Recent reviews by Shadow

For a VR title in the current era it is proportionally good to other titles of its type. The stalker-like experience is in some ways very well executed (inventory, items) and in other ways misses the mark so far as to be idiotic (enemies, environment, most gameplay).

As most things, despite being bombarded by "graphix so real" is a complete hit and miss. Weapons, player, most intractable objects, and some larger things like buildings and cars look good. Enemies, despite being wildly out of place, are also alright in their own way. Unfortunately 95% of the ♥♥♥♥♥ on screen at a given time are not those things, with everything else worse to varying degrees, and within that subjective "worse" there are a number of styles being employed which make absolutely no sense. The final (though most likely first) nail in the coffin visually is the childish and random upscaling of nearly every single environmental set piece. The fact that materials and objects vary in style, effort and scale so drastically, and that in any given frame these conflicting visual methods exist beside each other makes for a worse experience than if everything were consistently bad.

Gameplay, like visuals, is torn in two and polarized to extremes. Collecting items is a slow, methodical experience* and is the high point of the game. Inventory and item management, on a purely technical level, is the best VR has to offer.

*I find it relevant to make a note here, that opening cabinets and drawers is awful and clunky, but entirely the fault of the awful physics Unreal employs [though I feel the developers upscaled such objects to be "easier" as a workaround which is its own problem]. I bring this up as most braindead consumers would hyper-focus on these minor facets as "immersion breaking" while completely ignoring the countless other real lackings the game stuffs down the players eyeballs at any given point in time.

Combat is a grab bag ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like everything else. VR is clunky and awkward by nature. Collecting items and organizing inventory is a slow process, made slower by the clunkiness, but it cannot be helped. It works in the end and is satisfying for what it is. Despite being boring, the slow generic walking-zombie-type enemies fit the VR experience and give some leniency towards the awkwardness that comes with VR. From this point a gradual ramping up of difficulty would be welcome, but this is a terrible era we exist in and things are not sensible. The curve of difficulty between the zombie-like walking dudes and everything else is inexcusable. It is as if the natural tenancies of VR were ignored entirely at this point of development.

Police and soldiers either land every hit or none at all, and being in cover doesn't do ♥♥♥♥ to help. This leads to a realization that one does not have to take cover, a realization the enemies also seem to share as they run around completely arbitrarily and stop at random, making a confusing mess of what should be an enjoyable experience. What use are the detailed weapons if the using of such weapons is bastardized down to a level beneath children playing with squirt guns?

Speed of enemies is a huge problem. The aforementioned sprinting of police and soldiers is game breaking. When at a distance, the random, quick movement is just annoying and ungrounded. The problem escalates when they blaze straight past you at close range, and you, the player, a real life person in a confined space, are suddenly put at a severe disadvantage of enemies moving superhuman speeds in a chaotic mess while trying not to trip over your cables or smash into something by turning too quickly or moving too far yourself. The generic combine soldiers in HL:A or the boneworks soldier-things are ranged enemies which succeed in being challenging and fun yet still VR friendly.

Then there are spiders. Headcrabs in HL:A and the boneworks crabs are also existing examples of how to do this well. The spiders are just lazy and badly done. They glide across the ground. Their tentacles wiggle and jitter like broken ragdoll limbs with no rhyme or reason. They do not animate or ground themselves on walls or terrain in any shape or form. You can unload a shotgun into them at point blank and the pellets will phase straight through them as their hitbox is not in line with their visible form. They change direction instantaneously and jump 30ft at near-lightspeed through your body with no way to avoid unless you yourself are abusing some circle-sprint ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like the pro VR gamer you are.

I don't know how these guys ♥♥♥♥♥♥ the combat up so badly. This game feels like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ first attempt at a VR experience when it comes to the npcs, and it wouldn't have been passable as a VR launch title. It's the norm to give passes to this ♥♥♥♥, to overlook gaping flaws in enjoyment and develop metas around it (e.g. "just circle strafe the spiders and wait for them to get stuck before shooting them") because the average douchebag "gamer" in this repulsive era is too stupid to realize it's a bad stress inducing experience and why put effort in if all a game needs to thrive is a positive self-outlook and monthly dev blog with a roadmap and discord which "listens to feedback" to grow a fanbase that will gladly cough up cash for ego pets. There never would have been an excuse, but seeing as Boneworks and HL:A are there, it can only be seen as laziness or stupidity that the combat is so horrible. This is furthered by the fantastic weapons and inventory; something was done so well in one regard, better than any other VR game I have seen. It is some kind of sick joke staring you in the face as you play, saying in one regard "hey kid, check out this fantastically digitized russian gear! want to shoot some stuff like a real stalker?" and in another ripping that all away, leaving you constantly wiplashed between enjoyable experiences and absolute trash.

