Nylige anmeldelser av Dr. Blue

The concept just works a lot better here in VR than in the original game.

The original Gal*Gun was a controller based rail-shooter game with no option to switch to mouse and keyboard. And it played like one. This VR version fixes the controller issues by being a VR game where you can point and shoot in six degrees of freedom, and gives a reason for being on a rail as you move forward from a series of room scale environments. Unlike the original, I beat the game and am fairly happy with the gameplay, and will probably try a few of the score challenge achievements.

One of the reviews calls this a VR horror experience, and mechanically, they're right. You are being swarmed from all sides with entities that you have to shoot who charge right at you. You will get swarmed by multiple girls during some of the encounters which leads to frantic 'omg omg flail shoot shoot' moments, even though thematically, they're professing that they like you. The arena design is nice and diverse; there's not just different configurations of hallways and various open areas, but non-conventional ones like being on a ledge behind a stairwell where you have to worry primarily about what's above and below you.

If this game is for you, you should buy it.

That said, it's not flawless. The menu system should be thrown out and redone from scratch. (Why would you ever make the grip button the 'activate menu item' button while making the trigger button the 'cancel back one level' button? I almost abandoned the game, thinking it shipped broken.) The game will drop back to the empty Steam circle loading area for long periods of time between levels. There's problems clipping with objects in the world. In the 'Call' section of the game, where you can invite a girl to your room, the girl isn't placed inside the play area. There are no Steam Trading Cards. Gal*Gun VR feels like it needs a whole lot of polish but this shouldn't deter you from buying it because it's a glimpse into our waifu future.

Charming, but with problems. The aesthetics of the game are wonderful. I love the art style and the music. Reminds me of early World of Warcraft.

The tower defense mechanics are middle of the road. Your "towers" that you put onto the play field help, but you'll need to be constantly shooting at enemies. The mechanics aren't really explained and I suspect that I may have just brute forced my way through the game. The boss fights have a few problems (several attacks aren't telegraphed or are luck based), but generally feel appropriate for the game.

The VR aspect generally works with teleporting between different vantage points. Where the game falls down is between levels: the game falls back to the Steam blank area with the default Vive controllers for several seconds before putting up their game's logo skybox.

The biggest problem with the game is the voice acting. Judged just on delivery, the voice acting is really bad. And what they're saying is a mix of broken English. The script consistently has problems with subject/verb agreement among other gramatical errors and hearing this is grating in ways reading the same written text wouldn't be. "Nice shoot!" the game says over and over again.

Despite all this, I powered on to the end. It's short, has some big issues, but it held my attention all the way through so thumbs up net.

The Mexico '86 Table's gimick of a left mini-play area with its own flippers is rather neat: get the ball in and play a time limited target minigame. I was worried about how the inlanes/outlanes at the bottom of the field were asymetrical when I started, but I only had a ball go through the outlane once and you shouldn't be put off by that one piece of weirdness.

Buy individual tables; not the membership sets.

Most of the machines are really old school and underwhelming, so skip buying the full Memberships. That said, at least the 2016 and 2017 remakes are pretty good tables, so do pick those up. There are a few other gems (Devil Riders has a super neat gimick with it's raised board with its own flippers!), but most of the old tables are ignorable. Actually try the demos before buying a table.

Why a net positive review then? Because for VR, this is currently the best collection. Credit where credit is due: Magic Pixel Kit nailed both the table simulation. It doesn't have FX2's annoying things happening outside the table to distract you. Sure, I have some minor complaints: the VR menus for configuring a machine are overly complicated and move around. Achievements will pop in VR and will often display over where your flippers are (which is a bizare oversight). But on net, if you have a VR headset, buy the VR support and the remake tables. You won't be disapointed.

Uninteresting. The core gameplay breaks down to memorizing a tune, and then dragging the pieces of the song in order.

Jumping between ships is an interesting gimick, but the entire game feels really unpolished. Waves are repetitive, the pixel art is too low-fi to stand out in a sea of pixel art games, and I'm not a fan of the Speak & Spell announcer.

Arizona Sunshine is promising, and in early 2017, is one of the better FPS games in VR. It's the sort of experiment that needs to be done to find out what works and what doesn't.

First, the positives: this isn't a tech demo, but a full four hour campaign which held my attention the entire time. The guns are a little repetitive, but that's fine. You have a variety of pistols, SMGs and shotguns to cary with you. The static sniper rifle and minigun sections were also enjoyable. Encounters are generally varried, and I especially liked the train and refinery sections.

But there are several things about Arizona Sunshine which don't work very well. Other people have called out the aiming, but I was able to work around this by just dropping the difficulty which gives you a laser sight to aim with. There is a long pitch black section which just doesn't work. Between the Steam Chaperone and the grain on the VR screens, this area was more annoying than scary. (It was the one time I actually questioned whether continuing was worth it.)

That said, if it's still 2017 (or later and there isn't a better FPS released yet) you should certainly pick this up. It's the first real VR FPS that was playable and the authors deserve your money. Just realize that this is an experiment because not all the genre conventions have been hammered out.

Let's separate our the game and the implementation.

The game is great. It's a 10 hour metroidvania. Despite the original being almost a decade old, the graphics in this remastered version look pretty good. The game is mostly fair; there was only two secrets I had to look up, and the combat also feels fair (except for the tall bipedial walkers, which are stupid and overpowerful, but there's like two of them in the game so whatever).

The implementation is...not that great. I still recommend buying it, but it's only a passable pc port. If you want to modify anything but the most basic graphics options, you'll have to resort to modifying configuration files by hand. (Make sure to do this if you have a widescreen monitor, otherwise your FOV will be really bad.) This game is weirdly sensitive to other programs. If you merely have Oracle VirtualBox open--not trying to run it in VirtualBox--the game will start but will minimize on startup and won't open. You might have to fight to play this game, but I still recommend it.

Do you remember when FPS games were fun ultraviolence instead of playing peek-a-boo behind Chest High Walls? Doom 2016 will remind you. The actual moment to moment gameplay is a breath of fresh air. The guns feel good to shoot, the glory kill system incentivises manic battles, the graphics are phenominal...even the final credit sequence nails it.

The game is actually getting bugfixes again and at least currently, there's no bots.