombies, it's frustrating to shoot zombies. It's frustrating to reload weapons. It's frustrating to try to loot stuff. It's frustrating to explore the world when you're on a zombie-horde timer that makes no sense in the world of the game. It's just frustrating.

I know this game is extremely popular and a lot of people will think my dislike of this game is unfounded. But for me, trying to play this game was an extremely frustrating experience because of a series of bad decisions by Rockstar. So this is less a review of the game and more a review of user interaction and user experience.

First off, to play the game even in a single-player, offline mode you are forced to install a useless Rockstar launcher and create a Rockstar Social account that I don't want and want nothing to do with. Then I launch the game and am greeted with a very poorly-done UI menu that is actively frustrating to navigate and change up graphics settings, including mouse scroll-wheel not working in the UI correctly. All this isn't a deal breaker, but it means that by the time I actually wade through all the BS in my way to play, my tolerance for in-game annoyances is already significantly lowered.

Then I start a new game and get to play. The game looks great, I'll give it that. Impressive animation and costumes that move nicely over the characters without clipping. Unfortunately the bad UI made its way into the gameplay in several ways. Controlling the movement of a character is annoying and sluggish. Trying to get the horse to do anything other than "slow plod in straight line" would just cause the thing to spin in circles. Having to click and hold to interact with everything is a TERRIBLE idea and whoever decided to do that should be slapped. Aiming the gun is slow and frustrating. And why I had to click three different buttons to pick up different things, I am completely baffled.

All in all, I don't know if underneath a terribly designed and implemented UX and UI there is a good game, because everything seemed designed to keep me from just being able to play.