And as you ready yourself for some tense life or death survival in the zone, as you painstakingly hand load a few mags and stuff them in your rig, as you oil and clean and stuff a rod and paper down the barrel of a PPSH with your own two digital hands, as you wonder in awe at the perfectly digitized weapon you lovingly stick onto your back slot and set forth into the zone to fend for your life and collect artifacts, all of the detail detail and realism washes away in an instant when faced with the next spider you come across.

got this for a single dollar off one of the bundle sites, but i honestly wish i hadnt. the game itself is funny, and i did like what little i played of it because it was so non-standard and funny-bad. but the game isnt what i'm reviewing here, its what installing and playing this game did to me.

i installed this thing last night and played for a few hours, then i went to bed. when i woke up, my internet wasnt connecting, though all the other computers in the house were fine. i fixed it, but had a strange problem where unity specific games would not connect. it took me all damn day to remember that i played this piece of garbage for a few hours and that it was also a unity game, and then the realization hit me and i just feel used and ashamed. that one dollar purchase has already taken a day of my life away from me, hunting through registry files and random settings trying to figure out what the hell it managed to ♥♥♥♥ up, and its still not fixed. the last thing that screwed with the functioning of my OS like this was some virus ten years ago on a throwaway laptop that i didnt care about. now im seriously considering reinstalling everything i have because of this one dollar piece of ♥♥♥♥ game.

the grim dark future looks like mcdonnalds toys, but that's what reshade is for

As someone who has played far too much Dayz and Tarkov, my initial thoughts of seeing some gameplay of this was "oh cool, that looks alright for $20 or whatever it is".

Too bad this game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks.

There is a faint glimmer of what this damp turd could have been, but it came out a turd, not a burger or a pile of candy. No chemical baths or additional ingredients will make a turd edible. Believe me, I have a lot of experience putting turds in my mouth.

The game plays like a bastardized Dayz, which isn't saying much. You spawn, slowly aquire guns and other boring loot while running around a large bland map that all look and feels identical, and then eventually you die. There is nothing inherently WRONG with this type of game, but Deadside somehow pulls it off in possibly the most hollow, shallow way possible.

In Dayz, when you blap a dude running a ton of gear, especially inland, it feels satisfying. You know you just took a lot of time and effort from that player. There is a looming sense that everything you have accumulated over hours or even days can be lost in an instant.

Deadside replaces that weight with a shallow meta of being able to effortlessly sprint back to your body within a few minutes. Deaths feel cheap and hollow, even by current Dayz standards. It only takes a few minutes to find enough gear to run off and PVP, and once you're at that stage there really isnt anything left to do. Run around and shoot at dudes. What this ultimately does is make it too much effort to be a straight up deathmatch, because it's frustrating to spend 5-10 minutes essentially respawning, but at the same time it lacks the meaningfullness that something like dayz or tarkov has. Deadside lands somewhere in the middle, and it sucks so bad.

As far as the gameplay itself feels, the characters generally move around ok. Leaning and walking feel pretty solid. The character feels grounded in a way that other games sorely lack. Until you sprint. Then it turns into every other survival game out there, where success is based solely on reflexes and instant ADS with pixel perfect accuracy rather than thought, positioning, or character maintenance. Blast your way up hills and zigzag around bullets. Show that guy with the AK who is boss by weaving a perfect serpentine pattern to take full advantage of those couple milliseconds of response time, and ram your fresh spawn knife into his ♥♥♥♥♥ face. Once you're all juiced up, and some poor slob takes a shot at you while youre in the middle of an open field, simply sprint out some perfectly trained lines while you zero his position and 360 noscope that bastard. The generic character control absolutely kills whatever Deadside could have had going for it.

BUT WAIT THERES MORE

The audio is hideous. Someone recorded every sound with a pillow over the mic and then evenly leveled everything out to the volume of a footstep. Yes, it is that bad.
The visuals are so low contrast, the lighting is so flat, and the UE4 TXAA blurs what little differentiation there is into oblivion and literally makes my eyes water after a few minutes.
The menus and inventory system must be copy pasted from a tutorial or bought straight for the marketplace.
Everything else about it feels half baked and soulless beyond repair. It's a turd wearing a mask, desperately trying to trick you into believing it's not a turd, just so you might touch it and get ♥♥♥♥ all over your hands. Because every time I play this game, I feel the same as the instant when it hits me that the last thing I remember I thought it was a good idea to watch one or two videos on youtube before going to bed, and now it is somehow noon, and a sense of meaninglessness sweeps over me like a blanket the size of the ocean that in all rights should make my body lose the will to live, but instead that emotionless emotion whispers in my ear "just one more".

every time i launch a game, this piece of ♥♥♥♥ launches. i dont have a headset plugged in. every source game crashes because of this. nothing stops it. only option is to uninstall steamvr. so now my headset is a paperweight, thanks.

