Recent reviews by gamer tax breaks

So when I first bought this, I felt like it might've been a waste of money because of the amount of money I had already put into DCS world. It's not. It's in the top 5 VR games I'd recommend to surprisingly, everyone.

VTOL VR is really good. It's a VR flight simulator that was, for the ground-up, built for VR. You do not need any extra features, no custom joysticks, throttles, rudder controls, etc, and (at least from my experience) the VR controls are really responsive and accurate for an old, tired Quest 2 headset.

Certain features from regular flight sims are cut from VTOL VR. That's immediately obvious in the graphics and the size of the world it's rendering, both are relatively low-spec compared to DCS and especially Microsoft Flight Sim, and other features, like accurate recreations of real vehicles, or more advanced parts of the simulation are gone.

The communications system is also reasonably simple, given the comparison to DCS and MSF. Because every system is handled in plane, with no menu, it's a really simple menu where you select who you want to speak to, and then what you want them to do.

Most of your time in VTOL VR will be spent playing the scenarios & campaigns already in the game, and the workshop submissions, those can really depend in quality, depending on what you want. I'd also really recommend getting into multiplayer, whether you want to go with public lobbies/discord communities or get a friend to get it with you. For a game where you spend your entire time in separate cockpits, there's still something so charming about flying close enough to wave at each-other.

I'd recommend the DLCs too, just not for your first ten hours or so. The two first planes (AV-42 and FA/26) are really great for learning the basics, and the F45 is goated, i'd learn those before going for any other planes.

The T-55 is cool for flying with someone else in the cockpit, and even solo, it's very manoeuvrable, and makes for a dream stunt plane.
The AH-94 is super fun, a Co-op helicopter, but with enough patience, you can make it work solo. It feels suitably difficult to pilot accurately.
The EF-24G is pretty great. I've not had a chance to get fully familiar with it, but I can already tell you really will need someone to be your copilot. It's a dream having a modernised F-14 in the game.

cringe

To be clear - I don't care about the lack of servers, even the patchy netcode. I hate to say it, that's normal this day and age.

I more care about the lackluster options settings and bizarre choices that cannot be undone in controls. The crouch button will always roll if you're moving. The controls on controller are either way too sensitive or not sensitive enough.

This review won't be ideal for everyone. I've been playing this game literally my entire life, so I have more specific setups in mind. A lot of the controls just feel a little bit off to me, and the options settings are not robust enough to actually... fix that. There are so many minor problems I have that just make it not worth playing. I think I'll go back to the OG, which somehow had a more functional options menu than this.

I'm refunding this as a shotgun decision because I don't actually know if this game will get updates that make it more worth playing - and if the main audience isn't enjoying it, there's not much chance of a modding scene popping up. The modding scene for the original BF2 was a big thing for me, and i was hoping it would be coming back here, but my hopes are not high.

Prove me wrong. (Please)

Not worth it. Post-launch support has been extremely lacking, and the miscommunication between developers and the community is really, really bad.

Why should the miscommunication matter so much? Because it means that the developer's priorities seem to be completely misaligned with ours. So many people were just holding out for a mod support that isn't here yet, I'm still holding out for changes to the simulation and User Experience, etc.

Also, I'm a transport nerd. I haven't tested the game so much, but from what other people have said, I'm getting the vibe that the pedestrian and car simulations in this game are not realistic. Traffic jams being caused by pedestrians jaywalking so much is like... not a fun addition to the simulation, especially considering I've rarely seen traffic jams that are caused by having too many cars.

The simulation, both on a transport and economic level, is not accurate, nor fun. The Developers seem to think it is both, it is not.
The post-launch support was meant to include mod support, that was implied to be within a month of the release window, we're multiple months past that now, and they're talking about a "beta" of modding support.
The community engagement was meant to be good, not only coming from CO, a developer team who were good at this before, but from a company working under Paradox, who are generally really good at this, but their reputation has been stained by saying so many incorrect or dishonest things.

If Payday 3 didn't release, this would've been my most disappointing game of 2023.

The game needs more updates. More developer communication. A clearer roadmap that's more aligned with what the community want.
I get the feeling that we're a couple of months away from a DLC announcement and I have a feeling that will make people especially livid, when what we really have, is an early access game that is pretending it isn't one.

