Recent reviews by EvadableMoxie

Plate up is an amazing little game, which takes the cooking genre and combines it into an action and strategy roguelike. You start by picking your starting menu and the floorplan for your restaurant. The goal is to serve all customers before their patience runs out. As the days go on, you collect money which you use to buy new appliances and upgrade your restaurant. You also pick challenge cards which modify your run by adding a new hindrance or expanding your menu. If a single customer leaves unhappy your run is over (barring some rare continue items).

Making it far relies on both mechanical ability to quickly cook and serve customers, but also strategy in picking the right cards and spending your money on the right upgrades to handle the situation. You fully design your kitchen outside of the actual floor plan, deciding where appliances go and where customers sit, meaning it's up to you to find the most optimal ways to do things. This is usually a mix of both manually doing things and automation. Eventually you can automate it so a meal entirely prepares itself. It's even possible to fully automation preparation and serving. Eventually though, the lack of space will catch up to you and oftentimes it's not really about automating everything but rather smartly deciding what to automate and what to do manually, as space is limited and automation always takes up more space than manual actions.

The 'end game' consists of a few different goals.

The first is franchising, where you simply make it to day 15. Once there you can quit immediately or keep playing, and after the run ends you can take your starting menu plus 3 of the cards you picked during the run and start a new run with those cards, plus a special franchise bonus card. You can then attempt to Franchise that run, adding more cards and franchise cards until you eventually fail to hit day 15 during your run. Each time you franchise you go up one 'tier' so the goal is to climb to the highest tier possible by chaining franchises, with it getting increasing difficult.

The next is playing for Overtime, which happens once you get past day 15. This is simply trying to get as far as you can within a single run. This is usually about automation and effectively using space as your restaurant fills up and your menu continually expands.

Then there is speedrunning, where you simply attempt to complete day 15 on a specific seed in the shortest amount of time.

And then finally there is Turbo mode, which ratchets up the difficulty by adding a challenge card every day along with a massive increase in customer numbers.

The game has been out for a year now and the developers are still releasing new content, entirely for free. No DRM, No micro transactions, Not even paid cosmetics. Just quality update after update, entirely for free.

There is a ton of content between the different menus as well as a bunch of seasonal challenge modes, but if you ever get bored of that, the workshop support means you can then just go download some user made menus and try those.

This game is a rare gem that does everything right. If I had to think of a negative it would be the RNG inherent in the card choices. Not all cards are the same in difficulty, which is by design. Some are good to get and some are quite bad, and if you are unlucky you can be forced into a choice between two run ending cards. But even this is only a minor blemish in what is otherwise a fantastic game.

Knockout League is a boxing themed reflex VR game. Note that I said it is a boxing themed VR game and not an actual boxing game. This is where a lot of the dislike of this game comes from. So let me get this out of the way right now:

If you want a realistic boxing simulator buy 'Thrill of the Fight'.
If you want something a bit more 'arcade-y' but still mostly boxing, get 'Creed: Rise to Glory'.
If you just want a good VR game in general and you're okay with a boxing theme, then get Knockout League.

I own all 3 and I feel like all 3 have their own virtues.

Anyway, the basic premise of Knockout League is that it's kind of a fictional boxing league and I say 'kind of' because depending on the fighter it can be anything from pretty close to actual boxing to nothing at all like boxing even remotely. The game is very reminiscent of the Punch Out!! games on Nintendo, but ported to and designed specifically for VR. And this works. It works really, really well.

It's important to understand the basic flow of the game:

You wait for your opponent to launch an attack. You then react to the attack by dodging in the proper direction or timing your block. If you do it right, your opponent is stunned and you speed bag on their face. If you do it wrong you take damage. And that's it. You don't throw feints, you don't move your guard around, you don't try to sneak in jabs. It's a scripted fight and you have to follow the script. Again, this is Punch-Out!! in VR, not actual boxing in VR.

