Recent reviews by an_actual_whale

Ragnarock is to Rock Band as Beat Saber is to DDR; While this game is simpler than Beat Saber in game design, it requires much stricter accuracy and long, continuous hit combos to succeed. Hitting runes consecutively charges up your combo meter but hitting perfectly in the middle of the drum charges it up more (and give you more points). A second tier of this meter can be reached (for 4 times the speed boost) but any missed runes will cause your combo meter to fizzle and restart. While there isn't a Game Over screen like other rhythm games, you'll need to get very high hit rates and multiple combo meter dashes in order to get even bronze on a level, with higher difficulties requiring multiple gold (4x) charges to succeed. On top of this, the accuracy is really specific and doesn't feel good with any controls; I thought I was just having skill issues in VR but it really feels too strict on both KB&M and controller too.

My favorite VR rhythm games are Pistol Whip and Ragnarock, with Beat Saber being slightly above both of them. Of these three, this is definitely has the most hype soundtrack, but it is unfortunately balanced out by frustrating beat matching and narrow hit windows. I had a good time with it and recommend it for VR, but playing on desktop with KB&M or controller just feels like emulating the VR experience. It also works fine on Steam Deck but that version felt the worst of the four to play (probably because of the screen size). The beat maps are the same across all platforms but playing the flat version was frustrating knowing that I could do way better waggling in VR instead. Easy recommendation for some variety to your VR library, not so much for desktop play though.

Working through my VR backlog, I skipped over some shovelware and finally played the shining jewel of VR, Half-Life: Alyx. Does it live up to the hype? For the most part, yes. This is definitely a Half-Life game, but it's closer to HL2: EP3 than HL3. The graphics are astounding, the environments are incredibly detailed, and there's constantly new VR-specific gameplay being introduced to keep you engaged. While it isn't flawless, it's still worth playing if you have a VR headset. Thanks to Valve's infinite money, this is probably the highest quality VR title we'll get until Elon plugs our brains into Twitter. Even though this is a prequel to 2, the story does have consequences; hopefully Valve learns to count to 3 because I'd really like to see where this story goes next.

It's hard to live up to the hype of any Valve game post-HL2 but most of this game is at least "good". My main problem with Alyx though is the intentionally slow pacing: there's about five hours of story here padded out by repetitive VR puzzles. Occasional hacking mini-games are tolerable but there's one on every Combine door, locker, and upgrade station and you'll need to do them to survive most of the time. They get increasingly difficult and complex to the point that I just walked past some upgrade stations in the second half in the game out of mini-game fatigue. There's decent variety in how they work, but when you have to stop every 10 minutes to grab orbs and spin lasers *yet again* it really gets tedious.

This is also the bleakest and loneliest of the Half-Life games and the frequent poorly lit sections don't alleviate the tension. Half-Life's horror elements make an already unwelcoming experience more intense (especially in VR), peaking with a frustrating stealth horror level. This nightmare of a level involves Jeff, a blind, spore spewing alien hybrid that you have to create sound to distract. While Ravenholm was plenty spooky and atmospheric, Jeff's level is absolutely unnerving and just not fun to play; hiding in the dark while doing hacking mini-games that suddenly cause alarms to go off gets old quick. Between the tripmine hacking that has you waving your hand centimeters from the trip laser and the frustration of Jeff's level, I don't plan on doing a full replay of this game again.

I received this bundled with my Index controllers that I'm still using with my 2018 Vive headset. Apart from build quality issues (which might be unavoidable given how complex they are), they're excellent controllers and one of my favorite controllers ever, VR or not. While I can recommend Index controllers, I don't know if I can recommend Alyx. It's a pretty good game overall, but the low points are such a black mark that I can imagine people quitting upon reaching their own personal "that level". It's definitely one of the best hardware bundled games but I don't know if I'd recommend it as a standalone purchase at full price. If you get an Index or the controllers though it's absolutely worth playing.

Yet another two hour VR archery game (with the usual VR Tax) bloating the Steam VR catalog. The game looks and sounds great, but it's so short and repetitive that I don't think it's worth playing (especially considering almost every other VR game tries to cram in archery too). There's a skill tree with different magical arrows and abilities to unlock, but progression on it is saved per level: if you load a level from the Continue option, it loads whatever you had previously at the start of that level. Basically, if you want to try out different skill trees, you're better off starting a new game and redoing the skill tree from scratch.

The real cherry on the cake though is the fact that Sacralith is not a wave shooter, but a series of escort quests with friendly fire! You'll have a hard time not killing your allies too, considering the bow isn't aligned properly to the controllers and has no arc/aiming indicator. All this is assuming you can even get the game working... I had to use a launch option from the Community Hub discussions just to get it to stop crashing, even though I previously played through it on Windows 10 too. This is apparently an issue with older UE4 VR games and the devs never bothered to patch it. This game is a mess and really has nothing going for it. Absolutely not worth playing, even if its free.

