"Greetings! Welcome to the review for 'Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades'. We're gonna start off as always with a quick sound check, make sure your speakers aren't up too high..."

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

"...Wonderful!"

This game originally came out in Early Access in 2016. Still in Early Access with frequent content updates, there's no other VR game I could recommend way more than H3VR. A game that truly deserves a "Labor of Love" award (looking at YOU, Cyberpunk. It wasn't a labor of love, it was a labor of "oh sh*t, we better fix this before people get pissed").

(Update: It's 2024, and it still hasn't been voted "Labor of Love". But I'm nominating it this year once again. I wish it could win.)

The developer, Anton Hand, while I think there might be one or two other people working on it on the side, is for the most part his baby. He's been releasing updates every Friday of every week since the game first came out. Not always, mind you, sometimes it's just a devlog as an update might need an extra week in the oven (usually if it's a massive overhaul), other times he just needs a well-deserved break. But we've got 107 updates and counting. That's some serious dedication, especially with how frequent the update schedule is.

With over 500+, maybe even 600+ firearms, detailed, immersive controls and gun handling, people-sized sentient sausages that shoot at you, wacky game modes, mod support, and a W.I.P. in-game level builder dubbed "Gameplanner" (you can spawn a toolbox in-game that has "Pistools" that let you clone, place, rotate, delete, and freeze props as well as many other features) that will open up even more opportunities, and frequent content updates, how can I not recommend this amazing VR experience?

Anton Hand single-handedly is the number 1 most dedicated developer I've ever seen for any game. The fact that it's like 7 years old at this point and he has no sign of stopping says a lot.

I mean hell, Update 107 is awesome! The game has a lot of AR-pattern rifles, but the issue was that each model was made by different artists and also had different dimensions. There was a lot of inconsistencies throughout. So this update overhauled almost all of the AR-pattern rifles with brand new models that are all made by the same guy, with proper dimensions and design consistency. With it was also a plethora of new sounds and features, and even a bunch of new guns, as well. Sure, we had the M16A1 and M16A4. But now we have the M16, M16A2, M16A3, as well as some of the first civilian market ARs that I forgot the names of.

I don't care that this game may be permanently Early Access. The game has never had game-breaking issues, any bugs reported are IMMEDIATELY fixed, every update is polished as best as it can be, with maybe a caveat here or there (which again, is immediately fixed by the following Friday), and Anton has no sign of stopping with updates. Every update continues to add so much joy and it makes me feel like a kid again. I'm always happy to jump onto YouTube every Friday evening at 8:00 PM CST to watch his latest devlog, then play the update that gets pushed at 9:00 PM CST.

Thank you Anton Hand, for making such an amazing game, and continuing to make such an amazing game. You're pushing the limits of what's possible in a VR space and you will always have my appreciation.

If there's any game I think that deserves a Labor Of Love award, it's this one. There is SO much stuff in this and it's insane how polished it is coming from what is mostly a single developer. This and Vertigo 2 are the greatest VR games of all time.

I always got sick and tired of live service games. It doesn't matter how much you spent on a game, companies will always try to get you to shell out more, or make you grind excessively for weeks in order to receive new content. But you better watch out, because the content will be gone soon, and it'll be gone for good. This, my friends, is what's known as FOMO, or "Fear Of Missing Out". Companies pressure players by making them play several times more frequently than they usually do (even when people sometimes don't have as much free time to play to begin with) for the chance they can afford ridiculously expensive items from the shop, or pressure them to pay up and get the content early. This always pissed me off to no end. I never found a reason why you should only add content that's limited-time only. Seasonal content is not something like real manufactured goods, where you have limited resources to manufacture multiple copies of something. Digital content only needs to be made once, and then everyone with the game can receive it. What's worse, if you're a new player who starts playing at a later time, you're permanently locked out of content you'll never get to receive.

But Deep Rock Galactic is different.

Deep Rock Galactic is a live service where Ghost Ship Games keeps the game alive with transparency and frequent updates. They give you plenty of new content to try and earn with each update, but there's way less pressure.

This game indeed has Seasons, but the game never had FOMO. You see, you earn content through playing through a Season, but when that Season is over, the content never disappears. What instead happens is that the Seasonal content gets shuffled around and placed into the game's standard reward pools.

See, there's many different in-game ways to earn cosmetics in the base game. For example, some missions have cargo crates you can open that give you a random cosmetic, or you can find lost gear that gives you a random cosmetic. There's also Core Infusers that you let infuse your Blank Matrix Cores with a random cosmetic, but you get to choose which dwarf/class to apply it to. And of course, there's the in-game shop where you buy cosmetics using regular gold currency (with no microtransactions). When a Season is over, the cosmetics get thrown into these regular loot pools, and you can randomly unlock them like the rest of the cosmetics. The Season itself basically acts more as a direct way of earning that Season's specific cosmetics. But the content never actually goes away at the end of it all.

In other words, no FOMO! If you're a player who joined later in the game's life cycle, you can still earn the Seasonal content just by doing all these methods (which happen fairly often in missions too), albeit it's still being left to random chance. Though I'd like to mention that anything that earns you a cosmetic, won't give you a duplicate, it only gives you a cosmetic you don't already have, which also makes things easier.

But now, here we are. SEASON 5! What does Season 5 do, you might ask? It makes the live service system EVEN BETTER! Now with the introduction of Season 5, you can now access ANY previous Seasons and play them at your own pace, and better yet, unlock that Season's content.

THIS, my friends, IS A LIVE SERVICE DONE RIGHT! Yeah Call of Duty, what's your excuse?! Making people pay $70 just to play your stupid game, only to lock practically 90% of the game content behind a limited-time battlepass, and force them to grind like crazy for anything worthwhile (but watch out because it'll be gone soon, so you better hurry!), or make them shell out more money for stupid COD Points. And I've seen how much stuff costs in your battlepass, you guys are nuts!

Ghost Ship Games has been amazing when it comes to their community, and I praise them to high hell for it! I'll gladly down a tankard of Blackout Stout in their honor like a true dwarf!

ROCK AND STONE TO THE BONE!