Recent reviews by Gamesare2fun

ho-ho, boy, this is a hard one to recommend. I'm going to sound very mean and critical, but it comes from a place of love; the literal end slide of the game is asking for feedback. I intend to give that, and honestly.

First off its a wonderful blend of dark souls and sekiro combat, with sekiro's posture damage just acting like temporary damage that fades over time, whilst hits that actually connect are permanent injuries, unless you heal. (Which i very rarely did, as its not very responsive and leads to death easily.)

The game takes sekiro's perilous attack system and expands on it; you must dodge towards thrusts, to the side of overheads, and back from horizontal power attacks. This is awesome on paper, but oh dear god is it rough in practice. First, it's not relative to the actual attack, just the direction on your stick. soo many times they guy would manage to get off to my side a little and do an overhead, so I'd try to side step *around* him getting out of the way of the physical swing, just for him to heatseek into me. Which leads to a number of problems:

First, beyond a handful of fights against enemies not wearing proper armor, normal attacks just do not do any damage. Actually worthless. All that matters is heavy attacks (slightly) and counters to enemy heavy attacks (mostly), so all the time between enemy heavy attacks are basically just wasted time as you can't do any real damage until they decide to throw them - even with the best sword in the game.

Second: While you dont stagger enemies, like, ever, any hit staggers you and cancels what you're doing. A heavy attack, will throw you to the floor. Even with the best armor in the game, this is often just instant death because you have no ground escape roll, you cant parry, and you have no protection while you stand.... and you lay on the ground like an idiot for a good 2-3 seconds as well. In which time the enemy will be comboing you. If they use even one heavy attack while you're on the floor, thats pretty much you entire healthbar just gone. Start over.

Third, the alignment for these directional dodges is *stiff.* Diagonal is not good enough ,if you need to sidestep, it needs to be a straight up 90 degree angle on the thumbstick. I honestly think it mightve been easier on keyboard for that reason alone, but the main menu tells you it recommends a controller. Dont use a controller. By the time i got fed up i was already on the final boss and stuck with it.

If you just added an escape-roll, and loosened the directional dodge angle by like 15 degrees, this would honestly feel fantastic and fluid, but as it stands it just feels clunky, and dying often feels more like bad luck than you doing something wrong. Add on that the overhead and horizontal swings' windups look nearly identical on the final boss so most of the time i felt i was blindly guessing which it would be.

Now, nitpicks as a history geek that practices hema (historical european martial arts - basically literally what this game is, mostly longsword but a little one handed sword and dagger as well.), the animations are.... something. The enemies alternate between slow and clunky moves to suddenly lightning fast jarring chains with no real consistency. You swing your sword like a baseball bat. Which lots of games do, and i would let pass... but enemies will insult you in a dialogue for lacking footwork and having ♥♥♥♥♥♥ form, and 30 seconds later swing at you with the same form. Which is indeed quite ♥♥♥♥♥♥. You do get new animations every time you advance a tier, which is neat, and they do get less awful, but again, when the tutorial guy starts spouting off real longsword technique names and stances, and then launches an attack that looks like he's drunk and trying not to fall over.... it's a weird disconnect. I'd prefer they either lean into realism with better animations accuracy-wise, or just drop the historical dialogue and embrace the gameyness of the animations. A lot of animations look very familiar and I cant help but think they may be ripped straight from various souls games. I get that mocap is expensive, but it was *very* noticeable. And, yes, most people will not give a sh*t about any of this nerd-sh*t, i fully understand that. All I'd really like to see is the swings loop-back around into the ready position fluidly, in a sort of figure-eight type motion, as opposed to the awkward looking reset currently.

But, thats really it. A few minor issues holding the game back, to the point that unfortunately there was no feeling of satisfaction when I finally beat the game, it didnt feel earned, it didnt feel like i'd beaten the opponent, but the bizarrely selective controls. If the devs fix even *one* of these complaints, this game rockets from a rough recommendation to genuinely special.

