Recent reviews by Raxteran

Solid social fun. Made the pandemic slightly less soul crushing.

Finally, after years, a classless action-combat MMO that feels great to play, paired with an addictive crafting system.

That about covers the positives. Unfortunately, the development team has demonstrated far too many times over the few months since launch that they are unable to properly utilize QA to ensure the stability of the game. They have repeatedly introduced game-breaking issues and exploits and have had to take extreme measures restricting entire aspects of the game in order to isolate the damage.

In addition, despite their best efforts over the last year of development, it's very clear that PVE content was an afterthought, with 98% of quests being the same exact thing over and over again and one of the weakest narratives of any MMO I've played to date. The endgame is an artificially lengthened grindfest meant to hold people over until they finish making real content, and they still haven't figured out how to make the crafting system as rewarding as it feels that it should be.

Overall, this game has a solid stone foundation in terms of design, with a rickety shack built on top in terms of content and stability. I think that if they can slow down the crashing player counts and get enough interesting content in over the next few months, it could rebound. I could see myself editing this review in the future if they make some better choices, but for now I cannot recommend to anyone looking for a new MMO.

Alyx was an incredible pleasure to play. I could write paragraphs upon paragraphs of praise but frankly I am too lazy and honestly if you're reading this and you're not sure whether this game is worth it, I offer the following:

- If you suffer discomfort in VR, you won't here. The QOL features are extremely effective. I regularly experience VR nausea and discomfort, often limiting my play sessions to under an hour. I played the final 4 hours of this game in one session because I was so engrossed.
- The game is ~15 hours. Considering the quality of the game, that's 100% worth the price in my book.
- Performance is great, but different hardware will get different mileage. The game ran at the full VR-comfy framerate 97% of the time on my setup. My setup: RTX 2060, 16GB RAM, i7-8750H, Oculus Quest w/ Oculus Link. Not the best possible configuration, but still really great results.

Again, not talking about the game itself at all - it really is just incredible. Exactly the kind of quality you'd expect from a Half Life game.

This game is basically a carbon copy of Ark with a different skin. There are even some who claim it was originally supposed to be Ark DLC. Honestly that seems accurate.

EXCEPT they managed to completely fumble both graphical performance and server performance in the process. I played Ark, a lot of it. My rig averaged 40-60 FPS at all times on high settings. Atlas is playing at 20 FPS on low settings, despite appearing to use mostly the same tech.

Rubber banding makes the game virtually unplayable once you log in. My advice to those who are interested in Atlas right now: go back to playing Ark or Sea of Thieves. You'll be less frustrated and have more money in your pocket.

Snake Blocks is a great puzzle game - using the basic concept of Flow and making it 3D. The puzzles begin simple but ramp up in difficulty. Some of the 4 and 5-snake puzzles were really tough to solve and I enjoyed the challenge. The art and music are perfect for this type of game - clean, colorful, and not distracting.

Though I haven't used it much, I imagine that the puzzle creator could easily extend the playtime of this game to several hours.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with Snake Blocks. For a game under $5, it's a nice change of pace.

I've been playing Clusterpuck since it was in early development, and I can confidently say that it's my all-time favorite sports game. The controls are crazy simple (2 buttons and a joystick) so that anyone can learn to play quickly, but advanced players can find and develop strategies that add a lot of complexity to the game.

My group of friends and I have gotten really competitive as a result of Clusterpuck, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up becoming an eSport as it is perfectly balanced and involves a lot of skill and strategy.

If I had one complaint, it would be that connecting 8 controllers to a laptop is a bit of a hassle. If you buy this, be sure to pick up a USB hub or a wireless adapter for Xbox 360 controllers.