Recent reviews by The Guy

PSN login is now a prerequisite to play. While this is not much of an issue, and most gamers will have or be able to set up a PSN account, the fact that this can possibly limit gameplay for no benefit is concerning. We have seen for months that the game works perfectly without PSN login, so adding it after the fact when the game already uses Steam to authenticate benefits nobody, and only serves to harm the player.
Arrowhead's team and community manager have responded in bad faith to criticism over this, which speaks volumes about their view on the playerbase, and desire for the game to have longevity.

I killed a cyclops with a wooden stick and highfived my party members

At the moment, this is a severe downgrade from the original versions of the game.
A small list of the issues that I can remember
- Every Multiplayer host and client has to go through a middleman, which significantly increases latency, causing rubber-banding all over the place. On a server that is in the same room as me, I get 70 ping.
- Every Multiplayer host has to synchronously wait for the middleman to respond, causing significant framerate drops down to less than the tick rate in frames per second.
- The tickrate is immutable, even though it is internally mutable
- Nowhere does the game describe which ports to forward for the dedicated server, making this knowledge esoteric, and requiring the user to reverse engineer, or use external tools to discover (the answer is 5055 and 5056.)
- There is no way to run the dedicated server without locking up your steam account, making it impossible to play on your own dedi without two steam accounts which own the game. As described, before, hosting the server in non-dedicated mode may tank your framerate.
- Filling the name of a dedicated server creates a strange bug in which you cannot launch the game, and the selected maps get deleted
- "Naboo" is a banned work
- The “Sort By” options on the server browser are nonfunctional
- Searching by name on the server browser allows you to input less text than the length of a server name can be
- You are unable to un-invert the flight controls.
- The game still uses archaic input libraries, making mouselook feel latent and terrible.
- Mods for the original games are only partially supported (though this seems to be by accident.), meaning that many mods are unplayable, which unfortunately limits the selection of content the game offers significantly.
- The graphical upgrade is less than that of mods for the original, for 40 more gb than it's worth (not that I care about the size of the game, but some might)
- The updated console-derived UIs are insanely buggy. I would much prefer the original PC UIs, since they were highly functional in comparison.
- Rhen Var crashes the game in BF1

Besides all of this, it's just the xbox version of Battlefront with some pc features turned on, at it's core. If you enjoy Battlefront, you will at the very least enjoy single player/instant action.

I would love to see the following additional features in updates:
- Multiplayer Galactic Conquest (coop or competitive); yes, I want to spend 3 hours ruling the galaxy with my bros
- The original PC UI. It wasn't buggy, and was much more functional

- stupei
- you can pet the dog
- all hail queen ♥♥♥♥♥

Great amount of polish, seems to have solid netcode. Controls very well.
Without mods it is locked to 60 fps though.

I lost track of time while playing.
Visuals are a bit weird, and clash, but the gameplay is interesting enough to keep you engaged.
This game takes inspiration from various others survival-craft like Valheim.

It is very buggy, even localhost servers are laggy and rubber-band. Imagine craftopia with an ark+pokemon skin, and somehow less stable. Even some config options fail to work.

This game is best in class for emergent gameplay, and consequential player decision. The roleplaying experience which this game presents is unrivaled, and confidently sets a new bar for the genre.

A succinct explanation for why this is currently negative:
> Extensively explore level
> Missing a couple secrets, comb over level again
> See secrets in far off areas on the map, but no path seems to lead to them
> Comb over level again
> Comb over level again
> Comb over level again
> Confused, I boot the game with Unity explorer and noclip through the wall to backtrack so that I can figure out what I am supposed to do
> Secrets are impossible to naturally access

Besides this little goof with having unobtanium secrets, I am also going to complain about the loot system, which requires you to destroy everything in a level. It feels very bad to clear a room, then need to subsequently walk around smacking barrels for a loot score which ultimately does nothing. This design philosophy seems to just interrupt the gameplay that is actually good (the FPS combat.)

If you want a good Wolfendoomish FPS, this is pretty good in that regard, and has very polished art, and music that isn't insulting to listen to. I would suggest skipping the urge to explore and complete/clear though, since at this point, the levels are either unfinished, or the system is a cruel joke lol

Starting this off by clarifying that I wasn't a kickstarter backer, or even remotely hyped for this game. I received it as a gift from a friend as something to mess around in for a couple hours.

That said, if you are on the fence about weather you think this game might be interesting to you, I am going to suggest not wasting your time.

This game fails in almost every regard to do anything interesting. It has problematic gameplay, visuals, and presentation.

Starting with the presentation, the opening scene has numerous issues in regards to modeling, and UV mapping. Despite allowing you to use your steam account for authentication, you still need to go through a painfully untested account creating process which will involve exiting VR for some users. Getting into game, you are presented with buggy untested combat. Things such as players producing thousands of hit effects force you to reduce the volume. Worse yet, the game has an extremely lazy tutorial, where you're guided by the smallest budget indie voice actress possible. Navigating through the game, you will see countless issues in regards to NPCs and actors. More weird things, like some quests being given in the third person, and some in the first. Goofy, easy to avoid things like characters' feet hovering, and doing a weird dance. It is woefully obvious that the team behind this game put no effort into presenting the game well, I've seen more polished prototypes.