Devs, if you do read this, I am eagerly awaiting your next project and wish you guys only the best. I don't like criticizing small projects like this - I'm working on my own 1-man game as well and its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard. I felt the heart in this guys, its why i pushed through to the end. Cannot wait to continue alryk's journey.

Oh, one last note. The voices. they're... all ai. It's not good. But, for only two people, I get it it, budget constraints. What I'd really like to see more of is situational dialogue. I tell the guy that I'm fighting for my sick mother, if he beats my ass have him mutter a line about how he'll see that she's taken care of. If I say im in it for the glory or to be the best and he mops the floor with me, let him say a line of courtesy about how even if i lost, having come this far means nobody can deny your skill or that he should be more than easy to find a place in some lord's retinue or something. Little things like that to give the game some charm.

I suspect updating of this demo itself may be halted to work fully in the proper game, which is fine, these dont need to be addressed here but I hope to see this kind of improvement in the full game. If they do add any of these improvements, I'll replay on hardcore mode.

But hey, i beat it even with all of these complaints in two hours. If you want to kill some time, go for it, give it a shot and tell the devs what you thought.

If MGS1 and 5 had a baby that identified as an Extraction Shooter, that'd sum up this game perfectly.

Solid control, everything feels good, muscle memory from the old metalgears kicked in and I was snapping necks left and right. First run I survived, but only managed to gather 15k out of the 50k requirement, and I was gathering cash pretty much constantly the entire time. Not sure if im missing something or if it really is 'impossible' as the game menu claims. Still, for the pricepoint, very fun. Hope the dev transplants these systems into a proper linear MGS style experience in the future, as the gameplay and vibe are incredibly good feeling, but its limited by being what would usually be a minigame included on another disk, like the MGS VR missions or Snakeboarding.

If you read this Dev, really hope you stick with these systems, metal gear needs serious competition and this could be it. Throw together some connected urban environments with 2 or 3 routes and a story - even if non-voiceacted - and you've got gold, man. Good ♥♥♥♥.

Love the franchise, have the novels, loved the first game.

No, this is not the first game. No, we dont have the crazy vehicles. Yes, thats a bummer. I expect vehicles will come in future DLC.

Having played to level 5 now entirely solo, mostly on medium difficulty, I'm very much a fan and loving the game. Mouse sensitivity is my only complaint; 0 feels like youre standing in sludge, 1 (it goes waaaay higher than 1, to 100 i think?) means touching the mouse spins you around 3 times. 0.24-ish feels pretty decent.

I havent had any crashes, but I have lost connection to the servers a few times which is very annoying as even playing solo, you need to be online to play.

Twohanded weapons are extremely awkward.

...thats it, thats my only complaint about the game. A solid dungeon crawler with high quality melee combat (a rarity in VR - good combat *and* more than just a sandbox). Extremely fun to good around with in multiplayer.

I'd recommend either going full mage or running sword + dagger, the other weapon types dont tend to feel as responsive or accurate to the controls.

I love it. Imagine tarkov, but with very few cheaters (I went to browse a cheat-forum and had a wonderful laugh as they all complained that the devs were 'too active' to be willing to share cheats with each other 'if' they had them), no ubermeta guns or indestructible ironman armor, and no mouse to simply click on a skull with. So, instead of the mach5 speed that tarkov encourages whilst pretending to be slow and methodical, this game actually plays as tarkov advertises. Most people can't snap off a headshot in under two seconds, using cover effectively so only a fraction of your head and shoulder is visible will be rewarded, and updates come regularly.