Raw Data was one of those early VR games that I completely glossed over because it looked like just another VR wave shooter, but in reality just another active tower defense game. The main problems here are how short and lacking in content it is: for $40 you're getting 10 levels that are very hand-holdy and linear, with dialogue and scene transitions that can't be skipped on repeat playthroughs. There's also only four weapons: pistols, shotgun, bow, and a sword, which are tied to four characters with their own skills and unlocks. For the tower defense aspect, you only get four towers: laser, plasma (flamethrower), shield, and mortar. There's a very small limit to the number of turrets you can build per level (usually 2 or 4), and with only five waves per level you're not exactly going to build a bullet maze defense for your core.

All of the weapons feel good to use but I don't see myself replaying the campaign on higher difficulties or trying for more unlocks just because of how repetitive replaying the missions gets. Sairento, a game that seemed similar on a surface level from the store page, gets a pass because of its huge level and weapon variety but the bare minimum was done to sell this. The campaign itself is fine but outside of that there's just 1v1 pvp, co-op campaign, and some kind of 5v5 KOTH mode that's obviously dead. The devs get props for being one of the first VR games released (this originally came to Early Access in July 2016), but the VR Tax is really harsh here. It's worth playing if you get it in a bundle but asking $40 for this in 2024 is way too much. I wish Steam had an Informational option for regular reviews like Curators get because this is barely a recommendation... I'm glad I played it just to experience something from VR's launch window but the gameplay here aged like milk, especially compared to something like Sairento.

As with most older games, it took some work to get this turd of a port working on Windows 10 in 2024. I had to force GPU aspect ratio scaling through the Nvidia Control Panel at 1440x1080 which, on a 1080p monitor, letterboxed the 4:3 resolution with no distortion. I also had to force Windows XP compatibility (and a few other steps) by following this guide on the Community Hub. Not a lot of work but that's why my Steam playtime is so low... Steam only hooked into the game when switching between various launchers but I did manage to finish it with no crashes after fixes.

How is the actual game? Project: Snowblind is the definition of a weekend rental and was literally one for me back in 2005. I remember arguing with my friend about game picks at Blockbuster and him whining the whole way through the game. He really hated anything that I picked to play, regardless of actual quality, and this game was no exception...

Anyway, the game's fine but it's just store brand Deus Ex; Crystal Dynamics rushed this out in a year and you can really feel it. It's hard to tell if they were intentionally going for a B-movie feeling, with the over-animated cutscenes and cheesy dialogue, or if they were just suffering from incompetence. The cutscene cinematography is laughably bad, the voice acting is poor, the graphics are sub-par, and everything else is just completely mediocre. For historical comparison, Half-Life 2 came out a few months before this and F.E.A.R. came out at the end of 2005.

The biggest issue with the actual gameplay though is the incredibly strong aim assist that gets stronger the closer you are to enemies and can't be turned off. Mid- to close-range you can literally circle-strafe enemies without moving your mouse... Maybe this game feels better to play on a gamepad specifically because of this, but with KB+M it feels like you're steering a ouija board at a sleepover party. The PC default controls are emblematic of old PC ports too, with absurd bindings like grenade on Shift, F1-F7 to switch grenades, and weapon binds going from "1"" to "-", except you don't receive weapons in binding order and non-lethal weapons and tools are bound in there too.

If for some reason you want to play this you're better of emulating it (legally, of course) because the PS2 version is more stable and so you can use save states (so you don't have to deal with limited save slots and the sparse save points). The schizophrenic arsenal can sometimes be fun and it's a mildly entertaining window into bargain bin gaming from 20 years ago. Personally though I just bought this to add to my collection of childhood games whose quality I couldn't recall; I probably won't be playing it again.

"Society collapses, brown women most affected."

All I wanted from Cloudpunk was a cyberpunk delivery sim, but instead I got a shell of a game that is just a vehicle for modern politics. There's almost nothing cyberpunk about this except for the stereotypical aesthetics; as with most modern cyberpunk games, the themes here are just "capitalism bad!" but also some "racism bad!" too. All men are oppressors and caricatures, and all women are oppressed and need to be saved... unless they're rich, then they're obviously evil like men. There are occasionally man vs. machine conflicts and discussions about how non-humans fit into this society, but they're really surface level vehicles to push socialism and transgender politics.

As for the main character, there's no polite way to put it: Rania is an insufferable ♥♥♥♥♥ who argues and picks fights with everyone, and who only gets meaner as the game goes on. This whole game is supposed to be real time and taking place during her first night on the job, but even other characters will notice how rude and angry she gets by the end. She is always preaching about how everyone needs to be treated the same, regardless of if they're human or not, but if someone slows her down or annoys her she instantly wants them out of her car or off her comms. If she's so oppressed and hates living in the city, why did she even move there in the first place? Like CP2077, this is yet another cyberpunk game where the MC wants to go to The Big City to "make it big", and has no motivation or backstory besides "get rich or die trying", which really seems to clash with her anti-capitalism views.