Moving onto visuals, I already mentioned issues regarding modeling, and UV mapping in the menu scene. These issues continue throughout every location in the game that I have seen. Unfortunately, it is worse than that, as there are also issues in regards to skinning (like A posing models.) There are other odd issues like the ludicrously aggressive culling which causes visual issues at high framerate. More things, such as signposts in the game reading "Sample Text" when pointing to a village. More drawbacks, like there only being a very limited number of mobs (Boar, Rabbit, Turtle, Crab, Gremlin, Golem), where variety is created through color swaps. Digging the hole deeper, those sensitive to pop-in beware: at the highest setting, spitting distance visuals pop in. Worse yet, the distance in which textures switch to lower mips is aggressively in front you, and further in front of that. If you can ignore the lack of care, when the game looks it's best, it's at least not insulting? I don't want to be so negative about this, but it's not particularly unique, generally looks bland, but at least the textures look ok.

As for the gameplay, it feels majorly clunky and unintuitive. The first major issue, and insane red flag, is that the game does not support basic QOL like smooth turning. Similarly bad, it does not support having a sizable playspace. Your collision is always nailed to the center of your playspace. Problems like this were solved nearly a decade ago, and are trivial to implement.

Moving onto combat, the melee fighting feels like the kind of "yeah this is what vr can do" prototype that I whipped up in an hour when working with the DK2 back in 2014. That is to say, it's just swinging a hitbox around, with some thoughtless delays put in there. It's utterly awful, and this feeling is compounded by the tweaky, buggy mobs and their unclear hitboxes.
Archery is alright. I guess? It works somewhat better than melee, but it still has that same vibe of being a early 2014 prototype made in an hour.
Spellcasting is pretty much worthless, because of the implementation, you need to sacrifice uptime to do some pittance of what the other roles can do. I tried to wield a wand in one hand, and a sword in the other so I could use the ward spell to become more of a tank, but the game was too clunky for this to work right.

Combat is effectively just a "do an unsatisfying menial motion" simulator. There is limited feedback, and inconsistent, unclear hitboxes. The depth of having a party is just a question of who is currently maintaining aggro. Enemies only know a basic melee attack.

Speaking of a party, I didn't even mention what this game is supposed to be- an MMO! Yeah, there's multiplayer I guess. Some quests even share progress. Is it massive? No. Is it designed to be multiplayer? No. Your party is impossible to keep track of because no visual information about them is displayed besides the list itself. It's trivial to lose track of your friends.
As for how the game actually stacks up to MMO gameplay, it doesn't. Even OSRS has more depth in short and long term gameplay. It feels like the developers just ticked some boxes for surface level implementations of MMO things. Does it have parties? Yeah! Mobs? Yeah! Quests? Yeah! But that is the extent of how deep those things go.
Something neat that the game fumbles is the inventory and compass systems. The intent for the inventory is for you to pull a backpack off of your back, and you poke a little voodoo doll to adjust your equipment. Unfortunately, the implementation of everything regarding the inventory makes it practically unusable. Have fun wailing around trying to find the spot that grabs the backpack instead of the weapon!
The compass has a similar issue, you're supposed to put your palm above your eye as if you were looking out at the horizon. This is a neat idea, but it doesn't work! Most of the time spent trying to use this was having the compass vibrate from active to inactive as my hand moved a micron out of the right spot. That is, if I could even activate it at all.
Speaking of hands, this game doesn't even have bare minimum support for skeletal input. Your fingers pay no mind to your knuckles controller, and there isn't even a basic implementation of FBT. This is really strange for a game that is seemingly social.

None of the gameplay feeds back into the loop. Everything is just haphazardly there. This feels like an indie asset flip made by a 12 year old over the course of a couple months. This game isn't fun. The most awesome thing about it is the png of some other celestial body in the sky. The most engaging thing about it was the friends I played with.
If you're looking for an awesome VR MMO experience, it's not here, there's only slightly edited randomly generated Unity terrain here. I would go as far as to argue that anyone who even suggests this game on any grounds is either pilled, or a liar.

Edit: clarification

Edit 2: Something I forgot to mention, this is one of those games that literally just swaps the left and right controller for their 'left-handed' mode. That is insane, it's not how left-handedness works.

On top of that, I forgot to mention that the player-character movement is extremely clunky thoughtless. It seems like a basic edit to the default Unity character controller. It exhibits classic bugs such as being incompatible with going down slopes, having a strict angular limit for going up slopes (instead of having it correctly use velocity and friction.) Naturally, back-jumping will let you scale walls that you're not supposed to. This is a constant thing that makes the game feel worse.
There are multiple locations in the game where you can get physically stuck because of it, which requires you to respawn (which many players may not even know that they can do!)

Edit 3: I tried to run around for a bit today, since there is apparently a boss that I missed. Unfortunately, it looks like anyone using steam auth cannot log in, despite having an actual mageportal account? It doesn't make much sense to me that you can have 2 account systems, but a fault in one disrupts the ability to play the game. This is an addition to my previous complains about there being two account systems.