If you're okay with that then this is a very good game. If you aren't okay with that, buy a different boxing game.

There are 9 fighters and each has a normal mode and hard mode. The hardmode cranks up the difficulty not just by giving your opponents more damage, but by making them faster, making them better at disguising tells, and sometimes outright giving them new attacks.

There is a scoring system based on keeping your multiplier up by not getting hit, which provides a good amount of replay value by encouraging you to compete for higher scores. Additionally, there are training mini-games which are fun in and of themselves. So all in all, for the asking price I think the game has a pretty good amount of content.

Overall, this is a fun game and feels professionally done, unlike a lot of other VR titles that feel an look thrown together and half-finished. The soundtrack is also pretty good, with songs that range from just okay to actually really good. The visuals are crisp and work well.

About the only downside I see is the lack of a need to throw actual punches outside of one specific fighter and one specific training mini-game. Otherwise you'll mostly be speed-bagging on your opponent's face and taking the time to actually throw a proper punch with proper power behind is counter-productive. But again, that's why I said this is really more about being a good game in general than being a good boxing game. If the game made it so all you had to do is block or dodge and just took care of countering and damaging the enemy for you it would still be a good game.

Compound is a VR shooter rogue-light where you play through a series of procedurally generated levels, fighting enemies and bosses with the goal of reaching the end level of defeating the final boss. At this point the game loops over again, steadily increasing the challenge. There is meta progression in the form of achievements which unlock new weapons to add the pool of random spawns. Additionally, the game features mutators which change the gameplay up in various ways.

Compound is competent and functional. The controls work. The gunplay is satisfying. I didn't run into any game breaking bugs. The visuals, while hardly AAA caliber are functional and fit the style of the game well. I say this because a lot of VR products on steam are only barely functional or not functional at all, and given this is a game that's about as Indy as Indy gets it's important to note this game is fully functional. I didn't find any unwelcome surprises here. I was in fact quite pleasantly surprised at the level of detail and polish the game has.

There's no real story to speak of. You are attacking a cartoonlishily evil corporation. Corporate propaganda cheerfully instructs you to invite friends and family to public executions, and signs strictly forbidding thinking about philosophy are abound right next to giant tanks displaying "Virus" and "Vaccine." It's very on the nose and over the top and serves as nothing more than an excuse to shoot bad guys. I don't say this as a negative, necessarily, more to explain what the game is and what the game is not. I personally don't need this game to tell me a story, but if you do you should be aware that there essentially is none.

A place where absence is more noted though, is in exploration. There is none here. The levels are procedurally generated and fully mapped out for you at the start of each level. Bosses and weapon pickups are also shown on the map at the start. So, procedural generation here doesn't really do anything to keep things fresh and interesting because you have perfect information of every map right from the start anyway. The levels are not not linear in that they have a start in an end but rather it's more a hub of interconnected rooms. This gives you the option of choosing which room to clear in which order but there isn't much weight to this choice as the enemies are random anyway. This is really the weakest aspect of the game, but thankfully the core gameplay loop and gunplay is fun enough that even the absence of exploration doesn't sink things.

The game begins with 1 basic pistol with infinite ammo and which weapons you find in the levels are random each playthrough. Guns fall into a few categories of weapons, though all play differently. For example the SMG and Assault Rifle are both in the 'pink' category and take the same ammo, but the SMG has considerably higher damage at the cost of accuracy. Orange weapons tend to be high single target damage and accuracy, while green weapons are all explosives. Notably, there is no 'badluck' prevention. You might find the same category of gun, or even the same game over and over.

Thankfully, eventually you unlock new basic pistols, one specialized for short range and one specialized for long range. This gives you a decent selection of options even when your luck is bad, although you'll still be considerably weaker than if you had gotten better luck.

Different guns have different actions to reload which are fun and satisfying. It also creates rather hectic situations where you often need to reload under fire. There's also a balance of trying to dual-wield versus keeping a hand free to reload.

