Neue Rezensionen von iwem.xo

Wasn't the game I expected it to be. Fortunately it's still a good time, despite some questionable design decisions.

It's more possible to fight your way out of a jam compared to Aragami 1, and it's definitely inviting a speedy playstyle - not forcing it, thankfully. You've got a growing set of tools that ends up pretty massive, but it feels like there's a few that overpower most other options. Fun to experiment with though. The abilities end up super broken in a fun way once fully upgraded (kill any guy at a distance (in 3 different ways), various ways of getting invisibility, blow up lanterns knocking everyone nearby out, etc).

The biggest downside to this game is that it's reusing every level it's got about 7 times. That's kinda boring, but the enemy layouts do generally change at least a little per mission. The story that drives everything, I mostly tuned out, even if I generally try to care at least a little about even bad stories.

What that leaves you is a mechanically fun game - especially in co-op! - that repeats itself a bunch. You can speed through the levels if you've seen em before, and if you don't try to do the whole thing in one sitting, it's not too big a drawback. If the trailer looks interesting, go for it.

Easily the best mini golf game, VR and overall. Courses are always fun and interesting, the hidden balls (normal difficulty) and riddles (hard difficulty) keep things varied. Multiplayer is cross-platform (except the Quest 1 version isn't updated, so not compatible anymore apparently) and easy to join. You can join courses only the host owns (but you can't get balls or riddles then). Par isn't too cruel, the physics feel right, and many of the DLC courses get real wacky with it.
It's a great game to just hang out with friends in, and I can't recommend any other game more for that purpose.

Lovely environments, cool abilities, lots of levels. Great fun with friends. Puzzle design is clever and not too esoteric, with some occasional head scratchers. Another wonderful entry in the series.

Play this on easy!

This is now one of my favorite VR games. It's hard to overstate how gorgeous this game is. It's got mostly fun combat with 3 weapon sets and proper blocking and archery, and really nice exploration and puzzles. Best experienced in co-op (2-4 players). It's got 3 linear levels, but they're big and you can backtrack at any point.
It's not perfect - later on especially some of the enemies get really tanky and take a lot of hits, hence the recommendation to play on easy. Sometimes one player will get stuck outside of an ambush section or boss battle, or in the wall, but nothing that ruins all of your progress - respawning takes a few seconds but it's free.

Overall, had a great time, some mild frustration at the enemy healthbar sizes, and lots of marveling at the environments. 9/10

Unless you're looking for either a VR rhythm game that's light on the exercise or a massive Miku fan, look elsewhere. I kind of want to give this a neutral rating, but ultimately I can't recommend this to most people.

There are many better VR rhythm games: Synth Riders, Audio Trip, Pistol Whip Ohshape, and Ragnarock, to name a few. At the same time, this isn't really a *bad* game, it's just very basic. I'll just compare it to the rest of the genre:

• Where other games have differently colored notes to signify the hand you need to hit them with, this one doesn't at all. This simultaneously dumbs the game down a lot (can't force complicated moves if you can't specify which hand they need to be done with) it also makes sight reading more complicated sections pretty hard.
  
• Notes often don't seem to correspond to what's happening in the song. At some points there's some matching stuff, and then it drifts to notes for their own sake again. And since the game can't force notes to a particular hand, it can't really force players to do a particular dance move either.
  
• The tutorial is extremely lacking and basically only tells you how to hit notes. It completely glosses over fever mode (pull right trigger to activate a mode that temporarily makes your note hits worth more score). It also fails to inform you what you should do with bombs (which only appear in hard mode). I'm still not sure in fact, so poor is the game's signposting. If you touch them, they bounce back with a BOING sound. Doesn't sound particularly like a fail state. If you let them pass untouched, there is no feedback, except sometimes there's a cheer and some confetti? Maybe only when you graze the bomb. I'll have to record and check the scores around bombs I guess.
  
• Songs are generally a super easy flatline with 1 or 2 difficulty spikes per song. It's hard to feel super engaged that way, but it does make the overall experience relatively chill compared to especially the more involved games like Audio Trip and Ohshape.
  
• All the hard mode maps (there are only 2 difficulties) progress exactly the same: they start off relatively calm, then the note emitters start rotating, making it harder to anticipate where the notes are going to come from. After that, the note emitters come loose from each other and start bouncing around, making the notes come at or past you diagonally. I'm not even sure these are separately mapped rather than automatically generated based on the normal mode maps.
  
• There are (as far as I can tell) no user-made songs available for this game.
  
• Some history: the game started off with 4 speakers (that fire notes at you). Imagine you're T-posing. There was a pair at the elbows, and a pair at the hands. Miku was dancing in the middle, facing you. That all works, but it's a bit boring. So they updated it later on to have 8 speakers in a circle behind miku. Spices things up, sure, but now there are 2 speakers behind her legs, making those notes pretty hard to see because she's dancing in front of them until they clip through her quite close to you. (this update is also where the bombs come from they failed to incorporate back into the tutorial)

So all of those are reasons to buy (most) other rhythm games before this one, but if you're looking to diversify some, there's definitely also worse options out there. It's got bright colors, some light movement, and decent songs (if you like vocaloid music at all). Definitely not worth full price, but at 50% or more off, if you're still curious, go ahead.

