Recent reviews by Havear

So I had a huge wall of text trying to get across how freeform this game is and how it actually gives you the complete freedom that is always the bane of detective games. Instead, take some stories:

Murder report. Show up to find the cops banging on the door. After three seconds they decide the wife is taking to long and bash it down, knocking her out and sending her flying. They start clearing the apartment. She wakes up, cops shout "WHO IS THAT" and gun her down next to her husband, the victim. I sneak in after they leave, get some fingerprints, and spend the next hour tracking down the wrong person because I confused a U with a V in my notes.

Break into a company's office to find a package. Tripped security. Just got a no fall damage superpower, so out the window. Check on the last person with the package's apartment... they walk in on me. Flee... and decide to break back into the office, as the security has likely reset. Disable the security system... then walk in like I own the place but didn't realize the back room is on a second circuit and OUT THE WINDOW AGAIN. Then got noodles. Then broke back in... to find the package on her desk. Tripped security and went out the window a third time just for old time's sake.

Have to identify someone just by a phone number. City directory is out, raiding employment or government records would be a brute force taking hours... but what if area codes correspond to buildings? I have a record of someone's address with an area code, call the number I have from city hall, break into the building's basement to check the telephone records... bingo.

Murder case. Woman killed, only evidence a note that leads back to a religious flyer in a restaurant. Old enough no security footage. Street security cameras have a bad angle. Second woman killed while tracing the first woman's friends; no evidence. While stomping around looking for 'a suspicious bearded dude' I caught a lucky break in a basement and eventually discovered a bearded incel, trashed basement apartment, with cult flags and crates of guns. Not upset I couldn't find exactly which gun killed them...

Another murder. Poison. Investigation barely started when checking the camera feeds and watching a lady walk right up to his food, walk away, and him keel over. That was easy.

Fairly recent case trying to identify adultery. After a very confusing series of clues I swung out of a ceiling vent, dropped onto their bed in the middle of what I needed evidence of, snapped a picture, and jumped straight back into the vent.

Occasionally I rewire someplace that annoyed me's security system, including turrets, to... ah, "alert".... on anything not me.

One murder solved by literally following the bloody footprints because he was an idiot. It didn't hurt he left a love letter to the victim, and only two of her friends had the right initial.

This is going to sound odd from those familiar with my style of game (Aurora, SotS, CoaDE, etc), but I just can't recommend this title.
It's clearly a labor of love where the designer's familiarity of wet naval ships shines through. Maintenance especially is touched heavily in the lore, along with the pros and cons of various electronics.
Where it really loses me is it's stuck in an uncanny valley of hard science. The boxy ships with thrusters plastered on every face make sense in a high-school understanding of zero-gravity, but make absolutely no sense in the field of orbital kinematics and their impact on any kind of realistic space combat (for those familiar, read anything short of a torch drive). Railguns overpenetrate light armor and spall heavy armor... but once that's resolved they simply deal hit point damage like a 90s RTS instead of considering the effects of a high energy superconducting magbottle suddenly having a 10cm hole suddenly inside it. For that matter, the detonation of fusion plants with both fallout and Cerenkov effects leave me going ?????
Overall: If you want something with a faux feel of realism, or just a step up from a classic soft space opera RTS? Give it a try. Just don't expect it to map to anything approaching a realistic bent, despite the veneer of hard science.

Somehow worse than Wurm Unlimited (which I actually enjoy) in literally every way. UI? Worse. Intuitiveness? WAY worse. Graphics? Par, maybe? Stability? Worse.

Generally recommend, especially those interested in orbital mechanics.However, there are several hangups that especially hurt coming from anything 'harder' in orbital mechanics than KSP, and a few things that are just bad regardless.Orbital eccentricity is only found in the map view, and in general none of your orbital parameters (even the most critical, like AP/PE altitudes) are in any place accessible. Forget LAN.Information in general is really lacking, fitting the 'throw something together, trial and error' game style. Acceleration? Guess. Weight? It'll kind of tell you, but it's like pulling teeth, especially if you want to compare it to anything. Batteries? Cool, I have power! No idea how long that charge will last, and good luck finding what the power use of anything is. The choice of Isp without exhaust velocity is personally annoying, but at least is in line with rocketry texts from the 50s.Maneuvering is actually generally intuitive, even in a simplified system, but has a few particularly annoying glitches. Most especially have fun trying to cancel a maneuver as the most reliable way isn't clicking the maneuver and then the X, it's fiddle with the bottom left mode setting to flip to orbit and back to maneuver to hit the X there because it desyncs what your map mode is.To summarize: It's a great game in its niche of reducing a complex topic to simplicity, but in a few areas it has been simplified to the point trial and error is not just the easiest way but nearly the only way to move forward. Add in some frustrating UI issues and of course the typical wonky collision physics module and you have a game that is merely good, rather than one that is great.

Now, being Bethesda, I really didn't expect much. A rather simple port to VR that maps game systems to 3D space and not much else. Unfortunately, what we got is something somehow substantially buggier than vanilla despite being on its 3rd or 4th iteration, the interface is nearly identical to VorpX even when it makes no sense (lockpicking, for example, should have been moving the lockpick around the 3d handle with your hand, instead of being literally the same 2d screen floating in space), and stomps over already established VR paradigms in what could only be a deliberate decision to make gameplay as annoyingly clunky and awful as possible as this level of backwards implementation could not possibly be from incompetence.

If you'd like another example of how terrible of a port this is, let's take melee weaponry. In theory, you grab your weapon via some mechanism, presumably from your body, and then swing to hit things. Tried, true, everything uses it. Except Skyrim has to be different! Weapon equipping is still handled via a floating 2D screen in front of your face. "Now surely this isn't too bad Havear", you might be thinking. Right... except, remember in vanilla how weapons have swing speeds? Guess what! You can swing your sword as fast or as often as you like, and it will only register hits in time intervals equivalent to those swing speeds!

It's honestly the worst porting job I've seen (and I've played Prototype and Saints Row 2) not by lack of effort (even though it's plain to see, despite the $60 price tag), but by it seeming like what little effort put in was centered around creating more bugs (somehow they've made point-selection *worse*) and reinventing the wheel by making it square and rotate by alternately slamming flat into the ground and lifting the edges back up.