Overall, Compound is a fun game, if what it offers is what you're looking for. If you're looking for something with more story or exploration you won't find it here. If you're looking for something like old school DooM or Wolfenstein but in VR, it does that, and it does that very well.

Reviewing this game feels like a daunting task. There's so much I want to say, that I could write pages and pages on this game.

Let's just start with this: Zombies are popular enemies in games, because they enable lazy developers. You don't need a story, but if you want one you can just rip off any established zombie lore. Your AI can be barebones with zombies that just path to the nearest player and attack once they get into melee. The lack of sophistication isn't a bug, it's a feature, and so what if the path-finding is easily exploited and there's no strategy at all. They're zombies. They're supposed to be stupid.

Then you just give the player a gun, send wave after wave of zombies at the player and throw your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game up on Steam and hope someone buys it for $2.50 because they want trading cards.

This is not one of those games.

This is a game that puts monumental amounts of effort into every tiny aspect of the game. It is the most immersive zombie game I've ever played, and the fact that it accomplishes that in an isometric 3rd person perspective is nothing short of amazing. The way it limits your view to the direction your character is looking is done incredibly well, and it even plays with that system a bit, adjusting the viewing angle depending on your character's traits, health, and the visual conditions.

The Zombie AI is great. It's basic and exploitable by design which offers a ton of opportunities to master it. For example, if you have a horde of zombies on you, you can lead them through a house. Some will follow you, some will get stuck on furniture, some will lose interest and start bashing windows. Or perhaps you want to lure them over a low fence to trip them up and slow them down to give you some space to lose them. Or maybe if you saw the horde coming, so you snuck up to the edge of their vision and let a few spot you to pull them off and take them on in small numbers at a time.

This leads to a combat system that isn't based around twitch aiming or muscle memory, but rather a decision making based combat system. Where, when and how you fight matters a lot more than which weapon you have or what your character's stats are. An obese weakling can kill 100s of zombies under the right circumstances and a god-like character with max stats can die to a single zombie sneaking up behind them.

It's things like this that really give the game the most authentic zombie experience I've played. Wading into zombies to try to kill them will just result in you joining them instead. Using a combination of stealth, distraction, and discretion is the best way to survive.

Adding to the immersion is how in depth each of the games systems are. Everything from constructing a wall to making a potato salad lands in the sweet zone of being complex enough to be interesting but not so complex as to be overwhelming.

But the really amazing thing about PZ is how layered the experience is.

At first, you're just going house to house, killing zombies and raiding pantries for food. Eventually you master the combat system and positioning. You'll live long enough for your character to experience exhaustion and fatigue and eventually you'll learn to master those systems, too. You'll move onto base building and die to the helicopter the first time it happens. Then you live long enough for water and power to fail. Then you get to the point where all the easy places to loot are looted and you have to decide to try riskier places, or perhaps work on making your own food via farming, foraging, or trapping. Survive that long, and the season will begin to change and with it, new problems. Long term nutrition starts to matter, as even if you are satisfying your character's hunger, they may be losing weight every day and in danger of wasting away. Then winter hits. Survive the winter and you can survive anything.

Now the sandbox is open to you. Do you want to max every stat? Build the ultimate base? Master mechanics and build the ultimate zombie killing vehicle? Or perhaps take back your hometown from the undead, no matter how long it takes? It's up to you. Just don't get too cocky, because no matter what you've built and how many zombies you've killed, you are always 1 bite away from joining their ranks.

And even then, there's more. Try challenge runs with negative traits, or crank up zombie numbers and infection chances, or even enable sprinters, if you dare. Dive into steam workshop and download mods to change the game or add new content. Go online and survive with friends, or try your hand at a public server and cooperate and compete with other survivors.

There's always another challenge to take on.