It's pretty obvious that the city was built first and then a game was created for the environment because that's the only part of this game I liked. Everything looks great and feels appropriately atmospheric, despite the chunky voxel art style, but actually navigating it can be really frustrating. Your car steers like a tank that handles and controls poorly, other vehicles don't make an effort to avoid you, and the map just doesn't give you enough information about where you can actually fly. Movement on the ground can be frustrating too because of poor level design; elevators are automated and can't be summoned, most islands you land on are connected by very long, narrow walkways with limited access, and parking is just too rare (you can only park your flying car in designated parking spots). When everything works its quite nice to look at and just absorb the atmosphere, but I still found myself getting lost or walking in circles several times while on foot.

There've been several games this year I've already dropped or shelved in an attempt to get through my backlog so I've been trying to not hateplay games lately... Even though I did hate this game, I kept pushing through it because I did get some enjoyment out of this slow motion train wreck. This is basically a 10 hour walking sim that is padded for time with unskippable dialogue, very few player agency choices, and later missions being padded for time by flying you from one side of the city to the other repetitively. Cloudpunk has no redeeming values besides the effort put into the city itself; If this was just a delivery driver sim where you had time limits to pay off a debt, perhaps akin to Recettear, it might've been a real game (but then it would've been a completely different game). If you're just looking for a sci-fi delivery sim I'd recommend Death Stranding over this; Kojima is a hackfraud and has cringe writing too, but at least his game has actual game play and isn't a soulless shell of a game used for pushing leftist politics.

Sairento feels like something out of an alternate timeline where devs weren't too scared of making their players vomit and VR games were made with PC in mind. Triple jumps, near-instant dashes, wallrunning, and backflips all in first person are still exhilarating in 2024; Even several years after getting my "VR legs", my brain still tries to escape my skull while doing slow-mo backflips and I love it every time. This is the only game I've played that appropriately utilizes teleport movement: depending on your physical stance IRL and how you aim the movement arc, you will either dash, dash slide, jump, jump and slide, etc., with either an arrow or circle at the end to predict your end position. Traditional locomotion is also available and works fine early on, but late game focuses on abusing time dilation and redirecting jumps mid-air to dodge projectiles. This also makes melee difficult to focus on late game since you spend so much time trying to be mobile and you're generally not on the ground. That's not a huge issue though because there's a good sized arsenal here and you can have two pistols/throwing weapons on your hips, two weapons on your back, and one weapon on your lower back that are all very easy and intuitive to grab, swap, or swap hands.

I highly recommend this as long as you're okay with the grind being the gameplay. There's only 10 story missions and even then there's some padding with them but they provide a decent backdrop for the rest of the game. After that you have access to plenty of grinding for prestiges, new weapon and armor relics (mods), and cranking up the difficulty scale and adding modifiers to levels. The only issue with the grind is that even though there are loadouts, the relics equipped are per weapon, per loadout, and it can be difficult to just swap them between weapons with how bloated your inventory gets (and with how poor the inventory UI is). Overall though the weapons feel fantastic to use, there's a good variety of melee, guns, and throwing weapons, and legendary relics can provide really game-changing unique buffs (like exploding kunai, homing throwing stars, or bouncing rifle rounds). Regardless of your weapon preferences, it rides like a bike with excellent controls and tons of options for controls, accessibility, movement preferences, and integrations.

This game sits right at the mid price point that makes up the meat of any healthy game platform's library. I love Sairento because it just focuses on good gameplay; this isn't a $10, 20 minute "VR experience" or a full price desktop game ported to VR that has you clicking on 2D menus (you know what you did, Todd), but it's not flawless either. This is one of the few games that I felt didn't have a VR Tax on it, but your mileage may vary if you don't like the grind. As long as you can accept some jank and early VR awkwardness, this is a really unique experience that stands above the horde of bland wave shooters that crowded out the market of early VR games.

This should've been free DLC for The New Order and the fact that it's the same price is crazy. Frequent linear stealth sequences, terrible level design, almost no enemy variety, and bad writing makes this poorly paced and just not fun to play. There's also a strange obsession with prying grating open and stealth kills with the new pipes that use the same recycled animations over and over adding to the reused assets feeling here. As with most big budget FPS games, there's an obligatory terrible vehicle sequence *level* that is an absolute tutorial on how *not* to do vehicle sequences: having to get out of your crab mech to flip switches to open doors for your mech to get through (while dodging infinitely spawning zombies). The cherry on top of this turd is the end boss: a giant, ham-fisted zombie that has way too much HP (with no health bar), multiple phases, and is backed up by ranged enemies that magdump on you if they have line of sight.

