I’m mixed about this game. But although it has a bunch of flaws, they never prevented me from enjoying the game overall. It is important to note as well that I’m not familiar with physics sandbox games or particularly care about them. I never played Garry’s mod, for example, or its VR equivalents if any. And I didn’t even play sandbox mode in this game. So it might be entirely possible that I miss the whole point of this game. There is a story campaign however. This is what I played and this is what I’m reviewing.
This game has probably the jankiest VR controls that I’ve experienced yet. Sure, some amount of jank is to be expected from a VR title. But this takes the cake. Part of it might be because it’s old. Most of it, I assume, stems from the games physics based nature:
1. Your hands constantly get stuck inside objects. Even simply crouching with your hands down may cause them to clip through the floor.
2. Tables, shelves, boxes and trash on the ground aren’t simply static objects. They have physics attached to them. Which means you can attempt to move them. Move the table to make a barricade, or crash the shelf onto the enemy, for example. Which sounds cool in theory. But you never really need to. And in practice that means that when you try to pick weapons, ammo or keys from the table you end up grabbing a whole table instead. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I could never get used to that. 3. Also, just because you can move an object in theory doesn’t mean you’ll be actually able to. Objects have weight. And most of the time the game decides that they are too heavy for you. So you just end up awkwardly jerking them around. This most often happens with doors. Where you try to push the door open, but end up pushing yourself away from it instead.
4. Similarly I could never get used to climbing ledges. The way it works is that you come up to a ledge. Put both of your hands on it. Make a pulling up motion. Now you’d think that you need to simply move forward to finish climbing, but you outstretched legs get in the way. So you press crouch to tuck them in, but they are still in the way half the time. And it takes a lot of wiggling to actually climb up. Half the time you end up pushing yourself back down. Now I’m not sure, I might’ve missed some tutorial message in the beginning. Or this might not be an intended mechanic at all, and only works as a result of physics collisions being the way they are. Which would be cool. But if it is not intended, I have no idea how to do some of the harder platforming challenges this game provides. And if it’s intended, then it’s more janky than I would like.
5. Melee is also based on physics collisions, it seems. On one hand that sounds great, as anything can become a weapon. But in practice, swinging an object comes with inertia, which is based on the object’s weight. This means objects in-game move with a delay and slower that I can swing my hand in real life. This creates disparity between my movement in game and in real life, pulling me out of the experience. Also objects moving slower means they deal less damage. Which means you end up pointlessly waving your hands in front of you a lot of the time. If you two-hand the weapon to mitigate this issue somewhat. But it doesn’t go away completely. Also, like hands, melee weapons tend to get stuck on objects, enemies included.
6. The only thing that feels good control-wise is shooting mechanics. It’s not as deep and detailed as in “Into the Radius”, for example. But it’s functional, works most of the time, and I had fun while shooting things.
The game is not about just shooting however. There is some exploration from time to time. There are puzzles to solve, keys to collect and some platforming to be done. Some of it is optional, but welcome. And it was fun finding secrets here and there. The rewards tend to be a bit underwhelming though. More on that later. There are also a bunch of one and done mechanics as well like wall climbing with sucker cups or gravity manipulation. But I assume they play a bigger role in sandbox mode.
Saving is weird in this game as well. It’s done manually at specific save points. And I have a sneaking suspicion that each point works only once. You CAN attempt to use it multiple time, but it never seemed to actually update my progress after that. Also their placement is a bit uneven. Especially near the end you have to play huge chunks of the level with no save.
Reloading your game can be an issue as well. Upon reload all enemies respawn, but the ammo pickups don’t. So you may run out of ammo if you’re not careful. Not only that, but ammo is also used as in-game currency. So you might want to save it for some purchases.
The story itself, it’s setting and location design didn’t impress me. Sure muddy-gray and untextured walls might fit the unfinished virtual environment setting, but it’s boring to look at. There are some nice and memorable locations, but most of the time it’s just boring tunnels and sewers and the like.
Oh, I liked the music, though it doesn’t play often.
It is worth noting that a lot of sandbox content seems to be locked behind the story mode, where you need to find or buy certain things for them to become available in sandbox. Some of those things seem ridiculously expensive, so it might even require multiple playthroughs to unlock. Again I might be missing something, but that is what it seemed like to me. And this is also when most secrets come into play as they simply contain unlock capsules for sandbox mode.
Like I said. I haven’t played the sandbox, so I might’ve missed a whole heap of fun because of that. But despite all it’s flaws I enjoyed the story mode overall. I think it’s worth to play it once at least. As long as you don’t expect Half-Life levels of polish and variety, and maybe wait for a sale.
