EDIT: Forum Moderators are censoring criticism, image provided at the bottom of this review.

After eagerly waiting for this game to come out of Early access and enjoying the concept but waiting for the full delivery, I have to say I'm very disappointed.

The promised and very hyped campaign mode looked promising in the small snippets they advertised, but in reality is the same mission over and over with the conditions increased. Build your population to 400-600-800 by Day 25-30-35, destroy all the infected, sometimes don't. Destroy the infected doom houses and build your population. All of these missions are timed, so even after you've destroyed all enemies on the map you will fail unless you've spammed enough farms for population within the time limit for a "victory".

People complained about the absurd difficulty of the survival mode within Early Access, and those who voiced this were told to wait for the campaign for a more streamlined experience that will ease you into the game. This is not the case. Difficulty is all over the place but not in the way you'd expect; many elements are trial and error. You either build perfectly the first time by being a veteran player, or you keep re-trying a level over and over until you get it right as there is no save feature in this game.

Infected will spawn in locations at set parts of the map without warning to the player or a horde needed, meaning you either turtle from the beginning (and lose, because you're on a timer), or you expand out, kill all zombies, think an area is cleared and zombies will spawn out of thin air to attack your base. I've made a habit of trying a level, dying after finding out where all the hidden spawn points are, and building walls around them because I now know where they are. Not fun at all.

As for the "hero" missions, they are literally sending your unit to walk through a map, watching him/her slowly...and I mean slowly, kill each infected one by one as you Attack Move to the end. Your objective is to grab a box and bring it back to the entrance, and so far out of the 4 missions I've played the mission has been the exact same each time. There are no abilities (outside of consumables you can pick up) and very little thought process for this, just A click and watch your character slowly one shot each zombie...and they are billions. Worst still is there are collectables to find in these levels, but somehow they've ignored every prior RTS game that has included hidden items on levels and managed to design them without any visual cue.

Background elements may be collectables sometimes and may not be. Collectables will have no distinct visual difference to other objects in the map, and there is no way to tell what can be picked up or not unless you hover your mouse over it. That barrel texture you've seen plastered throughout the map? Out of that group of 8 barrels, 1 of them is collectable, but you'll need to hover your mouse over it to find out. This gets worse when random decals start to become collectables; a bit of chain on the floor, an identical glass bottle out of a group, and worse yet hidden collectables behind background elements, like trees, only fully visible if you disable terrain graphics.

Why care about collectables? They are your EXP to spending your talent tree, and how much resources you get in attack missions, meaning if you miss the smallest thing you are weaker for the rest of the game until you repeat that level. That leaves myself and many people on the forums complaining about spending half an hour in fully completed and cleared missions looking for the last hidden element somewhere in a giant map. Look out for the walkthroughs for this one.

There appears to be no voice acting, story, or dialogue outside of an opening cutscene. When a campaign was advertised, some sort of story was expected.

The final type of mission I've seen so far are "horde" missions, where your objective is to kill a set number of zombies running at your watch tower as you set up a static defence before the mission starts and see how it fares. After several attempts at this mission I was told by a developer on the forums that I should have taken a certain talent choice to be able to place spike barricades to finish these missions. This talent choice costs a lot of points, is the 4th one down on one branch, and requires a lot of investment to take. If the mission was designed with these in mind, why are they not given to the player as mandatory? As there is no way to respec, you are virtually forced to take this, or absolutely min-max the best possible strategy I haven't thought of yet. After 9 attempts of re-designs, screenshots of zombie pattern layouts to figure out where every choke hold is coming from, and a lot of trial and error, I've come to realise that the balancing in this game is simply not there.

There are a few "veteran" players that are essentially shutting down complaints that have been present since the start of Early Access for this game that critique the horrible balancing telling them to git gud, but as a RTS player and huge fan myself who has tried more or less all of them and has gone through the thick and thin of different campaign ideas and evolutions, I can tell you that this isn't just a difficulty problem, but fundamentally poor design. Most RTS games ease the player into understanding fundamental mechanics and slowly unlock units and aspects so they can learn how each work at a streamlined pace, this does not. This isn't the fun type of difficulty either, but the cheap one that forces you to start over because you weren't building optimally since the very start, even at the opening tutorial of the game, leaving very little room for experimentation.

EDIT: Criticism towards their game is now also being censored as well. Their forum moderator is calling people impatient and new to RTS games, insulting them if they've only tried their game for 2 hours telling them to put more in (past the refund process) if they criticise it. What a mess.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/518880635545190452/590975894483632128/unknown.png

After watching their forum moderator get into arguments and now starting to remove and ban users who are critiquing their game, I sincerely regret supporting this developer in any way and heavily encourage people to avoid them.

I didn't think I'd like this game as a stereotypical guy who is not a big fan of 'softer' games. The game makes it very clear it's tailored towards relaxation, absolutely no combat of any kind, and 'free-form gaming' or sandbox, and these do not normally interest me. However, I took a gamble with this game and I have to say it pleasantly surprised me.

It's one of those games that gives you continuous tasks to work towards but does not hold your hand or give you any objectives/notifications to do so. This means you always feel like you're working towards something, almost in a metroidvania style, as you're presented with something you cannot make/craft/surpass yet but it is within view and you have some hint of how to work towards it.

My main criticism is that it is too short, as with many VR games. I completed it in about 8 hours and that's with a little bit of leisure. Unfortunately I am not the target demographic for this game, so I did not bother decorating my environment much or making farms or crops; I would plant and grow what was needed for the task and nothing beyond that. I understand that others might get more time out of the game as they might enjoy the whole roleplaying aspect of customising their island so I can't criticise these elements too much, but I really enjoyed the dopamine hits of completing tasks.

The graphics are gorgeous and are well optimised, really highlighting that artstyle is supreme when it comes to delivering pleasing aesthetics, despite the game only taking up something like 500MB. The sound design is also very nice, with contextual noises depending on what you're doing giving you some really nice audio feedback to interactions as well as mood matching soundtracks. I experienced some very minor glitches where notes could not be hung up properly or a object would stop functioning temporarily but these were still very minor; for 98% of the game there were no issues.

My only other criticism would be the control scheme and movement system which felt like afterthoughts, especially for the Index. The GripGrab function is far too sensitive causing you to accidentally grab things constantly, and the teleport button is, for some reason, bound to the touchpad, which is such a strain to press on constantly as well as it's position in general. I had to manually rebind teleporting to B to make this playable. The movement as well by default forces teleport and swapping to analogue movement could have been a bit clearer. They support smooth turning but the "Very Fast" is the slowest I've ever seen smooth locomotion rotation operate at and was so bad that I just left it on snap turning. The teleporting is fine although it doesn't always seem to work, but the game also gets you to teleport up very high cliffs a lot requiring you to reach up high. For shorter people, or people playing seated, this can be problematic as you need to reach really high to aim your teleports above you, and sometimes I just stood up from my chair to teleport then sat back down. These all feel like minor accessibility concerns and could be improved.

One thing I will say though, beyond the control scheme, is the interaction system is done very well with inventory management and crafting feeling really good, so once you've messed around with configuring your setup it does feel really good to play.

Overall a very charming game that feels like a lot of work has gone into it with a great deal of polish. This does not feel like your typical indie VR game and surprised me a lot.

EDIT: The achievement for finishing the game is currently set at 0.1% of people having it, which really highlights how people are playing it differently to me. Hopefully that endorses how good this game is that I'm recommending it despite not being part of the target demographic.