If you somehow get this for free and you already finished The New Order you might enjoy parts of this. Otherwise, you should absolutely skip this mess.

Dungeonmans really tries to take the best of Traditional Roguelikes and add elements from newer Rogue-Lites, like meta progress with a town to build and upgrade between characters, but everything else about it is really shallow. Skill trees are shockingly small, combat is very spammy and repetitive, dungeon randomization is poor and sometimes broken, and time to kill rockets up way too fast. Add onto this the obnoxious Millennial writing and you somehow have a Traditional Roguelike with not only bad gameplay but bad writing. Maybe this is one of those games that gets good 40 hours in but I've play many Traditional Roguelikes over the years (starting with the original Rogue back on my family's first PC in the 90s), and this just doesn't scratch any kind of itch the genre usually does.

Roguelikes (old and new) thrive on replay value through character customization and build options but the bare minimum was done here for skill variety. Most classes has less than a skillbar worth of skills and there doesn't seem to be any hidden per-class; for example, two of the "standard" classes, Fightermans and Wizardmans, only have six and 12 skills respectively. Even then, Wizardman's tree has three stat buff skills, three fire spells (damage), three ice spells (CC), and three "Tricksonometry" skills (evasion and illusions). There's separate armor and weapon skill trees but they're really basic and mostly just -1 skill point to use a piece of gear. Nothing here is as comical Dungeon of Dredmor's Viking Wizardry class going into a berserker rage while shooting lightning or as insanely powerful as TOME4's time manipulation classes.

Time to kill is really fast right at level 1 and the rapid scaling on gear and enemies only exacerbates this. Enemies stay in the room they spawn in until you open the door... Except for Champions, who can open doors apparently. My last character died from a Champion opening a door as I was walking past, attacking and moving in one turn, and attacking twice in a second turn, to kill me in three hits from full to 0 HP. I totally expect a skill curve and wiki reading with a Traditional Roguelike, but this wasn't the first time this had happened during a run... Enemy spawning randomization seems to favor spawning bosses and Champions in tight spaces or around corners with no line of sight. You can say "skill issue" but I felt I had the most cheap deaths in this over any other game I've previously played in the genre.

Usually I try to finish a game before reviewing it, but most people don't ever finish a campaign in a Traditional Roguelike, and I don't see myself sinking dozens of hours into this to try to conquer it. As mentioned above, I'd recommend Dungeons of Dredmor as a good entry point to the genre and Tales of Maj'Eyal for something much more complex (while still being very combat focused). Playing this just made me want to reinstall those games instead; I don't see myself giving this game another chance, especially with all the other Traditional Roguelikes I have unplayed in my Steam library.

Zombie games are a dime a dozen and VR is no different. Arizona Sunshine barely stands above the rest simply by getting in early; Released at the end of 2016, this was not only a "VR launch" title, but one of the first VR games released on Steam. Unfortunately, this game aged like milk because of the terrible controls and dated graphics (such as low poly models and aggressive LODs). This is really something you'd expect to play in a VR arcade or taking turns with friends, but the asking price is way too much for what's here, even when considering the VR Tax.

Everyone was trying different control schemes and movement systems early on in VR but there's really no excuse for the default mapping here. For example, with traditional locomotion you reload with the Menu button and move with the right D-pad, but with teleport locomotion you move with the Menu button and reload with the D-pad. Even if you've never played VR before, you can immediately tell that these controls make no sense, nevermind all the other issues with controls (like grip toggle instead of hold). It's a first person zombie shooter in VR... All you really need for success is clean movement, a way to switch, shoot, and reload weapons, and make it comfortable to aim with your hands, but they still screwed it up. Nowadays you can bypass most of these issues thanks to SteamVR's vastly improved controller rebinding options, but the default controls didn't make sense during my first playthrough in 2018 and are still garbage in 2024.

As for gameplay, there's decent arsenal variety here, but there's a huge glaring omission: no melee weapons. Whenever enemies get near you (and it's a zombie game so it will happen), it's a frantic race to swap weapons to something that's loaded and hopefully land some point blank headshots. With how many VR games love cramming in archery and melee attacks, it's really surprising it's missing here, especially with how popular they are in zombie games. The lack of melee combat really makes close encounters frustrating, especially with the lack of movement abilities (its not like you can press E to vault in VR).

Arizona Sunshine launched at $40 with just a four hour campaign and Horde (endless) mode on four maps. More content (paid and free DLCs) have been added over the years, but I still don't think it's worth it in the 2024. It's just a really basic and predictable zombie game that only has the VR gimmick and some flashy dismemberment going for it. This is really something that should've been bundled with headsets or a Game Pass-esque system; This would've been great as a weekend rental back in the 90s but asking $30 for this in 2024 is insane.