The only bad thing about Gunpoint that actually matters is that there's not enough there. This game is so good and it's a crime it's so short.

Ok, I have three (now four) reasons I'm not recommending this. Two, are quite fixable. The third is a little more of something to just be concerned about.

1: Always online. Some people have problems with that, my problem is that when I want to play offline, I still have to 'matchmake', for seemingly a private lobby. Makes it inconvenient to play solo, and I'd just like the ability to host my own game like in Payday 2. I don't see this as being mutually exclusive with the always online integration, I just want to be able to not wait a minute to get into a game.

2: RNG. When you restart a heist, the RNG is the same. Sounds good on paper, in practice, you can skip a lot of a stealth heist simply by knowing the RNG from failed runs. Feels cheap. Not a massive problem, just something that sort of takes me out of it.

3: I'm just a bit concerned about the future of this game, in terms of monetisation. In terms of the companies owning Starbreeze now, they don't have a great track record, and I really just want this to live up to Payday 2's quality of free vs paid content, the free content allowing me to play more new heists with more new weapons after a year or two of being absent from the game. This one is just an initial concern as of release day. Hopefully my concerns are unfounded.

4: After playing every heist at least once, I want to express my annoyance at one objective, something other people are annoyed at, an objective where in order for Shade to hack something, you need to stand 4-6 spots across the map for up to 5 or so seconds. I do not like this. I would prefer to hack a random laptop on the map. That objective does not make this feel like a heisting game, it makes it feel like a "hold your phone up in random spots to get a signal" game.

I will, however say, the gameplay is almost flawless in execution, exactly what I'd hope for from a Payday 3. Smooth as hell, fun as hell. I've played in both betas, and I am excited to play more.

Old school as hell, but that's refreshing. A walkthrough for the original game holds true to this one, and apparently that's a bad thing (according to game journos). I don't get it.

Not every remake has to re-imagine the game and add Mr X. If you liked Prey, you might like this. Get the demo. It's a really good demo.

Also, devs, how tf did you make this game so beautiful

I'm not even done with my first campaign but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this is fantastic.

It's just XCOM 2 but better. So much better. Not to say that XCOM 2 is bad, far from it, but War of the Chosen turns it into what it was meant to be.

Yes it adds some difficult stuff quite early on, but it also gives you some good units too. War of the Chosen transformed a bit of a frustrating game into something much more interesting, especially that you're no longer just fighting aliens all of the time, which adds some variety.

One of the best stealth games ever made. Watch some videos on it to see how you'll want to play, mission stories on or off, and go forth and enjoy.

but don't buy it for the VR, it's seriously the worst VR game I've ever played.

OK WHAT THE ♥♥♥♥ IS HAPPENING

never made a review even worse than it already was. wtf are take 2 doing with this game, we've only had one real update and they've shuttered the main development studio while insisted the game still exists

thank you 2023 + 2024. i have learnt my lesson. only smol indie video games made by one developer
vtol vr go brr



Since I've played this update more, I've come up on some very annoying bugs that, as far as I can remember, have been here since launch, so I won't be updating the review to fully positive. Yet.

So I've played about an hour of the new update, but I'm waiting to play more before I give a more in-depth review.

I made a new save for the new exploration mode, and in my experience (which was back at launch which was nearly a year ago now), the worst bugs appear a couple of hours into a save, so I'm not going to be comfortable changing this review to positive until I'm a couple of hours in.

My first impressions on the update are that a lot of things have been fixed, and that this is how the game should've launched. I've seen a couple of visual glitches, I'm having a couple of problems with the UI, etc, but I have a science playthrough started and it's reasonably fun.

I think what's been achieved in For Science can be made a tad more obvious, it's a little bit unclear that some (but not all) science gathering opportunities happen in the background of your gameplay, and as with KSP1, science storage is a little confusing.

But, I am excited to play a bit more. I hope that this caliber of update continues, but I would also hope that minor changes to the User Experience, UI, HUD, etc, become more frequent in the new year.

Good job devs. This review might change to positive if it's not glitchy in future. However, for the price, ya know, KSP 1 is still available.