Recent reviews by davepdotorg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF2gPwMaba4

On paper this looked like it was going to be a ton of fun, and I went in really wanting to enjoy it. But... it's a hard no right now. The main problem for me is that it's so buggy it's pretty much impossible to get through even the tutorial. Things I ran into include:

- The character creation UI makes no sense, with it being impossible to know what option you've picked for some things (did you select smooth or toggle for crouch? Who can tell, it doesn't tell you, etc...)
- The crouch button only works during character creation. Once you start playing it stops working. Which means...
- ...the first thing you do in the tutorial is crouch to go under a tree. But you can't crouch.
- ...except if you crouch in RL. But if you do that *sometimes* it will register that you've done that and move on with the tutorial, other things not.
- Climbing is... okay I'll admit it's amusing.
- I never managed to work out how to throw a spear. It tells you what to do. You do what it tells you what to do. If you do what it tells you what to do one of three things seems to happen: 1) the spear goes into your backpack, 2) the spear just drops straight to the floor (sometimes just disappearing below the map, never to be seen again, meaning you can't finish the tutorial), 3) on rare occasions it just flies off in a random direction that has nothing to do with the aim mechanic.
- I fibbed when I said that the spear disappearing below the map is game over for the tutorial; you *can* just walk up to the deer and one-punch it to death. So there is that.

But really, that's it. I never made it out of the tutorial because so much of it either didn't register or couldn't be completed. Meanwhile I did find it pretty easy to clip through parts of the map to get out of the tutorial area. Oh, yeah, and the spear throwing session took so long I died of hunger in the tutorial and got thrown into some descendent-creation mechanic that had zero explanation and made no sense at all. This then dropped me back in the tutorial, or at least the tutorial area, but without the ability to finish the tutorial (or at least the tutorial was super confused about what was going on).

A game where you die in the tutorial and even the tutorial itself gets confused is a bit of a warning.

To give the game a fair go I did try and wipe my progress and try again. This didn't seem to help either and it wasn't really very clear if I had wiped the data or not because my character appeared to be the same as before.

I think, hope, there's going to be a really fun game here. This is why I've not refunded despite being tempted. If it can and does become way less buggy I can see me having a bunch of fun with it.

But... I could not honestly recommend it to anyone right now.

I never imagined that it would be possible to make a VR Alien game that left me bored. Turns out it's possible.

Video of my first play of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P96w-bOGTW4

It's a fun idea, and on the surface looks pretty nice, and would be a nice VR experience at a nice price if it worked in a playable way. However, I found it almost impossible to play. My attempt to play was with a PSVR2 headset that's working fine for PCVR with pretty much everything else I play on a regular basis, so do keep this in mind when making your own purchasing decision.

Things I ran into:

- Once you're out of the main menu location, almost every time, the world swims around you in a way that has no connection to the movement of your head; for anyone lacking the strongest of VR legs, this is going to make you feel ill in no time.
- Movement is horribly slow.
- Smooth turning is horribly slow with no obvious way of changing it.
- The quit option on the menu just... quits. That's it. I appreciate a good quit option, not all VR games have one, but this one just dumps you out without checking. So be careful when you pull up the wrist-based menu because you may select that by accident.
- I think it might be prone to the odd crash too. It's hard to tell though because I might have hit quit in the wrist menu without even seeing the menu.
- Almost right away on the first level of the showcase game mode, there's an enemy who seems massively overpowered and who shoots and kills you instantly the moment a pixel of your head pops around the corner. This seems like really bad balance.

Aside from these issues, there's also a bit of non-game-breaking jank in here too that gives a very "thrown together" feel to the game, sadly. Possibly the best example is a lot of the artwork and other textures kicking around, which have very strange aspect ration choices.

At the price I've chosen not to refund; I'm hoping this is a very early release and the developer will work on it and improve it. If it gets to a point where I can play it in a way that folk would not normally throw up from the image sway, I'd happily turn this into a recommend.

But, for now, I can't honestly recommend it; but I would suggest wishlisting it and watching how it develops.

A recording of my dip into the experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvQ_aXvEXiY

Sadly I really can't recommend this. From what it bills itself as, it sounds like a great idea, but the execution was something really very different. The graphics aren't great, the performance was terrible, the instructions, as few as there were, were unclear, even the hand-placement in respect to the controllers was off; and once I was in some sort of "hiking" mode (I think it was called) that was it really, game over.

Frustrating in all the right ways, and perfect on the Steamdeck. While some of the comments about the reduced colour palette making it harder to see what's going on ring true, it's highly playable and very addictive. It's quickly become one of my go-to games on the Deck when I have 20 minutes or so to kill.

Ever since I saw the game on release I've been thinking "why isn't this in VR?" -- here it is in VR and it's way more fun than I was expecting. It has that really annoying, in a good way, "just one more go, ONE MORE GO" replay factor.

Good price. Good fun. Good challenge. Good VR.

Recording of my first play of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOPHBI8jA5A

There will be a certain sector of the VR/FPS/Zombie/Shooter audience who won't find this enough of a challenge, and that's fair, but for the rest of us this is a really fun game. It's fairly chill to get started, but still a challenge. Graphically it looks good and it also has to be one of the smoothest VR experiences I've played in quite a while. The world feels to scale, weapons feel sensible and solid in the hand.

There's a lot to enjoy here and I'd especially recommend it given the price.

This is one I'm going to keep coming back to, and I'm looking forward to seeing where development takes it.

My play of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2lFEyqE2CY

I'm afraid this has to be a no from me. Confusing mechanics. Confusing everything else. Confusing design. Kinda buggy it feels too.

I *think* the idea behind this could be a fun little VR game; but this didn't manage to be that for me.

Every action movie fantasy you ever wanted to experience. If that sounds fun, don't hesitate, just get it.

It's exactly what it says it is, and it's really rather good at it. I'm not even an hour into messing with it yet but I know that this will become a tinker toy I'll mess with on and off for plenty of time to come. As a bonus it seems to work reasonably well on the SteamDeck (controls aren't exactly great, but I'm getting the hang of it) so it's also a StemDeck tinker toy too.

Well worth the price.

I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.