As a big gun nut, I'll say this gun's weapons handling is honestly above H3VR in some ways - the game that ruined nearly all other VR shooters for me - as whilst some guns can be overly awkward to aim in Tabor, the manipulation is superb - AK and SKS mags need to be loaded at an angle and 'rocked' in - small touches like that lead to firefights sometimes legitimately being decided by who is more proficient with their weapon and can actually reload faster. Malfunctions are in the pipe for an upcoming update, and unlike Tarkov where I find these annoying as you need to wait helpless for your character to figure out how to rack a bolt for 5 years, it will simply be up to your skill with that weapon - or your presence of mind to draw a sidearm - and frankly I find this highly exciting.

Now, big caveat, and the game's main flaw. Guns will sometimes collide with things that they shouldnt. Sometimes theyll be fine, sometimes theyll decide your body, vest, mag pouches, and slung weapon are all physical and rigid, making it impossible to actually aim down your sights - this has been the cause of genuinely over half of my total deaths, and has cause me on occasion to get frustrated in a gunfight and literally drop my ballistic vest/extra ammo just so I can actually aim. Most of the community, I have no idea why, insist this is not a game issue but a quest 2 issue with tracking. It is not. I have a quest and a Vive Pro, both do this. No other game does this. And you have eyes in this game, and a neck. You can literally look down and see the gun colliding with things. I've never seen a *dev* claim this, so i dont know why everyone parrots it. itd be 'realistic' except mag pouches and slung weapons can be pushed to the side in the real world and arent welded in place. For this reason i simply dont put any pouches on the right-half of my vests.

update

ive mostly stopped playing for now. too few too small maps leads to a lot of repetition, and with the new advent of the UwU dlc and everyone running around as an anime girl, the game has also lost its ability to be taken seriously - i play vr primarily for immersion, else i could just play a normal game. For now, ive just gone back to tarkov for the new wipe. Hope to check back in on tabor in a year or so and appreciate all the development/progress.

Mods make this amazing, but only if youre very experience with game modding. Bethesda posted this as abandonware, so its still effectively the 2018 version of fallout 4, outdated, rough, often incompatible with many mods and generally unstable to boot, its about as lazy of a VR port as one could possibly make.

However, if you know what you're doing on a computer, and you take the time to put together a solid modpack, or download a pre-ready Wabbajack or Vortex Collection modset, it can be truly fantastic - full body, functional scopes, horror mods taken to the next level through VR, incredible graphics, it's all possible, and shapes up to be one of the best VR games currently available... but expect a lot of trial and error, hours of enabling and disabling mods and looking at guides trying to make the damn thing launch or not constantly crash, etc.

Oh, and bethesda didn't even set up DLC to install properly, so you need to install both this and regular fallout 4, cut, and paste all of the dlc into this game's folder to even play them - you know, the content that you purchased with real money, on this alternate release of the game that you purchased with an absurd amount of real money.

Bethesda, I want so badly to love you for all of your creative games - starfield, the doom reboots, etc - but you guys make some really scummy decisions as a company sometimes that makes that really, really hard.

So, I tend to be very lenient on free to play games, it's rare I'll say I don't recommend them, but this game just isn't ready - not even for testing. Dev, I genuinely hope you read this review, I don't mean to ♥♥♥♥ on or attack you and I'd like to see this game improve. If it gets a few updates I'm happy to come back and redo my review.

Enemies seem to spawn out of nowhere with no cue so you randomly start getting stabbed in the back, reloads seem to happen in slow motion, enemies are bullet sponges which flail wildly, knockback from enemies seems to be unaware of boundaries, so if you're near a wall and get hit youll get shoved through and immediately die, the game likes to shut you into tiny rooms with mass amounts of enemies that take 10+ seconds to kill and can kill you in a few hits with no real strategy to get by aside from trial and error until you get lucky. The xbox controls seem servicable enough as well, but on keyboard the controls are awful, you cant rebind anything, and you cant use the mouse in the menus either.

There's a lot of quantity in this game but not much quality. I'd be happy to revisit the game and revise this review, I'd love to return and change it to a positive review and I hope the creator reads this review and isn't hurt by it. My advice, dev, as I'm aware you're solo and respond to a decent number of reviews, is to slow down, stop adding any kind of content, and refine what you have. It needs work, a lot of work, to be made something more resembling playable.