This is everything wrong with modern trash rpgs. It may as well be for mobile. How it can be so bastardized from the first in the series is astounding.

I'm not a huge fan of quake style games but now and then I can appreciate the old classics or the more modern ones that aren't ♥♥♥♥. I was going somewhere with that but I don't care because this is a bad game.

- It looks and feels like a mobile game. Like if someone took a really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ mobile MOBA, somehow turned it into an FPS, added loot boxes, and then ported it to PC, and then someone threw some money at the rights to an old game no one cares about, and then they said ♥♥♥♥ it this is quake, because "wow! we (me) could really market this". The end (heh please let me die).

- CHAMPIONS with SKILLS in QUAKE (why)

- PAID CUSTOMIZATION* (HI KIDS REMEMBER MODS [haha they don't exist anymore])

- Movement, aiming, and just about everything about the game feels like someone greased everything up with butter. I don't know how else to explain how awful it feels to do everything. It's like watching one of those TVs that fakes 60fps for non-60fps shows - it's just wrong.

- Characters just kind of slide around - animation shouldn't be a big deal for this kind of game and I wouldn't normally mind, but something about the way other characters move just feels particularly wrong (like everything is tweened? like they arent moving the direction it looks like they are?). On top of that, because there is nothing grounding the characters to the environment (because it's all flat, overly ambient light), because the outlines are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ obnoxious, and becasue everything is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ busy yet not busy at the same time, I found basic depth perception when trying to aim any sort of projectile rediculously difficult. Bundle flat environments with no depth, with floaty characters with vague animation, and you have everything you need to make trash. But then people liked the doom reboot so what the ♥♥♥♥ do I know about stupid video games.

- Loot boxes.

- 3 tiers of look boxes actually.

- Why are there multiple types of credits/points and what could they possibly be used for IN A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ QUAKE GAME?? (oh haha for a second there I forgot that this is 2018 and that nothing matters)

- Every menu feels like it's meant to be used with a touch screen on some giant phone. But I guess the only way this entire game makes sense is if the demographic is #mobilegamer babies with fat greasy fingers who need a GIANT BUTTON THAT SAYS PLAY on the top center of the screen. ♥♥♥♥ video games.

- For a game about fast paced twitch action, the load times are horrendous for what this is (what the ♥♥♥♥ takes the main menu over a minute to load?), and the post game stuff drags for way too long (as far as I know you can't skip it).

- It's hilarious and sad how bad people are at copying games from 20+ years ago. I guess the only thing sadder is that I don't even like Quake to begin with and I'm still wrting this for some reason. At least I'm glad** this was free from a steam event. If only God would give me the strength to lose all this weight so I could finally hang myself.

*I'm assuming from how the cusotmization menu looked, because I don't give enough of a ♥♥♥♥ to look into it

**also not really because I downloaded and played it, and now wrote all of this, all becasue it was free

TLDR: wow! great game 4 true #twitchg4m3rz! spend ur $$$ on this game NOW 2 grind lootboxes 4 fun + subz

Since the new engine, and especially since the 1.0 release, Dayz has deteriorated into arcadey fortnite/pubg/etc style gameplay. Long gone are the days of subtle status effects that gradually changed, intense encounters that required thought to get out of alive, and a survival system that required attention. Usher in the new era of status bars that belong in a casual mobile game, a huge inventory screen that looks like a default babys-first-ui bought off the unreal marketplace, and running at inhuman speeds because the casual gamer bro this game is now apparently geared towards cant stand anything less than titanfall levels of movement speed.

Since .63 Dayz contains the same high level "gameplay" every gamer bro craves, which is strafing everywhere at sonic speeds while dodging bullets. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they added fortnite-style insta-building to this so all the twitch streamer wannabees show off their elite skills by building the fastest, dankest ramps u evr seen mid-firefight. The only right way to play Dayz is to play it like a fast paced deathmatch. There is no more thought involved in situations, just which bro can out-strafe the other.

Something as basic as running slower up a hill, which was in arma 2 all the way up to .62, is gone. Dudes can sprint 20mph straight up a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ vertical cliff. The reticle used to be dynamic, the guns had weight when aimed and shot. Bushes couldn't be sprinted through. It didn't fee like every other ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game out there. it was faint, but it had a soul, something to differentiate it from the other stuff. Now everyone gets off to ♥♥♥♥ like "drinking from a well plays an animation and has a progress bar, wow!" but the underlying basicness of the new game is completely ignored. stuff like limb-specific damage isn't in, and never will be, becasue the modern playerbase is too stupid for it, but who cares, just add more clothing options. Expressing your digital self matters more than the game itself. There are 10 glaring shortcomings for every thing that was 'fixed'. Dayz has been modernized into a sterile, generic blob. On the surface it is "better" to idiots watching their favorite youtuber build a base, but it is a husk of its former self. Despite the many flaws of .62, it was a better, less broken game then, and it is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ shame they completely removed it from opt-in.

