Onward

Horrible devs

Pros: -Audio Quality -Gun feel -Short TTK Cons -Limited PVP and PVE game modes -Awful ai -Ultimately extremely repetitive with little variation -Subpar graphics Onward has potential but it feels squandered. Most everyone knows the graphical hit that came with Quest support, and there's been improvements but the game still looks pretty bad and feels weirdly over contrasted on my index, blacks are so black that enemies can blend into objects even in the daytime. It feels incredibly hollow compared to other offerings like Pavlov and Contractors that have a huge host of mod content and game modes, Onward in comparison is really lacking. Ironically the thing I most hated about Onward (the sacrifice of PC fidelity to bring Quest compatibility) is what led me to buy it to have something cross platform to play with my cousin, but that is the only time I launch the game. I've owned it maybe two years now and have 15hrs while Pavlov has nearly 150. There's just not much to do. The PVP modes are alright but get old quick, and most often we want to do PVE which is even worse. The PVE modes are different but functionally feel the same. The new mode is more of the same. If you played it once you experienced all it has to offer. I was hoping for a more dynamic experience but ultimately each mission reward offerings is basically the same every time, the first mission you always get a choice of two snipers and a shotgun. It's just so repetitive, that I no longer bother and just do Coop Hunt instead. And Hunt suffers from the horrendous ai, the worst I've ever seen. On the hardest difficultly if you are behind an enemy you can shoot them, literally hit them and they won't react. You can shoot them 2 3 times, taking all the time in the world between shots and they won't even turn around to shoot you. Shooting near enemies also doesn't seem to do anything with or without a silencer, you can miss them and they just don't even react unless you are in their cone of vision or reaction cone. You can throw a grenade at an enemies foot and they will just stand on it. The enemies in hunt also seem to just stand entirely still, where before I remember they seemed to swarm your position, unless maybe that was a different mode? Audio wise the game is great with the best audio of any VR shooter I've played, the guns feel good needing good control and trigger discipline, I like the short time to kill and high stakes, but the core gameplay loop is just not at all enticing. Ultimately nothing draws me back to this game. I relaunched it and ran through it again for the sake of this review to see if anything had changed but it hasn't. Outside of my cousin wanting to play I never launch it, and it's a shame because I love the short time to kill, the audio, and the gun feel, but there's just nothing fun to do with it. None of the PVP or PVE game modes feel enticing they just feel so boring and repetitive. I came back and played maybe an hour and just felt like I had wasted an hour because it was the exact same as every other time I played it. The PVE modes are just boring and lackluster and need a significant rework, and I didn't even bother with PVP because it's pretty well the same story there.