Recent reviews by RileyInc

Accurate representation of me looking for a working server

Gonna be honest, I think this is the fastest I've seen a game kill itself. I'm genuinely impressed. A bold move? Yes. The right move? probably not

My spacebar is not happy with me

This game sucks

Oh boy, where do I even start.
Normally a TLDR would be at the end, but its gonna be at the start this time.
There are many games with good VR ports. Payday and No man's sky come to mind. This is not a good port

Now that I've reached sanctuary I think I've played enough to get a feel for the game, and man, the feel is not good.

The Port has a lot of problems, which aren't dealbreakers on their own. Just a lot of small things, like barely animated arms, weird controls, cutscenes played in the void, no multiplayer, no sprint, no jumping, vehicles being a nightmare, but the one big problem with the game is unfortunately something they really couldn't screw up.

The guns are bad and uninteresting to use.

Take any modern VR game with guns, there's almost always a lot more to a gun than just point and shoot. I'm going to use boneworks as an example, as that's the one i'm most familiar with.
Firing a gun with one hand? That's gonna be inaccurate with a pistol, outright impossible to hit with something large. Need to reload? better drop that clip and get a new one. Can't hit anything? try properly aiming with the scope. It's like borderlands took every single thing that makes VR guns fun and interesting, then threw it out the window. Guns magically reload on their own. you can only fire with one hand. Guns just teleport into your hands instead of having them stored on your body. Scopes are a tv screen you spawn in front of your gun. All these add up to have guns, a key focus in borderlands, extremely bland and uninteresting. If guns were actually fun to use, and had more skill and entertainment value than just point at enemy and pull trigger until they die, every single other problem could be overlooked. but it all adds up into an extremely lazy, uninteresting port of a game.

Oh yeah, and its full price. for a port.
It would be very hard to recommend this game at half price, or even quarter price. Heck, if the port was entirely free, I would still consider it a waste of time. Thank god it came with the recent humble bundle

But hey, I guess the environment looks nice. If you can make it out of the first area.

Its a great game with a lot of good stuff to do, although I recommend having friends and not playing solo

But this comes with a warning as well. You will have hours of progress taken from you from other people. People will hunt you down and bully you for literally no reason. The community (mostly) isn't toxic, but it is highly encouraged to hunt other people instead of working on your own profit. Even making an alliance is flawed, as you only get half value on things other members sell. Speaking from experience, you simply have to put up with the fact someone can come along and ruin your day at any time. It's quite unfortunate, some of the best parts of this game are with other crews, but you have to treat others with so much caution that fun interactions are few and far between. If these things are a dealbreaker, then I don't even blame you, and I recommend you either find some friends (preferably skilled ones) or avoid solo at all costs.

Also, you can have public ships, but I wouldn't trust those with my life, outside of arena

Edit: because people seem to be misunderstanding, I have no problem with people focusing more on the pvp than the pve, and targeting other players for profit. What I do have a problem with, however, if often people will just outright assault you, even if its clear you don't have any loot on you, and sink everyone they see for the sake of sinking people. it drives new players away, and just makes it even harder to get people to trust you. The fact that I have to warn new players that you can and will get bullied for literally no reason should be enough of a point, but the fact people still use the "Its Sea of Thieves not Sea of Friends" excuse for them not robbing, just murdering for no reason really drives home how some of the playerbase are, and how badly they want to feel in the right for attacking people for no reason. Because they aren't in it for the loot, they're in it to be the worst people they can, and feel in the right, because the game doesn't have any kind of punishment for being a ♥♥♥♥

I normally don't write a lot of reviews, but this one is a special occasion.

Drake hollow is an interesting conundrum of a game. At first, I simply thought it was a good game that just needed some work in a few places, but the more you play, the more you realise how barebones the game really is. While the game is fun and enjoyable for a good 4-5 hours, it rapidly turns into a boring showcase of good ideas. You need more than good ideas to make a good game. But I want to go over everything, so this might end up a bit long.