"but base building!" You're right, base building. The pride and joy of any trending survival game. The perfect thing to tweet about. Your hip aunt who has a twitter has never touched a mouse and keyboard outside of a cubicle before, but shes surely heard of the sick bases you can build in this cool new game. Impenetrable fortresses of infinite hoarding and combination locks that cant be broken without burning through 20 sledgehammers. "raiding" a base means finding a way to glitch through a wall. And the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ morons think this is fun. Becasue tents were for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, if you have a tent or a stash somewhere someone might wander across it, thats not fun. What is risk vs reward anyway. This is 2019 base building after all. The old joke of "go play minecraft" isn't a joke anymore. The real joke is "go play Dayz", becaue those kids who grew up on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ minecraft are in college now and they play Dayz now, and mincrcraft is still the same minecraft, but minecraft is somehow a deeper, better game in every respect than the trash Dayz is.

The future of this game used to look good, back when there were only 3 or 4 maps, only a few classes, and only one gametype and one boss.

But this is the 2017/18 video game industry we're talking about so why lie to yourself, we all know where this ended up.

Now it's about loot boxes and stupid skins, $24.99 gun crates, every menu and game start looks like an ad, the point of playing is now to do daily/weekly quest grinding to get more loot crates, every other server has MLG wannabes who immediately start a vote to kick anyone who isn't already grinded to the top rank, and for a multiplayer game in 2018 you still can't make a custom game with friends unless you set up a dedicated server.

For a game entirely about shooting zombies, every match goes through a complete shift, from "feels pretty good mowing down the first few waves" to "this fleshpound is just doing its vague damage animation and skidding around the map and nothing is stopping it". There is absolutely no feedback on larger enemies or bosses, which feels even more terrible than it would in isolation since the smaller zeds are so satisfying to mow down.

There is no clear damage from the larger zeds - you could take damage from seemingly far out of melee range, but at the same time not take any damage while standing directly next to a fleshpound that is flailing and slapping its arms right through your camera. Their movements are erratic and stiff, and they end up sliding around most of the time because the animations are so disjointed and horrible, like my parents marriage. It's chaotic without cause, and a real mess to see in motion.

It ends up feeling like they had some really good work on the smaller zeds, but when it came to the bigger ones they couldnt figure out how to make them work but did it anyway. The point is the matches get WORSE the longer you play them, and it is astounding to me how that isnt a problem to most people.

Enjoy the bleak soulless future of video games you stupid animals

Boring uninspired garbage.

Everything about this is a literal copy of far cry 3 except placed in a destroyed city setting (wow edgy). If you thought far cry 3 was good, rejoice, becaue this game is for you. There is even an added bonus of having no taste - you will never be dissapointed by anything, like a dog who is happy with anything as long as he gets to lick buttholes all day.

This is one of THOSE games where you start with a pistol, and have to go to "weapon stores" (i.e. unmanned lockers in random buildings) and pay for new guns becaue you can't just pick up an assault rifle off a dead guy. You get money by "scavenging" (holding E for 3 seconds over every dead guy, and spamming E on every highlited trash can while you "explore") to get junk to sell to the unmanned weapon boxes for $. That's some immersive gameplay right there. 10/10.

This incredible game has the courage to ask "what if north korea wasn't a joke country and took over the US" and the incredibly detailed* world it created to answer that question will leave you asking questions of your own. Question such as "why are all the buildings in perfectly good condition but everyone decided to live in cheap tents instead?" and "why are there often tents inside buildings with furniture and beds?" and "why is the KPA suddenly forever unable to patrol a 2 block sector becasue my brave character hacked a satelite dish?" and "how did the KPA take out the entire country when they can't even see my brave freedom fighter calmly walk across the street 10 feet from a supposed fortress"

Such a thought provoking experience really proves this game has all the ingredients that makes a game great, such as "story", "big ideas", and "gameplay". The blend of those ingredients produces a fine product which was surely worked on by a very intelligent* and talented* team of people with very good taste. After all, there is nothing that says "fun" like directly copying literally every aspect of a game from a previous exceptional title*

Anyway I stopped playing this after about an hour, when I ran past a horde of KPA, sounded the alarm (everything was flashing red wow!), and then I lost them because I ran around a single corner a few feet from where they saw me. truly exhilarating.