Scratches an itch that nothing else does.

This isn't a universal recommendation - don't play this looking for a power fantasy or a Mount Your Friends ragdoll comedy affair. Climbing is relatively slow and methodical (though there are absolute ♥♥♥♥♥rs on the leaderboards). The environments look pretty good, being sourced from photogrammetry, and the climbing is the closest I've seen to the real thing in a videogame, though still nothing beats going out there yourself.

There's plenty of things that aren't quite right yet - moss, dirt, and plants all register as excellent for grip, there's some minor holes and seams in the geometry, and often you'll just be scanning for a good readout on the grip meter rather than looking at the wall for something that looks like it might hold you. I hope early access sorts these out at least somewhat, but for me it's worth playing already because I really know of nothing that tries to simulate real rock climbing (VR efforts that are 100% campusing do not count) like this. Also each area has a cat that you can pet hidden somewhere.

A scrappy, unpolished B-movie style game with some bizarre budget allocation decisions. The swordplay is relatively constrained in options compared to, say, Ninja Gaiden, but being able to switch to guns and grenades rounds it out nicely, along with being able to parry not just melee attacks but any red-flashing powerful attack with a one-button pistol shot. There's also Ninja Gaiden 2 style obliterations (one-input execution of enemies missing a limb), but that's about where the comparison stops.
Even though combat has a wooden quality to it, there's also a flow to it. It very much slants towards the defensive side, with the parry ripostes often leading to an enemy being in a state vulnerable to instant execution.

The later third of the about 10 hour experience on normal difficulty turns into a slog, with about 2 or 3 hard encounters per checkpoint. On the one hand, I really resented having to replay these so much just to die to the last encounter before the next checkpoint again. On the other, it really forced me to engage with the game's mechanics and exploit them to my advantage.
- Oh, I don't feel like fighting the melee guys, so I'll just unload into their faces with a machine gun before they get close.
- Cool, you can parry the hulking heavy machine gunners' melee hits too.
- You can draw this beefy guy past an exploding barrel and shoot it.
- These ninjas spend some time flailing if they're hit with a fire grenade
- If I parry and then riposte these hits, their followup hit still hits me, so I need to dodge instead

And so on. The end section was pretty grueling but it made me play better/dirtier, and the feeling of beating it was better for it, despite the frustration.

The minigames are so-so and entirely avoidable except the first go it forces you to do, but they're still weird and entirely out of place (you literally do some karaoke after committing a massacre), so I appreciate them being there.

Ultimately the game is a rollercoaster of janky but compelling action, baffling choices on where to spend its development efforts, and a grueling difficulty ramp near the end. If it looks in any respect appealing to you, go for it!

The axe climbing (which is pretty much all there is to the gameplay) never quite feels natural, though you do get used to its quirks in the 1.5 hours you'll spend with the game. It's its own thing, not quite realism (no feet, tire very quickly) and too punishing to be arcadey. About half of my time was spent retrying bits that felt very trial and error.
I had a decent time with it - the mechanics are the focus but there is a morsel of a story to bookend things.
If you're reading this, I'll assume something about the concept really grabbed you, in which case I'll give a mild recommendation for this game. Otherwise, stay away.

It's Left 4 Dead in space, just not as good. The vast majority of the weapons sound weak, the shooting isn't satisfying, enemies sometimes ragdoll almost standing up so you're not sure if they're dead.

You've got equivalents to L4D's tank, spitter, smoker, and they work. What doesn't is the Flasher, a special whose gimmick is just that he emits a bright light that dims your entire screen before you even see him. He doesn't pose a danger other than to make your game look worse.

Anyway this game is 99% shooting and that aspect feels worse in every way than L4D, so I can't recommend it over that. If that improves I'll gladly come back to it.

The combat just doesn't feel good. There's lots of attack animations that take a relatively long time and lock you in place for that duration, and there's enemies with a similar duration for their ranged attack wind-up. So you're committed to an attack that you just noticed you'll get hit if you don't cancel out of, but there is no dodge canceling, just dodging. It just doesn't feel fun to get hit when you can see it coming and are trying to get out of the way.
There's bullet/witch time if you do a dodge just in time, but the window is tight enough that I could not get this consistently. It's more forgiving for the artillery enemies' bombardment than the cube enemies' lasers (which can have you get hit several times in a row due to the hitstun).
Despite the mechanical difficulties above, combat never felt challenging or interesting. I got about 3x the health pickups I actually used. Instead of challenge, you get more weenie enemies at the same time.

The level and enemy designs are too bland to make up for the rest. The levels in particular look like someone took The Division and stripped most of the chest high walls out. There are hidden items strewn about, but they're usually just health items. Levels come across as barren and lifeless in between enemy encounter arenas.

The intro comics are nice though, and if the combat mechanics are overhauled this might turn out to be decent. It just isn't right now.