All in all, Project Zomboid is a superb game, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out some flaws. The game is still very much in early access development. There are a few things about it and it's systems that are a bit wonky as a result. A big criticism is how slow skills level, although in custom sandbox mode you can add an xp multiplier if you want to.

Also some skills like carpentry are well fleshed out and feel vital, whereas electronics feels almost forgotten and there's very little reason to advance in it. There aren't any huge bugs I've encountered, but sometimes the interface can be a bit odd. There's also a lack of polish sometimes, like for example there are no animations for sitting in a chair or sleeping in a bed.

But all in all, the rest of the game is so fun, so satisfying that it's easy to overlook these things, especially because this is a $15 game by an indy developer, not a $60 +micro-transactions AAA title.

It's okay for the first 3000 hours but then you start to get bored. And then you use mods and it's okay for the next 2000 hours but at 5000 hours it starts to get old again. Then you buy the Royality DLC and it's okay again for another 1000 hours. Then ideology comes out and it's good for another 1500 hours. Then Biotech comes out and I'll let you know how that goes.

This is a game I really wanted to like, as I love the concept of VR exercise. I wish stream had a 'sideways thumb' option, but since it doesn't and I have to pick Yay or Nay, it's going to be a Nay.

PowerbeatsVR starts from the position of being exercise and tries to make it a game. This is a reversal from games like Thrill of the Fight or Beatsaber which start from the position of being games and just so happen to also be good exercise. This distinction leads into a lot of the design decisions and ultimately a lot of the problems with the game.

The best exercise is exercise that you'll actually do, which is why VR exercise works so well. You don't view it as exercise, it's just playing a game so you want to do it. That in turn makes it easy to stick to an exercise schedule. But the 'game' part of PowerBeatsVR is sorely lacking. It's incredibly repetitive and the lack of progression in player skill and difficultly makes it unsatisfying.

So firstly, there are 4 different themes you can use. All of them are mechanically identical, it just changes graphics. This helps by changing up the scenery but ultimately does very little to keep you interested. I think technically some might be easier or harder due to having slightly different graphics and collision boxes. For example transparent shields are an advantage over solid ones as you can block and also see through them, but these are very minor differences.

The game boasts 4 different weapons and this is technically true, but in practice it's really two weapons. The listed modes are Fists, Maces, Shields, and a power glove.

The Shield is just fists with the option to press the trigger to create a shield. The shield awards points when it collides with mines and subtracts points and breaks you combo if it collides with anything else. So this effectively just creates an additional player option to block mines for extra points instead of dodging them, and otherwise the experience is the same.

The powerglove is just fists with a power meter that builds up and you can active to destroy all orbs on the screen. So it's exactly the same except you have a resource you manage. Technically. In reality the patterns are all similar and none of them are really harder than others so there isn't much management to do, you might as well just pop it whenever it's up. Otherwise it's identical to fists.

Maces are different as you have weapons to attack the orbs with which increases your reach. This isn't all that helpful though, since the maps do not change based on your weapons. So this means all the orbs you have to destroyed are all going to be within reach if you were using fists, making additional reach unneeded. Also, the maces have collision with walls and mines, so they make it harder to dodge. I expected coming into it to enjoy maces more since I like Beatsaber but in practice I never used them more than a few times.

So in practice, your options are Mace or Fists, and if you pick Fists, you can then choose to take Shield or power as your activated ability. But power and shield will still play nearly identically to fists. After some experimentation, I turned on shield and then just never changed it back. Maces feel clunky and the powerfist isn't interesting because the patterns are too similar to make resource management matter. And there's no reason to go back to default fists since if I want to play without shields, I can just never activate them and the experience is the same.

So yes, technically the game as 4 weapons but most don't really feel like they have much of a place or are well thought out.

The game's soundtrack is fine, I don't think it's amazing but the music is okay and the levels seem to be well designed to flow with them.

