Recent reviews by McMessenger

Well... it was fun while it lasted. Crazy to think that a game this influential in the development of the early internet era and gaming culture as a whole has just been left to rot by the original creators at this point.

Definitely a welcome break from Tarkov - enjoyed the PvE side for the most part. Met and interacted with some friendly people; saved a few (and got saved) from death at times. PvP is a bit weird - extract camping is a big one (seems like that would've been an obvious issue from the start); not a huge fan of that.

That all being said - unless you have a 2000$+ "streamer" rig with top-of-the-line PC components, good luck running this game anywhere past 60 fps on even low settings at 1080 / 1440p. My current setup can run most current releases just fine - GZW still needs a lot of work in optimization overall in that regard. Game performance is a big deal to me, especially with how much I've invested into my current setup already - so I'd probably wait until the game gets more optimized first.

Snoy backed down! Long live Helldivers 2 and AH!

Nevermind, Sony isn't allowing almost 100+ countries to buy the game on Steam now, RIP.

Really expected the 1.0 release to be more polished than where it currently is, given how long the game was in Early Access (and even for a few years before it released on Steam in EA) - but I just can't recommend this game at full price currently with all its issues.

Suspect AI still needs a lot of work - they're still too "inhuman" in a lot of situations and their visibility through smoke and at night is a real problem.

Performance is bad / mainly inconsistent overall; lots of frame dips at inconvenient times. Either the performance requirements need to be updated on Steam, or more optimizations are needed to make the game run better.

Came across a few graphical bugs on certain maps (enemies just pop into existence) and gameplay bugs (door jams turn invisible when playing in multiplayer lobbies, and are sometimes irretrievable).

Additional gamemode options that were available before 1.0 have been cut, with only 1 way to play each map every time. This added a lot of repllay-ability with different scenarios per map, and there was no mention of this being removed before 1.0.

The "campaign mode" (Commander) feels pretty half-baked, at least in comparison to something like SWAT 4's campaign mode. I don't know what else could be done to make it more interesting to play through, but I didn't really have that much fun with it (probably more-so to do with the current state of the AI, if anything).

Overall, I'm pretty disappointed with the official launch after spending a good amount of time with it. It sucks because I was heavily involved in the modding scene during EA and made a few popular mods that people enjoyed - but I don't really have any desire to go back and update them simply because I just don't enjoy the way the game is right now. The "aimbot" suspect AI has always been a problem that's been brought up numerous times during EA at many points in development by the community, and despite a few things that were added to them to "give them more life" - at lot of it just feels like wasted effort, or just feels completely absent in 1.0 now.

I hope VOID can do right and provide some updates soon to at least address the current performance issues and maybe give some kind of roadmap post-launch - but it's been about a month since launch with little to no information from them in that regard, so who really knows. For $50 USD, I don't think it's current issues are worth that price - maybe when it's on sale for around $30. There's definitely some good visuals and atmosphere here (soundtrack is also a highlight for me), but actually playing the game feels like a real chore at times.

This is likely the closest thing to a "Time Crisis, but in VR" game you can get right now - but it suffers from one very key problem that even the first Time Crisis had: the indication system. Let me explain:

If you've played Time Crisis 2 or the later games, you may remember that enemies will telegraph accurate shots with the "Crisis Flash" - that red fireball-looking thing that appears when an enemy is about to hit you, which you can react to and dodge back into cover. Time Crisis 1 didn't have this system, so at times it would feel frustrating to avoid getting hit, especially since there was already a time limit, so Namco introducing the "Crisis Flash" indicator into the 2nd game (and the rest of the series) was a very welcome change that also allowed for more enemy variety - such as red enemies where their first shot is always accurate, or machine gunners with higher rates of fire, meaning they have more chances to hit you. As a player, this meant that you would have to sometimes prioritize certain enemies over others, or know when and when not to peek out to fire - so there was also an element of player skill and strategy involved. It wasn't just random chance anymore if you'd get hit - now you could avoid it, if you were fast enough.

Unfortunately, Crisis VRigade 2 doesn't have that same system, so it suffers from a noticeable difficulty problem, even at the lowest difficulty - which is funny, considering the "dodging the bullet" aspect from TC2 could have been a fun movement idea in VR (e.g. using your head to dodge an incoming hit). The closest that Crisis VRigade 2 comes to an indicator system is showing you nearby enemies with a small, hard-to-see yellow "danger" icon above their heads - though that doesn't always mean they're guaranteed to hit you when they shoot, so you can't fully rely on it as a way to know when it's OK to peek out. It's also worth mentioning that you don't see any indicator at all when playing on the 3rd difficulty (Veteran) or higher.