Firstly, the basebuilding, and probably the best part of the game, the only part I don't have any real complaints about. There's an interesting progression in everything you build, and you have to think both for practical and defence purposes. You start with not much options in buildings, and progress into better and better stuff, even requiring electricity and water for things to function. Just getting your base to both look nice, function well, and defend is the best part of the game, the only flaw here is that there's no way to upgrade buildings, outside of replacing them entirely. Not the worst system out there, but it can get annoying when you just want to make one thing better, but instead you have to demolish, then rebuild, then rewire it, just to have to do it again later when you get the next upgrade.

Next up, the exploration. Similar to everything else in the game, it starts quite enjoyable, then rapidly loses its fun value over time. the map is built by randomly generating a set of islands, surrounded by mist that kills you if you stand in it too long. getting through the mist is pretty simple, only requiring crafting a temporary charm to clear it around you as you run between islands. The islands themselves are not randomly generated, outside of loot and vines you have to clear. Sounds pretty solid so far, but unfortunately, it doesn't get much more interesting than that. there's nothing stopping you from just crafting a large amount of charms (which are also very cheap) and just running in a straight line between objectives. Clearing islands of vines are both vital for collecting resources, and a huge chore at the same time. One island needs to be cleared of 15ish vines you have to punch? not a huge deal. all 10-20 islands all need to be cleared of vines for collection purposes? It turns into a chore real fast. Getting around can be made a lot easier by building "waystones" that can be linked and grinded on to speed up moving places you've been, and transport some goods back to your base, but not clearing an island jams up the line, and stops things from moving. you're always gonna have to be clearing islands to progress, but its always the same thing. find island, find all the red vines and punch them until they break, rinse and repeat every time you step onto a new island. Unfortunately, even though the islands themselves are not randomised, they are very samey and not that unique, each of the four worlds could have had a lot more interesting variation. The perks of having handcrafted pieces is that they can be very unique and interesting, but outside of a few of the islands, there's not a lot to see. The sea of the exactly the same fog everywhere probably doesn't help much.

And lastly, the combat. Fighting in this game feels...unpolished and strange. Fighting is pretty basic, you have melee weapons for both close range and blocking, and a choice of ranged weapons for picking things off, along with a set of buffs you can get from your drakes to help you out. Putting it simply, there's not a lot of depth, its clunky, and very unbalanced. Swinging makes you stand dead still. You can block things behind you. You end up with so much health late game the only times I died were to accidentally walking in the fog for too long. its incredibly boring once you get the hang of it. Progression is also rather plain and simple, you simply find a higher tier of weapon once you reach a better camp level,
effectively forcing you to cycle into new weapons. There's a mere 4 enemies in the entire game, and while each one is unique in how it fights, it also gets boring and predictable real fast. Along with that, most one hand melee weapons are just plain bad compared to two handed weapons, why should I care that this one handed bat hits faster and is more likely to crit, when I can just oneshot anything with this two handed? Ranged weapons aren't much better either being flat out busted, or just not that useful. A great example is the blunderbuss. it does great damage and fires fast (enough to oneshot the strongest enemies early game, and twoshot later game) and ammo is plentiful enough that I never worried I was getting low, yet the humble balloon launcher I barely had ammo for the entire game (despite never using one) and even when I did get enough to use one, it does barely anything? The balance in everything is very questionable. Normally I don't talk balance, even more so in a PvE game, but when a pretty basic perk build with a blunderbuss cleans out the strongest enemies without a sweat, there should be some concern.

I think i have rambled on long enough, so I'll make the end nice and short. Drake Hollow has some great ideas, and cute creatures, but there's just not enough to do. every single piece of the game (except basebuilding) needs more work, more variation. There's some great pieces in this game, but it's just that. Pieces, and the bad outweigh the good. I have no idea if they plan on working on the game still (they recently added a endless mode) but there needs to be a good few major updates before I can consider this a worthwhile game. We'll see what's in the future.

If you have ever thought "I really could play some Enter the Gungeon, but my plants in Stardew valley need watering." then you'll probably enjoy this game

If you don't like the shape killing you just stop sinning, silly.

Good if you like ponies, and/or punching them in the face.