Recent reviews by Droopy The Dog

It's the king for a reason, as games go it's 5 star and the biggest flaw is you'll play for 5 hours and think it was only 1.

I'm a sucker for a good space game, and this isn't -bad-, but it's pretty underwhelming.

It's very similar to Starpoint Gemini for most of the gameplay, especially the combat which does almost everything the same except even more clunkily than SPG, with turrets that act downright drunken half the time when you try to aim manually. Directional shields, manual flight with WASD, adjustable energy management between sheilds/weapons/engines. If you've played space games before, you know the dance already.

The universe in BTS feels almost completely devoid of life. You either fly from the station to a randomly generated contract waypoint and it spawns in the encounter as you arrive, or you fly around randomly in circles (literally circles if you want) until it spawns a random encounter. The universe basically doesn't seem to exist outside of you and whatever ships spawned in when you reached the next waypoint.

And thrown on top of that is a bit of Space Rangers' old text adventure resolutions for about half the missions. That puts a lot of focus on the writing, which is a shame because it's just all over the place. At very best it's entertainingly gung-ho in a pulp sci-fi kind of way, at worst it's almost functionally gibberish due to what I assume are the unfortunate quirks of translation. But most disappointingly, most of the time it's just a bland retelling of all the worst tropes of the last decade. Which would also be almost unintelligible if they weren't so familiar I can fill in the grammatical blanks myself.

For example a drug addicted guy will randomly accost you in a station and beg you to help a woman who is convulsing in an alleyway from what your science officer says is a drug overdose. If you choose to try to save her life your next forced response is to tell the guy to get lost and you're taking her onto the ship because she's not safe with him. Then suddenly you get an achievement for saving her from a bad male influence. With the only clues in the text being that they're both visibly drug addicts, and the guy desperately tried to save her life, the story then just abruptly concludes he dragged her into that life and you saved her from him. Or there's the almost insultingly nasally voiced merchant guy who keeps disrespecting the war hero lady captain of the prologue for no apparent reason, who inconsistently flips between thirsting to apprehend all the pirates in the sector to whining that the pirates can wait because he forgot his lunch box or pissing himself, seemingly just to force in some mean spirited comic relief.

Normally I don't put so much focus on the writing in a game, if I want good writing I go for a book, I'm here for gameplay. But since the combat gameplay has been done before and better, and the sandbox elements are very thin, the writing is the only thing BTS has left to set it apart and instead the writing just tasted bitter in my mouth.

The graphics are prettier than both Starpoint Gemini or Space Rangers though, I'll give it that much.

Brilliant fun, and guaranteed to have you exhaust yourself because you're so into it.

The punches feel good, the sound is good, the training gym is surprisingly useful with good feedback for actually training techniques, and most importantly for a single player only game - the AI opponents are very reactive and fun to fight. They'll wince and drop guards if you hit them hard enough in the body, they'll go for a counter punch if move your hands from guard, their punches will go wide if you hit them hard enough first and they start to adapt if you keep going for the same combos. The blocking is a little funky, it works fine if you block properly, but it also sometimes lets you jam up your opponents punches in ways that would get your hand slapped out the way in reality.

The punch damage is mostly velocity based, with some minimum momentum calculations so you can't get away without doing a windup. So mostly it encourages techniques that match real life boxing punches, except you have no resistance so you'll end up with some wide ass follow through even on swings that hit and probably some unusually sore muscles from pulling back punches.

Supposedly to accommodate all fitness and technical levels it defaults to automatically adjusting the in game damage based on the average velocity of your previous punches, so that your average punch does an "average" amount of damage, whether they're weak or sledgehammer strong in reality. It's tuned so that you're not going to be knocking anyone out easily with an "average" punch, so you'll be working your ass off if you're going for the win no matter how fit you are, but you'll never feel like you're doing nothing either. Which is great for making sure you're tired enough to actually use those between round breaks to catch your breath, but does lead to some unintended gamey consequences like farming out limp-wristed jabs to bring your average down before going for a big hook, or penalising playstyles where you only go for big hits by making them all "average" eventually.

Fortunately the customization is incredibly detailed so you can turn off the automatic adjustment and set your own velocity/damage conversion. The sweetspot for me was to go absolutely ham on the training dummy with full-force punches for a while, then adjust up the force multiplier the automatic adjustment had set by 10-20% and lock them in.