The only reliable / safe way to really play this game is to either (1.) Use the Riot Shield for every level, which gives you much better hard cover to work with and blind fire from or (2.) Sit on the floor IRL the entire time and hope that a stray shot doesn't hit you when you peek - both options aren't all that fun. If you decide to play without the Riot Shield, then peeking from cover will almost always require some amount of luck, since the coverage that enemies have on your single position is far greater than your ability to isolate them and pick them off 1 at a time, in most areas. You'll likely end up just blind-firing since there are so many enemies shooting at you at times - and again, without a similar "Crisis Flash" indication system, you can't safely peek knowing if you'll be safe from an accurate shot or not. Let me be clear - my problem isn't that I don't want to use cover at all to take on 5-6 guys all at once - my problem is you can't know whether or not peeking out of cover, even for split-second, means you're going to be hit, unless the enemies just aren't shooting (which is rare, given that there's almost always at least 5-6 enemies at the start of a new area shooting at you). The fact that every enemy has automatic rifles also increases the chance that a shot is going to hit you as well - why not give the enemies less automatics and more pistols instead, at least in the earlier areas / levels? It would at least help newer players ease into the first few areas and gameplay systems, instead of getting immediately pressured by 6-7 enemies all firing automatic rifles and SMGs at you all at once, in the first area of the game.

Difficulty-wise, this game might be better / easier in 2-player co-op, though I didn't get a chance to really try it - and the game didn't release with co-op on launch, so saying that the game is "easier" in co-op doesn't justify the poor balance, in my opinion. I've heard good things about the co-op aspect though, so this game might be a bit more bearable with a friend I'd imagine.

Enemy variety is very "meh" - mostly just the same, generic bad-guy types in different outfits depending on the mission, so there really isn't that much strategy except blind-fire most of the time, and peek out occasionally for the last few guys. Bosses are sort of the same way as well - just they have health bars instead. The 2nd mission boss did catch me off guard though, which was fun, but he's also basically a "shoot him 'til he dies" affair.

Length-wise, this game is very short - you can basically complete every level in about 1-2 hours or so if you're fairly skilled with VR shooters already - I managed to beat all the levels on the 3rd hardest difficulty in about 1.3 hrs. Again, due to the frustrating difficulty and design, it's hard to want to go back and replay through any of the levels, even to try and beat my high score. Crisis VRigade 2 has a similar combo system compared to Time Crisis where hitting multiple enemies in a row without missing gives you a bonus, but again, I don't feel compelled to replay the levels when it felt like I was being hit with no chance to avoid it. There a few areas in some missions where you have to crouch for your cover, and sometimes it's not even "hard" cover, so you'll end up getting hit through it anyway.

I was really hoping Crisis VRigade 2 would be more like Time Crisis 2 - TC2 is probably my favorite arcade game ever, and it's pretty hard to find any cabinets in modern arcades nowadays, so it's a real shame that Crisis VRigade 2 is as frustrating as it is. Perhaps if it leaned into the more "arcadey" style - where instead of moving in an out of cover physically, you'd only need to move left or right to avoid telegraphed gunfire, then it might be a better step in the right direction - though I think at this point, this game is pretty much set in its design decisions, for better or worse depending on your preferences. It technically is still in Early Access, so who knows - maybe it could dramatically change.

If you want to play this, I'd say it's worth to get it during a sale - even then I still don't know if it's all that worth it. Making a difficult game is easy - but making a difficult game that also feels "fair" is a hard thing to do, and I don't believe Crisis VRigade 2 is there quite yet.

----- This review has been re-edited and reevaluated (as of 2/20/2021), based on some updates which improve the game in areas I previously found lacking; I've kept that previous feedback in this review, but striked-out to provide some context. Great job devs! -----

Into the Radius VR is essentially trying to be like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - but in VR - and while I like the premise, there are still a lot of some problems that need addressed, and the overall experience needs some much more a bit more fine tuning before I would consider it a game worth $30 (at the time of writing this).


I'll discuss movement first - it is very weird and unintuitive. Instead of being able to walk / jog at a consistent speed in any direction, and only being able to sprint when moving forwards (like most VR games with continuous locomotion systems), you can only walk the fastest while moving forward, and you seem to walk at a crouching speed when opting to strafe left or right, or moving backwards - which just feels wrong and limits the player, especially with head-based forward orientation. And while sprinting is faster for getting around, it almost feels a bit too fast, so movement devolves into mostly start-and-stop sprinting, since walking is too slow, and sprinting is too fast.