To start, I'd add rebindable keys, and a quicksave. Then I'd reduce reload times in everything but the AK by about 25%, I can understand wanting a revolver to feel like something cumbersome to reload, but its so slow and lacking urgency that it just makes the main character seem mentally disabled, in no rush at all whilst being shanked to death by ghosts. Speaking of - he has no reaction, at all, to the mansion full of ghosts and bipedal gators, which adds to the feeling that he's an idiot. Idiot MCs are annoying in anime, they're annoying here, you don't want that. He doesn't have to freak out, he can be cold and professional and crack oneliners, but at least add a little surprise or disbelief.

Then, I'd increase the double barrel's damage. 3-4 hits at point blank is too many to kill an enemy, especially the gators. Makes the baseball bat solidly better than the first two guns in the game, this is awful and needs to be addressed. While we're on this, make them more accurate - significantly more accurate. I've fired the gun and seen it impact on the literal corner of the screen, this is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane. For hipfire make the area it can land be around 3x3 inches on the screen, enough that its accurate enough to hit anything up close when you need to fire rapidly, but wont hit ♥♥♥♥ at range. Then, when aiming down sights, let it hit on point. And please, god, put the front sight on the AK. I have no idea why i'm aiming through a rear sight and seeing air. If you need help with the guns my guy, feel free to message me, I've done 5 years with the army, and am pretty much a walking gun encyclopedia. I'm happy to help you make them seem accurate and satisfying.

Next, ♥♥♥♥ the serious sam style item pickups, they clash hard with the theme of the game. Make them normal sized and place them on the ground. Seeing a revolver the size of the desk it's on surrounded by a yellow glow kills any sense of tension in your survival horror shooter. Medkits and such too. Just make them sit on the ground.

Get rid of the enemies turning into fire when they die, in tight spaces it just leads to really cheap unavoidable damage and isn't fun.

Tighten up the movement so it's less floaty and fix how ungodly easy it is to phase through walls against your fears, it just sucks. I'm genuinely sorry if I sound mean, but this game just isn't ready to be played yet. I get it, I'm working on my first indie project with a couple of friends right now as well, its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard especially alone, and this can be a cool game; its a fun premise and im actually curious whats going on with the girlfriend, but it needs a lot of polishing to feel good enough to want to play. If you need any help or opinions or to bounce and discuss ideas, or want to improve the dialogue then feel totally free to reach out to me I'm happy to help.

I wish you the best of luck finishing this game.

So, I've tried to play the game twice.

First in coop with two friends, second in singleplayer.


In coop, nobody is actually synced, it feels more like youre each playing an individual version of the game but can see each other, much like the Skyrim Together mod. It starts out synced-ish, but if someone joins after you've opened a door, that door is closed for them, and when they open it, it closes for you. things like that.

If you die in coop, you can load your own quicksave - everyone else keeps playing normally, only you go back to when you last saved and enemies are back... for you. So everyone else gets to laugh as the schizophrenic shoots nonexistent enemies, whilst screaming that they're dying. Good, fun, jank.

In coop your inventory doesnt really exist, you get infinite ammo for your class's main weapon (Rifleman gets seemingly an AK74N in 5.45, breacher a KS23 shotgun (which, given that its an oversized shotgun used to lob grenades IRL in I think 8 gauge as opposed to standard 12, does not do nearly enough damage.), Marksman gets an SVD without a scope. This, honestly, killed the experience of coop for us, not being able to loot or use the new guns we picked up. When we found the hidden AKM in the basement in 7.62, I wanted to use it. This is where we stopped playing coop.