The game boasts the option to import any song you like and to auto-generate tracks for it. This issue is that the auto-generated tracks simply take a few different pre-arranged patterns and repeat them. Over and over. It's so limited that it feels repetitive before you've even finished the song, let along tried multiple songs. It also doesn't flow to the song at all, even remotely. The only thing about the song that matters is the beats per minute, as near as I can tell.

All of this could be forgiven if there was a reward for mastery and difficulty climb to keep you coming back.

There isn't.

Even in my first session doing the hardest difficulty I was able to score A- on most tracks. In fact, it seems like the scale is A- to A+, I can't recall ever getting anything else. You can't fail a track, which makes sense since the point is exercise, but with a seemingly limited range of score, no ability to fail, and no advanced levels or difficulty modifiers to keep you engaged there really isn't anything to keep you wanting to come back. Compare this to Beatsaber which has enough difficulty to take months to reach the highest point. And the issue with exercise sessions being interrupted by failure has already been solved by Beatsaber with NoFail mode, which kicks in and lets you finish if you fail or gives you a score if you don't.

And this is ultimately the problem: After a few hours, PowerBeatsVR gets old and then it's not a game you want to play anymore and will keep coming back to. It becomes just exercise, and that defeats the entire point. There are plenty of games that will burn calories that you will WANT to play again and again for hours and hours. This is not one of them.

That said, it's not terrible, and playing it in short bursts occasionally for a change of pace isn't the worst thing in the world. Any game will get repetitive if played enough, even Beatsaber, so having more exercise games in your catalog you can sift through is nice.

It's just that after putting 6 hours in I really feel no desire to come back to the game. Maybe, after a year, I'll come back now and then and have enough hours to justify the purchase. But I also feel like the money could have been better spent on another game.

Until you fall is a Roguelite swordfighting game. The basic gameplay is that you advance from room to room killing enemies and receiving powerups as you go. Enemy attacks are telegraphed and avoided by either aligning your weapons to block, or moving your head to dodge. Different weapons have different traits and special abilities, and you can mix and match any two weapons to come up with whatever combos you want to try. Each room and boss you beat awards currency which is used to unlock and upgrade your weapons, so there is progression between each run.

While the name might suggest the game continues on until you lose, there are actually a set number of rooms with a boss at the end, and it is possible to complete a run. As of the time of this review, there is no infinite mode.

While this sounds simple, the interesting part of the game lies in the complexities. The game has 4 difficulty levels, 3 of which are available at the start and the last which becomes available after completing the game. On easy difficulties enemies are mostly willing to let you fight them 1 on 1. On Nightmare, the hardest difficulty, they'll attempt to flank you, jump in to defend their friends when they are vulnerable, and back off when their guard gets low. While the game will only ever have 1 enemy attacking you at the same time so that it is always technically possible to avoid every attack, they can rapidly swap between which enemy is attacking you, making it incredibly difficult to avoid attacks if you allow yourself to be flanked.

So while the easy difficulty at first is all about learning the enemy combos so you can consistently block them, the game later becomes more about effectively engaging multiple enemies at once. Sure, you can master fighting a Knight and be able to block every attack 1 v 1, but can you fight 2 knights at the same time while a spell weaver is trying to blast you with fireballs?

This would be frustrating if the game didn't give you tools to deal with this, and thankfully it does. Each weapon has a special which can be used to damage enemies or for crowd control. And then there is movement.

The movement system in UYF is one of the best I've ever played on VR. I generally hate dashes or teleports in VR largely because they are usually clunky and require you to hit a button and then aim something with your hand and then release or similar systems. UYF's system is so much better. You have a dash indicator at all times, which is controlled by looking in the direction you want to dash. If you tap forward, you dash to the indicator. If you tap down, you backdash. Tapping left or right turns. This is simple, intuitive, and works great. Also, dashing is a major part of the game, you can deal damage to enemies by dashing into them and how much damage you deal is determined by your weapons and can be upgraded. It isn't just a tacked on feature to avoid motion sickness.

