Recent reviews by Ledow

Bored.

Out of the first few hours, I've played the game for about 10 minutes collectively, and that's with every cutscene on fast-forward (where it lets you).

The plot appears to consist largely of dying, nearly dying, passing out, sleeping, and then repeating, and every now and then you're allowed to move around a little and shoot. If you're really lucky you're actually in the city when that happens and you have a bit of free movement until you commit some tiny violation and then it's just like GTA but with terrible driving mechanics and it's difficult to even enter/leave a car with any kind of reliability, but now the cops are after you and oh look... you're dead again.

Bored. Bored. Bored.

Didn't pay much for it and got it effectively for free, and have had no technical issues running it at full whack and honestly... it's not even that pretty. I have no idea what people see in this "game".

Still being £49.99 is an absolute joke.

See my play time?

That's how long it takes to complete the game with about 3/4 of the achievements when you've never played it before and didn't know it was just that damn short.

Cute little casual game that's simple enough for young kids to play.

Trouble is that it's just too darned short. Need twice as many levels, and bosses, and new uses of the tools, and new tools, and new missions and new achievements.

Great game, though.

Ran it on a 2060 mobile chip.

No bad comments about the graphics (it's doing well considering what it's running on!) but was forced to update drivers before it would play, crashed several times just getting to the main menu, and then crash-hung about 10 minutes in for no particular reason.

Could just be the remaining bugs from the HL2 engine underneath but either way it means I was entirely reliant on the regular saves to do anything.

Running on a 2060, I wasn't expecting miracles but the lighting was good, but it had a tendency to go "talcum-powdery" in certain scenes, even if it held 30fps quite nicely.

After a few minutes of playing, it all becomes rather moot though because you just don't notice the graphics that much nowadays so apart from seeing a few shadows and lighting up areas with fires (things that the original game simulated quite well enough anyway), it doesn't really notice that much.

There's clearly been a lot of work put into it but it seems a waste because there's clearly still a lot to do on the underlying game and libraries that actually stops it being reliably playable. In the original HL2 games, I don't remember anything more than a "game engine" kind of crash (where the game stops and repeats sounds and you can kill it with Task Manager and just restart) if you played for many hours (and I think the only one I could reliably trigger was the big fight in the town square where things are bombarding you all the time).

But this has crashed more in the first 10 minutes of play than in all the time I played HL2.

I think the obviously-highly-skilled people making this should have just made their own game. It's technically great, but it's only great if you feel prepared to sit down and play it and I'm not sure I am.

Okay, from the perspective of someone who cannot kayak:

- The tutorial is an absolute chore to get through... your kayak has to hit the boxes but the second the front of your boat passes more than a few inches past the box, it disappears and you don't get another chance. So if you go to one side of the box and could easily recover... nope. It just removes the box and now you can't complete the tutorial. To complete the tutorial, you have to collect all the boxes. There are four stages of that, culminating in a proper river ride with the same boxes. It took me 35 minutes just to get to that point, and probably several dozen resets.

- The view does drift and you have to reset. Given that I have a room-based Vive Pro VR with fixed lighthouses, I don't understand this. Couldn't work out why I was feeling odd, and it's because the camera had "the kayak" over 90 degrees to my right after only a few minutes of playing.

- Had at least one collision where it catapulted me into space. Not sure what that's about, but you'd think in a game where you can't come out of the water, it would know not to launch you out of the water.

- The mechanics don't seem right to me but you can play them. Back-padelling seems to either not work or spin you off course entirely, nothing in-between. And keeping your paddle in the water doesn't slow you or turn you like you would think. I think there's something slightly off in that.

- The indicators for where you should paddle in the tutorial - ignore them. If you follow them, you overshoot the boxes every time.

- You will get stuck on the rocks. If you're lucky you can push off without it feeling like the physics just cheated to get you back in the water.

Don't get me wrong, it was fun and pretty, but to even GET to the first actual course, you have to complete a ridiculous tutorial, and then you lose all enthusiasm. Strangely, left to my own devices, I paddled the entire first and second courses no problem at all, because I wasn't after disappearing boxes.

I also ended up dialling the settings down and didn't really notice... the only difference is that my PC fans weren't trying to take off.

Picked it up very cheap.

Looks great, runs perfect on Steam Deck.

Problem is:

I've been "playing" for 30 minutes and out of that about 2 minutes was actual interaction, including two fights with basically very limited options (the rest was walking down a single path you can take, and solving one "puzzle" involving looking for a symbol).

I died in the second fight (a "one-at-a-time" fight with multiple things) because despite being identical the same button presses did nothing the same for the last guy and you just die.

At that point I realised that it's just not a game.

I would be *very annoyed* if I'd paid £30 for this. As it was it was only £1 and, yes, sure, the graphics, environment and atmosphere are great, but it's NOT. A. GAME.

I'm not sure I can be bothered to find out if it become a game later.

One of the best casual VR games collections - wide selection of games, all of them pretty intuitive, very Wii-Sports like throughout, and not heavily demanding on the system.

Amazingly addictive little game, deceptively complex in a real-time battle.

A bit like the old turn-based strategies of old, but played in real-time, upgrading your ship in between each battle, along with random encounters and buying/selling parts to upgrade and new crew as you go.

Lots of build options - focus on defence, attack, drones, even boarding enemies in-person - lots of different races to fight against, play yourself in their own unique ship, and hire into your crew, and tons of hidden options and secret worlds and conversation paths.

Another triumph for the Trine franchise - by just sticking to the same kind of simple, fun gameplay and not trying to get too clever.

The usual beautiful graphics. The wonderfully simple gameplay. The multiplayer possibilities but with no single-player compromise. The new techniques to stymie the puzzler until they combine new with old. And the well-pitched gameplay to make sure that even if you can't do it in the way intended, any bodge solution will be successful with enough perseverence.

Tough bosses until you learn their moves, great combinations of the characters and all their movements, and fun just swinging, bashing and stacking as always.

I'm always dubious of putting more money down on the next Trine because surely it'll be the one that stops me playing, but each time it isn't.

The game is great in concept but the load times are painful, especially in a multi-player mission where you can be watching loading screens for far longer than you are ever playing (one shot of a armed but non-hostile enemy, and you have to start over).

If I can't suffer the loading screens on a fast machine with a good GPU and NVMe storage, I don't know how anyone else does. Even in single-player they're frustrating. Trouble is, the game really needs to be played multiplayer or else it's just you taking on a dozen armed guys with no backup.

Great game, and fun, but that loading screen needs to die or become almost instantaneous.