In solo however, it's a competent hardcore survival shooter. Very janky, yes, but fun. Resources were scarce enough I felt the need to conserve ammo on Hard (Nightmare I played for the first 5 levels but it turned into instadeaths when taking corners with nothing i could do about it) but never actually ran out or felt I didn't have what i needed to survive. This is possible to exploit further as loading a save respawns all loot on the map, so you can pick up the same medkit infinitely by saving and reloading, though you'll never really need to do this.

The Arsenal
Your primary weapon for the entire game will be the AK74, as every soldier you fight drops a mag for it meaning you'll always have a robust ammo reserve, with a choice of Shotgun, AK47, or SVD as a 'special' weapon that will have less ammo but be more effective. After testing all 3, the AK47 is absolutely the best choice, 2shotting enemies with 1hit kills to the head. The SVD is okay but lack of any optic makes it just a worse AK47 with almost no ammo drops, and the shotgun is just hot @ss beyond spitting distance with an extremely long reload and small magazine size. Coupled with a random spread and slow firerate, if you don't pray hard enough to RNGesus for the first shot to kill whatever youre aiming at, youll die before you get a second shot. If the dev reads this review, they should halve the spread on the KS23 - same amount of pellets/damage, just a tighter spread so more hit a target at once for reliable damage and its functional past spitting distance, it would feel infinitely more satisfying and viable.
You also get a knife, which you will never, ever use, and a choice of Makarov in 9,18mm, or a Tokarev in 7.62x25. The makarov is used to kill the first soldier and get his AK, then never again. The Tokarev is a solid choice for killing zombies without wasting rifle ammo. Basically, this game is about the AK platform. Don't bother with grenades either, I put one in the perfect center of a group of 5 zombies and not a single one died, afterwards I promptly dropped them all. Klesk, if you're reading this, double grenade damage and increase the radius by 50%.

There isn't much of a story. (Spoilers, i suppose. Not much to spoil.) You're sent to the basement of a russian government facility to repair a generator - whilst doing so, you witness something you shouldnt, a zombie they've created in their lab that's escaped containment. So, the soldiers begin opening fire on you to prevent you from getting out alive and sharing the secrets. You battle your way deeper into the compound since you can't go back the way you came, and eventually encounter what appears to be a british spy dressed as a lab worker (he uses google british text to speech instead of an actual voice actor.) who tells you that the compound must be destroyed before the KGB can release the virus, and gives you a bomb, promising that he'll see you home safely if you can plant it on the reactor. So, you do that, fight your way away from the reactor core, and that's about it. The entire game lasts about an hour.

Do I recommend this game? As a free passion project? Absolutely! If you've got some time to waste, there's no reason not to give it a try, especially if you love old school shooters or old school survival horror inventory tetris games. Is it gonna blow your mind? No. But it will kill an hour.

What MGSV should've been.

So, to preface, i received this game as a gift from an old friend as something of a surprise; I'd grown long since bored of the recurringly samey installments of the series, loving V2 but not a large fan of 1 or 3, with 4 being passable in coop.

We haven't gotten to do coop yet, he's been away with work, and I've limited myself (rather painfully) to the first three missions. The first is a large open map style area with a myriad of different objectives and a *lot* of ways to go about them. Not in a contrived scripted 'loud or quiet' way, but more like a blend of dishonored and MGSV. The second map was smaller and more focused, with you simply trying to breach the countryside to arrive in an occupied castle manor..... but the building itself is large and intricate with dozens of rooms, functioning something like a close quarters combat maze, where sneaking starts to require utilizing the various gadgets and tools at your disposal as even a suppressed pistol shot will give you away indoors, when you dont know who could be behind a wall or above or below you and within earshot. The third is a mix, a well fortified and guarded main building surrounded by beach, sea, and urban sprawl that you need to infiltrate. Variety, nothing grows stale, im actually very sad that there are only 10 levels because I know I'll be craving more.

Really, to me, this game feels like what MGSV should have been, rather than a sniper elite game - truth be told I've used my rifle somewhat little in both PVP invasions and the game itself, the pistol and knife tend to be more useful in almost all situations, aside from the odd enemy sniper to take out first. And that's honestly fine, the pistol feels nice, unlike previous SE games where everything but the sniper rifle felt intentionally nerfed to make you not want to use them, guns feel like guns in this game.