Speaking of, even though the game features a vinetteing system to help, I've never had any issues with motion sickness. The movement and dashing is so intuitive and smooth that it's never been an issue.

But how is the sword fighting? In a word: Amazing. The feedback both visually and audibly is amazing. Learning combos is incredibly satisfying. The first time you manage to block an empowered knight's combo you will feel like a sword god. And you damn well should.

If I had to say there is any downside to the game, it's probably the difficultly curve which can be a bit rough because each time you restart a run you start back at square one fighting weak enemies. When you are first learning it can take awhile to get back to the point where you are fighting things that are actually a challenge. This can be a slog when you have to spend 10 minutes every run slogging through easy enemies to get back to the parts you are dying on so you can actually learn and improve. This does get better if you push through it, but it can be off-putting at the start and a bit of a grind. My advice if you run into that is to mess with the difficultly, either increasing the difficultly to make the start harder, or reduce it to get some progression.

There is also a bit of a lack of variety in enemy types. There are basically 4 enemies which each have a normal and empowered version. I personally don't find this boring and find plenty of variety thanks to how the enemies act and the different weapons available, but this might not be enough for some people. There is also currently one one set of levels, or 'campaign' available. I feel there is enough content for the price, especially given how good that content is, but again, that's up to you personally.

All in all, UYF is a fantastic game. It's one of the best VR games I've ever played.

I received this game as part of a humble bundle.

I'm amending my review since I initially made it, since I've played much more since then, as well as purchased Thrill of the Fight, so I'm better able to compare the two.

The main difference is in the feel of the two games. Creed is much more arcade-y, whereas Thrill of the Fight is designed to be more realistic. As such, Creed has better visuals as well as visual indicators that stand out more. Thrill of the Fight is gritter with less realistic graphics and no special visual effects except for indicators to show how much damage you've done, and those can be disabled in the options.

Creed is more about understanding the patterns of the enemy AI and knowing where to keep your gloves to block almost every attack as well as when to attack and when not to. It's more akin to the Nintendo Punch-Out games than a boxing simulator. It doesn't care as much about how hard you hit, you just need to hit over a certain threshold. It doesn't care where you land hits, either. From playing this a lot and looking at the score cards in the end it seems like you just win when you land a specific number of hits, at least on Champion difficulty. The hardest fighters on champion always go down after about 180 hits, give or take a couple, and will KO you after about 20 hits, again give or take a couple. Once you know that, the strategy simply becomes landing any type of hit while avoiding the enemy hits. Which means for opponents that are your size, quick backhand jabs to the face over and over until they go down. It's just a question of knowing where to keep your gloves and when it's safe to jab and when it isn't.

Enemies have predictable patterns of attack which you can learn. One of the first ones you'll pick up is that about 90% of the time enemies close a gap it's with a big overhead swing followed by the low hook to your right side. Boxers eventually get unique patterns as you go on and more difficult ones. Again this is akin to the Nintendo Punch Out games.

You can dodge attacks but side to side dodging actually hurts you more than it helps since it usually just means you get hit in the side since you're also moving your guard out of the way. Back and front movement within your playspace however is quite powerful and if you do it in time to the AI's pattern you can get great results.

In game movement is terrible to the point where you basically can't move at all in game except when you are advancing at the start of each round. This is very problematic sometimes, especially when you get knocked down and then the enemy is right on top of you. If the enemy gets too close they can punch right through your gloves and hit you. So if the enemy gets in your face and you have no where to go within your play space, you are in trouble. You can manage your playspace to try to keep the enemy in such a state where you can still punch forward without hitting and wall and also dodge backwards without hitting a wall, but you do need a good play space to do it and it's hard to master.

Creed technically has a story, but it's told primarily through a radio show about boxing that tells you what happened between matches and the history of the fighters. There's also bits of dialog with your trainers, but not much. If you've seen the movie it'll make sense. If you haven't, you'll be wondering why suddenly Rocky Balboa is training you, but it's not really relevant to the gameplay anyway.