I also love that you can tailor the opponent's behaviour in great detail with the custom difficulty settings, although I haven't played with it much yet, but you can adjust how much they favour their left/right hook/straight/uppercut, as well as their punch speed, power and aggression levels, to set yourself exactly the kind of challenge you're looking for.

Fantastic game, especially for the price, I recommend it highly to anyone who'll listen.

The shooting feels terrible compared to other big VR shooters. The guns are not responsive, the reloads are janky, and the scope mechnic that just projects a flat image across your whole vision is unpleasant.

Doesn't work well with index controls either, the guns are misaligned below the controllers' forward aim which makes two handing feel very unnatural, and the map ping seems to be completely absent from the index control scheme. No finger tracking support for the hands either.

Graphically the whole thing is very stripped down, there's a handful of buildings with some detail put into them, but most of the map is barely textured boxes.

Fantastic game, nothing else I own can get my adrenaline pumping before the first shot is even fired like this one does.

It's incredibly tactical and there are so many tools to gain an edge with, traps, PvE enemy lures, area denial tools, sound decoys, adjustable environmental lights. But the short times to kill and prevalence of low-rate-of-fire weapons will still test your aiming skills to make every shot count, even the be laid plans can be ruined if you flub even 1 or 2 shots at the start. Ironsights are pinpoint accurate when you aim down sights, and recoil will only shift your aim to where the ironsights move to, so your hits and misses there are 100% down to you. Hipfire still has a cone of fire, but because of the high stakes and low fire-rate spray and pray is generally a bad idea outside of almost touching range.

The sounds are amazing quality and are a huge part of the gameplay, with the amount of cover on the map and the distance some of the louder sounds travel you'll hear your opponents before you see them more often than not. Everything makes a sound in the game world, even switching weapons and the slight breathing as you enter and exit aiming down sights, they all have their own volume attenuations so some can be heard across the map, some you can only hear when they're almost on top of you. So you have things like just barely hearing the gentle creak of wood as a guy sneaks through the cabin you're in, then hearing the slight glug as he switches to a molotov and you know it's time to burst into the next room blasting whilst he's not got his gun out. On the other hand if the guy you're sneaking up on is moving around he'll never hear the sound of you crouch walking over his own footsteps. I mostly play solo versus teams of 2-3, so the stealth/ambush aspects are especially important to me, and they feel just right IMO.

The attention to detail is amazing too. Everything is broken down and dilapidated on the map, so every house has crooked planks and gaps in the walls or cracked and missing bricks, and almost every gap in the model has a matching gap in the hitbox, so there's no hitting invisible walls stopping you as you try to shoot that guy's head through a tiny crack in the wall. Then there's little things like most of the grenades are lit-fuse types and if they land in water the fuse goes out and if they land in an open fire they go off immediately. The flash bomb is a glass ball that goes off when it shatters, if it hits deep water it just sinks instead of shattering, but the model remains underwater and if you shoot it later it still actually shatters and goes off. You can quietly break glass lanterns at a distance by throwing anything at them, even just decoy rocks and you can trigger some levers at a distance by the same or shooting them too, it really helps build the feeling of being there and able to use anything in the environment to your advantage.

The PvE is tough enough to be scary when you first start, but predicable enough that you can use it as a tool against your fellow hunters once you've got some experience. It's never nothing though, it's not very likely to kill after you've been playing a while, but it can force you to make noise or start wasting some of your consumable items if you mess up, so it gives you enough to keep entertained as you look for the bounty/other players.

The persistent items/hunters between games aren't too punishing, even the cheapest guns can still kill in 1 headshot and you always have at least one free option to go into the game with so the stakes can be as low or as high as you want. Plus there's usually a few mid-grade guns scattered around the map and you can stockpile spare free hunters/weapons every time you make it out alive, so you never really run out of decent stuff.

Genuinely my favourite VR game, by a wide margin. Overtaking Alyx, Blade and Sorcery, Robo Recall, Beatsaber, Pavlov all the classics. I cannot overstate how much more right than all the others this game feels one it all comes together and how much attention to detail there is in it. It's the full package:

Because of the momentum and the full body simulation, the immersion is fantastic, this where Boneworks exceeds all the other VR games by the greatest margins. No glitching through objects, no feet hanging in mid air like magic. No weird crab walks when you duck. Everything works as you feel like it should in reality. Before you jump your character ducks a little, and if you duck lower and throw your hands up in sync you'll jump higher. Try to put your hands through a wall and instead of just flopping against it you'll push your whole body back like you're doing a wall push-off. Try to run on a wheeled cart or imbalanced object and you'll roll it backwards underneath you as and split the difference in momentum. My only slight gripe is trying to walk on big piles of loose rubble (or bodies) can make you feel like a baby giraffe as your character slips and slides trying to find their footing.