This has been changed: now movement is a consistent walking or crouching speed (depending on your stance) no matter which direction you face while moving, while max sprint speed has been brought down slightly. While I've seen some complaints about the speed decrease in sprinting in this case, there could also be solutions in increasing your default carry weight (or just don't take as many things with you before you head out from your base lol) to help balance this problem out.


At this point, I hope that future updates involve reworking the "mantling" system as well for getting over knee or waist height obstacles dynamically, rather than using pre-determined mantle points (Half Life: Alyx is great example of this), which would make navigating rockier terrain much more bearable (or even just some kind of jump button).

Regarding weapons, there's some good and bad - and I've played a fair amount of other VR shooters (Pavlov, Zero Caliber, Onward, etc.). I like the weapon variety, managing ammo and weapon durability, and the firing range as well as grip animations for weapon handling are nice additions - but some of the weapons just feel "off." I constantly seem to have problems with quickly cycling another round with bolt action rifles (lots of starts and stops mid-way through chambering), and attempting to 2-hand a pistol seems to swap it to my left hand more often than what I'd want it to do. I'm not exactly sure why there's a feature to swap from my right hand (dominant in my case) to my left while still gripping on my right controller - most games would just force you to let go of the grip on your right controller, then grab with your left. Maybe have some kind of option for that in the settings, that way I don't constantly swap hands by accident when I want to just 2-hand a pistol? I also noticed that some of the guns aren't sighted correctly, in particular the TT-30 pistol - it seems to shoot a lot higher than the iron sights would lead you to believe when lined up on a distant target.


The TT-30 pistol iron sights are now properly aligned and sighted for close range.


Something that bothered me while playing through the first hour or so is just the lack of any human NPCs or characters. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games was the times when you'd trek back to a human outpost for rest and supplies, and could chat with people - it offered a sense of comfort and familiarity before heading back out into danger again, but Into the Radius doesn't seem to have any human NPCs, friendly or not. It just feels 'off' and makes going back to your hub for supplies and rest not as enjoyable, in my opinion.

The world / environment of Into the Radius is by far it's strongest aspect - enemies and anomalies are unsettling and bizarre at first, and the weather and fog help add to the tension as you explore. You never really feel truly safe unless you're back at your hub outpost - fortunately there are some small houses scattered around that offer some brief safety. The only thing I didn't enjoy that much was a lack of distant landmarks for guiding the player, but you do have a map, so it's not a huge deal.

There appears to be some over-arcing story / narrative you have with a young girl or something like that - she helps guide you through the tutorial level and she shows up in the world in landmark locations - however, I didn't realize that triggering one of her in-game monologues would slow me to a crawl. I found this out during a mission for a black box nearby the Construction site, and I ended up triggering her while near a large, yellow crane. The 6-7 or so enemies in that area then proceeded to walk at me while I was nearly frozen in place, and I ended up dying after 30 minutes of carefully making my way up to that point, and that's where I stopped playing. I understand that this isn't meant to be any easy shooting game - as in you need to plan ahead for what you'll be facing - but getting killed by some narrative / lore story thing was EXTREMELY unfair. If I'm being slowed down to listen to some kid talk about something, then why aren't the enemies affected?


After coming back to this game and testing some things, this turned out to actually be one of the "anomalies" (environmental hazards / something you DON'T want to walk into), and originally this was placed around one of Katya's dialogue locations, which was confusing at first since I initially thought it was meant for the dialogue, not something that would alert enemies to your location; this has since been moved away, so it's not as confusing for first-time players anymore.


Overall, I don't think this game is worth $30, or worth buying at all right now. Clearly there is some good work put into this (again, the environment + weather effects are great), but it needs a lot of fine tuning and additions before I would consider this game worthy of its asking price. I'm surprised it's out of Early Access in the state that it is - it's the little things in VR that take a game from OK to fantastic, and having to fight with the controls more than the actual enemies in the game is a major problem. I think with enough time this could be something really special, but for now it needs a lot more adjustments and improvements.