The campaign mode is simply a series of fights, with training montages between them. The montages are a series of mini-games, and completing them gives you more stamina for the fight.

In terms of fitness, once you figure the game out and don't bother with wasted movement, you can down the hardest fighters without much of a sweat since all you need to do is keep your arms up and jab with one hand. Thrill of the Fight is much, much better for fitness since rounds are longer and how hard you punch is a factor. It also has more realistic AI behavior and less predictable patterns.

Creed is a far from perfect game. Most of the time you can manage your playspace by pushing toward opponents which will make them back off. Until they decide they don't care anymore at which point they keep creeping forward until your back is to the wall of your playspace and then they simply step through your guard and hit you. Most of the time attacks are telegraphed, but as fighters get low their dodging and attacking gets faster and then it starts to glitch out, resulting in them teleporting away from your attacks and landing hits on you via telekinesis while still in the blocking or guarding animation. You can still usually win even on champion but when you lose due to this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it's frustrating.

So, creed is fine if you want a fast arcade-y and visually satisfying experience. Thrill of the fight is better if you want something more akin to a boxing simulator than a boxing video game in VR. I have both, I enjoy both, but they are difference experiences.

Keep in mind that Thrill of the Fight is less expensive and can kind of become arcade-y if you want it to be, by disabling the punch strength scaling and just setting it high. Even then it won't be as visually satisfying but you can make the matches quick that way. So overall if you can only afford one, I'd say get Thrill of the Fight unless the presentation and visuals are really important to you.

I'd give this a side-ways thumb if I could, but since I HAVE to vote Yes or No, I'll give it a yes, with the following caveats:

You want something arcade-y, not a realistic boxing simulator
Visuals and presentation is important to you
You want a more casual experience than Thrill of the Fight
You're okay with occasional glitches and bugs
Cost isn't an issue

If the above is not true, then skip this and get Thrill of the Fight.

I initially reviewed this after 4 hours when I first purchased it. Now I'm at 50 hours and amending my review. Not because I don't recommend it anymore, I actually recommend it even more strongly now. But since my review I've learned a lot more about the game and a lot of additional content has been released. This review was amended right after the Encore update.

Pistol whip is a 'on rails' shooter, similar to old school rail shooters like Time Crisis or... Typing of the Damned. The difference being you are in VR so you are manually aiming and you avoid damage both by killing enemies before they can shoot as in a traditional rail shooter but also via physically dodging incoming fire.

On lower difficulties with easier levels and modifiers you can mostly stand still and kill enemies before they can fire. On harder difficulties, levels, and modifiers you can force constant movement and get a good workout. The best modifiers for this are revenge, which makes every enemy fire a shot when they die and bullet hell which removes the delay between enemies spawning and shooting, while also causing them to fire constantly.

Speaking of modifiers, the game sports a ton of options. You can change the enemies into targets if you prefer not to shoot down humanoid enemies, change how scoring works, randomize enemies, remove the aim assist and more. On top of that, there are several different weapons, from the standard pistol to revolvers, burst fire guns, explosive area of effect guns, or the humble pencil in melee only mode.

The soundtrack is largely electronic/techno type music, although with the latest Campaign Smoke and Thunder they've branched out a bit. If this isn't your thing you might find the game a bit less enjoyable. Even then though, you could just turn off the music, set scoring to only count accuracy and listen to whatever you want.

I should probably explain that a bit. By default, the game scores you based on your accuracy (while on default having a very generous aim assist) and your rhythm. Rhythm in this case means shooting enemies on the beat to score more points. But, you can use modifiers to change scoring to be solely based on Rhythm or solely based on accuracy if you'd like. The game does do a good job of making enemies appear and fire on beat, making it visually and audibly very satisfying.

With the right modifiers and difficulty you can get a great workout from this game, even better than beatsaber since you will need to constantly move to dodge bullets.