The puzzles are fun (often multiple solutions, a big plus) the physics simulation is used to brilliant effect in lots of places. Some puzzles feel like Human Fall Flat, except you have full body control instead of some QWOP like handicap at moving things. There's little clues scattered around to both the puzzles and lots of little easter eggs and secrets. And a nice smattering of lore stashed on notepads and graffiti'd on the world if you like to look at the little details.

The platforming is also fantastic. Because of the aforementioned immersion and simulation, the way you never hover anywhere and you can use your arms to adjust momentum, they just feel so good. Balancing and shimmying along a narrow ledge will feel properly tense, making a running leap for that swinging rope will feel amazing when you grab it and your arms whip up and your body starts swinging, and leaping over boxes and tipping over stacks of shelves as you go to dodge the hoard of angry NPCs behind will feel very cinematic. If you had the sensors for full body tracking I bet it would be even more incredible.

The melee is good. In isolation it doesn't feel quite as fun as B&S, but it's pretty damn close, and that's probably just because Boneworks is less of an insane power trip where you're not strong enough to punch people into orbit with your bare hands. And I'm a huge fan of the full body collision Boneworks has, meaning the enemies can't just float through you if you collide like they always do in B&S and ruin the flow. Again the inertia simulation aspect adds a lot to the melee, as you grab enemies and throw them around you'll also end up shifting your own body around in relation to them, and if you charge into someone or do a running skewer or you'll actually lose full-body movement speed as you make contact. Even the grip friction is simulated and analogue, if you stab something hard enough with a long handled weapon, your grip will slide along the shaft as you try to push forward, and the harder you hold the grip function on your controllers the stronger your in-game grip is.

The shooting is very satisfying all on its own, easily as fun as Pavlov's or Alyx's, and the weight/momentum and collision simulation really adds another extra layer to small vs big weapon CQC techniques. The core gun variety isn't huge, obviously way better than Alyx's 3 but not a gun smorgasbord like Pavlov, and there's weapon variants with differing attachments/sights to keep things fresher. Again the attention to detail shines, there's one deliberately very dark level in the story mode, and you'll suddenly realise how big of a difference actual glow in the dark sights makes to gun utility, nevermind the flashlight mounted weapons. BUT, and this is the biggest, best but you'll ever see; the gunplay feels great, in a game that also has good melee combat! Pavlov and Alex don't hold a candle to Boneworks when it come's to John Wick'ing your way through a hoard of shmucks. Knocking people over and popping heads as you hold them in an arm lock, blocking a swing with your rifle slamming them with the buttstock and nailing them as they fall over, flipping helmets off with a pistol whip and doming them on the return stroke, they all feel so badass. And you even have slo-mo to really nail the execution.

My biggest criticism is the game's campaign gets off to a very slow start, and it gatelocks all the really fun sandbox content until you reach/find certain milestones in the campaign mode. And it's understandable because the game itself takes a good bit of time to understand and to learn to use the fully reactive simulation aspects, so the first few levels are more or less playgrounds to try out the physics and movement options. And that's enough fun on its own with lots of little secret detours that you could easily spend several hours messing around before you even get your first gun, and another couple of hours after that before you really get to see the game shine when it puts everything together in more complex levels with actually serious enemies.

Oh and if you get VR motion sickness, this is definitely a game you'll have to acclimatize to. Mine is only mild, but in my first few play sessions of Boneworks it was definitely noticeable. But on the plus side, once you get used to it in Boneworks, you'll be basically immune to the feeble motion sickness of lesser games.

Whilst I'm sure it was great for it's time, as VR has advanced it unfortunately feels like this arena combat game has aged poorly. Little things like the iron sights of pistols not actually lining up with your shots, glitchy menus, boxy graphics and the god awful default controller setup for index knuckles mean it's doesn't hold up too well next to newer VR games in the same price bracket.

It isn't even worth it for free. Very dated mechanically, same generic hotbar spamfast that has been done a million times over at this point. And it's full to bursting with the usual F2P time-waster mechanics trying to nickel and dime you in every way imaginable. It just feels like a game cannibalising its core gameplay to eke out those last few bucks rather than trying to be sustainable or actually enjoyable.

Definitely not worth it for solo/single player.