After coming back and spending a bit more time with Into the Radius, I've grown to mostly enjoy the overall experience. It's still rough around the edges in some spots, and there's definitely a bit of a learning curve to how the world and systems work, but I've had my fair share of intense combat that do truly test your ability to think carefully and plan ahead - failing to do so will usually punish you, and it's nice to see a VR game that's decent challenging, even for veteran VR players. I'm still hard-pressed in saying that the whole story is worth $30, since how fast you choose to play through the main story is entirely dependent on your overall skill level - and once that's over, it's essentially a survival game (more-or-less). Overall though, this game has made a decent jump in improvement since when I last tried it, so if you're really itching for a more hardcore, lengthy single-player VR survival game, then I'd say it's worth the price. If 2 player coop multiplayer support does ever become a reality for Into the Radius, then I would 100% recommend this game - time will tell, I suppose.

What happens when you combine VR, Spider-Man web swinging, and elements from Portal? You get this interesting game called Yupitergrad. This is essentially a puzzle-platformer where the main premise is moving around using plungers combined with physics and swinging to get past obstacles - and it's a lot of fun.

Honestly, I'm surprised that more people either don't know or aren't talking very much about this game. I'm baffled at the time of writing this that there are only 26 reviews. Like what?! Especially considering that there are few well-made puzzle oriented VR games in the first place, but I digress. Yupitergrad has a lot of potential to be not only a great puzzle game, but would also make for an AMAZING speedrun game. It's easy to understand and play the game at your own pace, but having enough precision and speed to correct your movement as you're flying past obstacles at light speed in a speedrun setting would be a real challenge.

While this game is rather short (it only took me about 2 hours), it's core game mechanics are very strong and are fun to mess around with to try and figure out what forms of movement work the best for certain situations. At the moment, this is about as close to a VR-Portal like game that is out right now - it follows a similar theme in it's story and presentation that I can't help but feel there are parallels, especially with an AI companion that isn't quite as evil as GLaDOS, but still cracks jokes about the superiority of the Motherland vs. "the capitalists", which are still very ironic considering the circumstances for you being there, as well as the ending. The art style also helps keep the game feeling a bit more comedic and light with it's more hand-drawn, cel-shaded look that I think matches the tone / mood of this game perfectly, and just looks nice overall.

Currently, the devs are planning to add in a proper speedrun mode with an in-game timer, which is good news. Having proper Workshop support and a level editor would also make for great additions. More experienced VR players will fly past most of the obstacles without too much trouble, so having some more challenging additional levels separate from the main story would help add some replay value, alongside the Workshop and user-created levels idea.

All-in-all, Yupitergrad is just a great VR puzzle / platformer. I'm still incredibly surprised at the small amount of reviews this game has - hopefully this game won't remain a "hidden gem" for long, because the devs at Gamedust have created a very solid game that's easily worth the $15 price tag.

Basically "The Room" of Half-Life 2 mods. Crappy, inconsitent level design along with broken cutscenes, terrible enemies, game balancing issues on higher difficulties, and graphical bugs left and right makes this experience one you should quickly avoid at all costs.

Do NOT purchase this game. Go buy Black Mesa - it costs 5 dollars less and is worthy of being a paid mod.

Here I have uploaded my first impressions of this game, along with some background on myself involving it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfLgSVRfmKI

I enjoy playing this game, I really do. I've met many good, fun players on PUBG Discord servers for teaming up together, as well as enjoying the game in solo matches. Compared to other battle royale games that are out right now, it has just the right blend of gunplay and vehicles so that firefights feel intense and engaging. Despite the problems that are in this game, when it works, it works so damn well. During Early Access, I held off on my complaints because bugs and network issues were things I fully expected.

But this isn't Early Access anymore, so I'm going to treat it as such.

I've played though all the iterations of this game, starting from it's Early Access release on Steam until now, and I can't deny that there hasn't been significant improvements. They've reworked the grenade systems, vehicles physics and sounds, tweaked FPP to a playable level, etc. etc. On top of that, the jump to the updated Unreal 4 has seen major FPS increases all around, and some slightly better visuals. The vaulting system, as well as the animation work for character movement is top notch, and definitely benefits the variety of gunfights in this game.

Now on to the bad, which I hate saying there is more than there really should be.

Most of these critiques come from my own personal experiences, but I feel a large majority of the players in this game would agree with me. Firstly, the network/server systems in this game are just not up to the standards they should be for a "released" game. Rubberbanding and ping/latency lag between clients is a common occurence, and is almost expected to be the cause of death in many cases. For a game developer trying to promote their title as an upcoming E-sport is kind of laughable, when the online server tickrates can't compete with the likes of CSGO of Dota 2. I can see how it will be more difficult to bring PUBG's servers up to that standard because it's a very different game compared to most E-sports, but it's still an issue that needs to be addressed.