In addition to just individual levels, the game now sports 2 campaigns of 5 maps for free. It should be noted that since the game came out, the developers have added a ton of new levels and content, including both these campaigns, completely for free. This is incredibly generous of them because both campaigns are a great experience and they easily could have been justified selling each as a $5 DLC.

2089 was the first campaign released and sees you playing as a sole survivor on a planet infested with killer robots. It features a traditional electro soundtrack with several songs by Magic Sword which is just awesome. I also really like the flow of the campaign. The first level serves as an introduction and warmup. The second level changes things up and gives you a good workout. The third introduces a new mechanic to the player and lets them play with it and feeling powerful. The fourth ratchets up the difficulty to match the player's newfound power. And the final level is an amazing boss fight that ties it all together.

Smoke and Thunder is the second and currently latest campaign. It features a departure from the traditional electro soundtrack and features rock instead. Taking place in a steampunk western setting, it introduces two new weapons. The first is a traditional revolver and the second is a Aoe 2 shot pistol. This changes up gameplay significantly by restricting clip size while also enabling dual-wielding.

The main downside to the game as of now there is no official support for customizing the game. This does put a rather big damper on things, although at this point I feel there is enough official content to justify the game's asking price. I feel there is definitely more than enough content if you try out different weapons and modifier combinations, but your milage may vary here.

Overall, this is a great game and well worth the asking price.

The Exile is a big departure from the normal gameplay of Cultist Simulator. The original game is a puzzle game pretending to be a resource manager. The Exile shows what Cultist Simulator as an actual resource management game is like. The decisions you make will often have a permanent impact on your run, and there are a lot of 'traps' included, ways to use resources that are so inefficient that you basically should never do them.

You may like this, or you may hate it. If you're the type of player who only ascends after doing every expedition, leveling every acolyte, maxing every stat, gathering every every lore, then this DLC may be incredibly frustrating for you. It's nearly impossible to assemble a 'perfect' board here, and the main mechanic involves a dwindling resource you can never get back which acts as a kind of time limit. Outside of perhaps the major ascensions, the game generally lets you take all the time you want to explore. Exile does not do this. You may be forced to leave areas you can never return to before you've done everything you want to do. You may lose things you can never get back again. You may run out of time and be forced to make a desperation play before you're fully ready. This is all part of the game. Victory is meant to be a struggle.

Overall, I'd say Exile is the hardest Legacy to date. Even with major ascensions, you're still playing the base game and can rely on a lot of the base game tricks to get you through. Exile disallows or severely weakens a lot of the more powerful things you could do. It also changes the rules in some pretty big ways. For example, the game will now read the board and change things based on that, something the base game did not do and means you can't just rely on hiding or lifting cards to fool magnets into thinking a card isn't in play when it actually is. There are also less ways to 'store' cards to keep temporary ones around, or hide them to avoid magnets.

A lot of people have complained about RNG. There is quite a bit of it, but good play will give you enough leeway to deal with bad luck. Yes, you will get unlucky from time and time and you will lose things, but outside of one specific ending, you have enough resources and ways to do things that you can have that happen to you and still win.

The most common complaint with RNG is recon generating traces. This is by design. You're always on a ticking clock. Good luck gives you more time, but you don't have to rely on luck. There are other options that are far more effective. It's not particularly a huge issue once you know how to deal with it.

Overall, I found the lore and story extremely solid, as always. I especially love the twist in how Edge ascensions are completed. It's totally thematic to the lore and just makes perfect sense. There are a ton of new faces to see and people to meet, as well as some familiar ones. Surprisingly, there are quite a lot of endings to find, too. Some are very similar but even discounting those, there's at least 3 distinct ways things can play out (4 if you count losing).

If this sounds appealing to you, then by all means, give the DLC a try. But if you're more of a completionist type who wants to see and do everything without a time limit, you may want to skip this one.