It's grittier and more realistic in both gameplay, tone, and visuals, after 3 and 4 felt quite cartoony and almost light-hearted, it's a delightful return to the seriousness, high stakes, and tension from V2.

The invasions are really fun, but suffer from the same issue as Elden Ring invasions; they Never. F&cking. Stop. You'll kill one invader to be invaded again minutes later, or be killed and receive the same. If you have invasions enabled, you're going to be playing the entire mission against invaders, rather than the rare and odd invasion which would stand out and be scary it leads to the invasions feeling extremely arcadey, contrasting the rest of the game. So, whilst i do still invade, i have turned it off in my own game so i can play slowly and methodically as befits a sniper.

Morality?
The game features a dishonored style 4-directional spectrum for playstyle, between Lethal, Nonlethal, Stealth, and Combat. I... don't know why exactly this is a thing or why they added nonlethal rounds and takedowns, aside from to further dethrone MGSV in that regard. Personally, I'm softening a beach so my boys can land with fewer casualties, I'm going to kill the enemy instead of giving them a nice nap so they can wake up when the marines or whoever else arrive. It is a sniper game, after all, so I don't see the purpose of playing nonlethally on a first run... but ill probably do a pacifist run afterwards.

Skills
The weakest point in the game i think, half are combat, a quarter are about Focus which is disabled on the hard mode like i play and the rest are things like carrying an extra explosive you'll almost never use anyways, so, if you play sneakily on hard, skills are absolutely worthless. So, levelling up is worthless. A bit sad, it'd be nice if all those points you rack up with long distance kills actually mattered.

Gameplay
It's just refined. The best thing i can liken it to, is just MGSV with tighter feeling and more responsive controls. Not that MGSV had poor controls, but it's a noticable difference to someone with a few hundred hours in MGSV with the infinite heaven mod - which i do ALSO recommend to anyone still playing MGSV. Targets are now treated a little more like the new Hitman games, they have routines and there's 'interesting' preset ways to kill them which unlock different things (think i got an MP40 for dropping a chandelier on an officer's head), but I actually do wish I could just actually use my sniper rifle. I intend more than one playthrough though, so I'll try to unlock all the weapons first time and play more freestyle next run, and then my pacifist run.

The coolest part of the playtest was the extensive customization you could do to your character to try and look like a badas$ merc. Now that's all locked behind currency unlocks so everyone looks the exact same.

Under that... you have one map for one game mode that's just a poor playing battlefield knockoff, and the other map thats just a knockoff of PUBG except whilst the circle closes you have to put little mining machines down and defend them because if you don't collect enough 'Q-on' which is supposed to be from asteroids but apparently you mine it out of the ground, you can't call in a helicopter to extract. Played two games of the PUBG ripoff, never saw a single enemy player. Played one game of the battlefield mode, first spawned on top of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tower 90 feet into the air so I couldn't do anything until I was shot off. Spawned, saw someone on a balcony, aimed my *mosin nagant* at him - because that's a solid standard issue rifle for a modern mercenary working for intelligence agencies - squeezed dead center, no hit marker, he turns and runs into the house. I run into the house and he's sniping out the window with his mosin because everybody has mosins, so i take out my knife. Stab him three times, three hitmarkers, he casually turns around and blows my head off, then goes back to sniping.

So... so much wasted potential. If it tried to do it's own thing instead of rip off pubg and warzone as a trend, if it didnt make the cosmetics a weird unlock, it could be great. If they *need* to rip off a game, with this storyline, rip off tarkov but keep this faster paced more fluid gameplay - it would actually stand on its own as a unique niche then. As of now, I'm sure itll do good preying on people who can't afford more expensive games, but it cannot stand on its own two feet.