Talking about bugs/glitches, most of these are minor when compared to the bigger issues, but I can tell it frustrates people enough to the point where they'll make Reddit posts about it, so I'll discuss this a little bit. Just recently, a patch was released that fixed a collision issue with chain-link fences in the game, where one side would have no bullet collision (you can shoot thru it), and the other would have collision. Needless to say, there are still some chain-link fences that haven't been fixed. While this is only one very minor issue among many others (such as models not rendering at long distances or wonky vehicle physics) it's still an issue nonetheless, and it does need to be addressed. Not to mention that in terms of the quality of updates and transparency with the community, which PUBG Corp/Bluehole have a terrible reputation with, making updates that don't entirely fix the problem or make it worse doesn't help in improving that said reputation.

And finally, I'll try to tackle the controversial topic of cheaters and the, as PlayerUnknown himself calls it, "xenophobic" behavior of the playerbase towards China. This issue is probably the largest by far, going off of the massive amounts of hate I see on the Discord servers I play in, as well as the attitude of people I've played with in those Discord servers.

I'm honestly baffled as to how big this problem has grown in the past couple of months, but maybe that's just because most of the online multiplayer games I've played through Steam always excluded the Chinese playerbase on most accounts. In September of 2017, CSGO saw a release in China through Perfect World, and up until then I never realized just how big the Chinese playerbase for games was until then; they needed their own version to play on. So it's no wonder that PUBG has been breaking Steam records; it's because they're including everyone in the whole world. To put this into some perspective, PUBG has the majority of its players from China, about 60% or so. Then you look at the amount of hackers that have been banned: 1.5 million. Quite the impressive number for a game that's only been around for roughly 1 year, considering that again, the majority of those hackers come from, you guessed it, China.

I don't hate the Chinese; that's not the point of what I'm trying to say here. What I will say is that it's stupid as a developer to look at this problem and say that the minority is being "xenophobic." Nobody would have an issue playing with people from other countries if they played fairly, and I suppose that's what a system like Battleye is for. But it's pretty clear that Battleye isn't going to be enough, if the minority is going to be as vocal as they are about it. People want this game to be better in so many different ways, and that's why Steam has as many negative reviews about this game as it does, because the minority of the playerbase knows PUBG isn't perfect, and that it can be better. I don't see what's holding PUBG Corp/Bluehole back from implementing changes that would improve the game as a whole for the people who actually want this game to get better, rather than not really saying/doing anything. That's the same reason I stopped playing CSGO competitively; it just felt like the VAC system wasn't enough and Valve wasn't doing much to fix the problem.

There's no best solution to this Chinese hacker problem that I can see. Many people want all kinds of things like hardware ID bans, region-locks, ping locks, etc. Truthfully, I've only ever played with a legitimate Chinese player once, and he was playing with an English-speaking friend of his that would translate what he was saying back to the whole squad, so we could all still work together. I suppose the fear of splitting up the PUBG playerbase, by region-locking half of the world to the other or forcing the Chinese to player on their own version of PUBG, is that it would look bad by Steam stats, since the concurrent player count would be halved (as of writing this, PUBG has hit 3 million). Ping-lock looks to be the safest solution to this mess, and there are many games that do implement this already. Call me xenophobic for saying that, but it would improve the experience for many people who want to see this game improve in a meaningful way, myself included.

Anyway, that's pretty much all I have to say about PUBG. Who knows, maybe within a couple months we'll see massive improvements/changes, blah, blah, optimism, blah. Given Bluehole's track record in the past, I doubt it, but that could change.

Oh, and Mr. Greene, please bring modding into this game at some point soon, at least some modified Unreal Developer Kit for PUBG that we can use to build our own battle-royale maps with. You said it yourself, you want to find the next "PlayerUnknown." For someone that came from the Arma modding scene to be so heisitant about releasing modding tools for one of the most popular games on Steam, the next "PlayerUnknown" will never be found by only offering "custom game" options that are limited to a simple UI. Heck, if you really want to do that, take a good long look at the Halo games, with their Forge mode and custom game options. Just a suggestion.

Alright I'm done. Peace ya'll.

There's hilarious explicit dialogue spewed from your main character that seems like it was written by a 14 year old who exclusively plays Call of Duty multiplayer online, and has a huge disdain for communism.

That's pretty much the only thing this game stands on. Or if you have an affinity for slapped-together FPS controls, tropes, and a 2-hour campaign.

That being said, at the time of typing this, the game is only 75% off and only worth $1.24. Buy at your own risk.

For those that don't want to waste chump change, here's a YouTube link to the dialogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xVr7fo4ckQ.