The spell variety is pretty limited, there's ~25 direct damage spells in total and about half of them are very minor variations on a theme.

For example, you have:
Arcane Beam - a continuous damage beam
Fire Beam - a continuous damage beam with a minor burn DoT effect.
Ice Beam - a continuous damage beam with a minor slowing effect
Light Beam - a continuous healing beam
Nature Beam - a stronger continuous healing beam with a very short range
Dark Beam - a continuous damage beam that costs HP instead of mana
Storm Beam - a continuous damage beam with minor chaining damage.

[Edit] Clearing up my computer and it turns out this game left 3gb of log files just hanging around my appdata for 5 years after uninstalling, so that's something.

That's 1/4 of your combat spells.

There's little in the way of debuffing or synergising between spells, so most combat against the AI boils down to picking your most mana efficient spell/weapon combo and running backwards/in-circles whilst hitting them with the same spell over and over, hoping their HP runs out before your mana does. Even on basic mobs you'll want to focus on mana efficiency because basic mana regeneration is achingly slow and crafting mana potions is just more grind, so if you want to engage in back-to-back fights without waiting you'll want to ration it out carefully.

Enemies are... Average. There's a decent number of -technically- different varieties, although they're mostly pretty one-note, you have the flying ones, the melee ones, the ranged ones, the big slow melee ones and when you really push into the end-game you have the teleporting melee ones, the flying ranged ones, and the melee ones that also sometimes fire a ranged spell. Hit boxes and AI pathing are both clunky as hell too, and almost none of them can deal with a player flying directly above them, the only downside of which is the heavy mana-cost of doing both at once.

The grind as a single player is ungodly, so much so that even after cranking the rate of everything to 500% in server options, I still ended up using console commands to largely skip the mid-game when it became obvious that the progression through the tech tree was simply "More of the same, but bigger numbers"

The building looks pretty enough, but is largely useless to a solo player short of having somewhere to place crafting stations and store your junk. It's also pretty expensive, so of course the default is an ugly cramped box rammed full of crafting stations and a respawn circle.

The 3 end-game dungeons were also not well balanced for solo play either. You will need an immense stock of mana/health potions if you want any hope of depleting the massive health pools in the allotted time before the dungeon kicks you out, and even then expect a boring too-long fight running in circles slugging it out with the final boss at the end.

Exploring was underwhelming, there are a good few "biome" styles around the map, but everything felt a bit lifeless. And the NPCs constantly scattered in random little empty stone huts, asking you to "kill/tame/harvest X of Y for an XP/item reward" being pretty much the only interactive NPCs on the map outside of the tutorial is pretty lackluster.

[Edit] 5 years later and I'm cleaning up my PC the old fashioned way. Turns out it left ~4gb of log files behind after uninstalling and they've been blocking up my SSD ever since. So that's something.

The aesthetics are well done, everything else, not so much.

There's plenty of gripes. The looting/inventory controls are janky and deeply unpleasant to have to constantly deal with, the bicycles handle like tanks, the enemy AI bugs out constantly, items bug out frequently, hover drones drop through the floor occasionally and just buzz around under there taunting you, sometimes combat won't end because of some random enemy stuck on a corner 3km away, preventing you from entering stealth again.

The removable armour, weakpoints and weapon disabling on the robots are done quite nicely, although with AI that randomly makes them spaz out and flail around everywhere trying to hit them isn't always enjoyable. Even so, the enemy variety is very limited, so even the detailed damage locations get boring far quicker than more enemies get introduced. Guns are so-so, pistols have a good kick and the shotguns have bite out to a realistic mid-range. But long range shooting is an exercise in frustration since there's no tracer round effect and bullet impacts are near invisible, so there's little to no feedback as to how much you need to correct for bullet drop and you just end up blindly adjusting upward in small increments until something blows up.

And, as with most survival shooters, you'll spend -far- too long travelling across empty fields and along empty roads. So when the action finally happens and is plagued by bugs, it just heightens the frustration.

[Update] So I wanted to give it a fair shake, and at least see one of the big tank enemies, so I put in a few more hours. My opinion hasn't really changed after that. Still too repetitive, far too much tedious running from point to point, and buggy/stupid AI opponents. I do appreciate more now that someone worked pretty lovingly on the wind and rain audio though.

I will say the long range shooting gets better when you start getting better weapons that have less deviation, it's a lot easier to range myself in when the shots are more consistent. My comment about getting very little feedback on a miss still stands though.