Reach

this is the closest game to half life alyx type of grapchics. Top 3 vr games

Experienced on a Bigscreen Beyond 2e with Index controllers. One of the cooler VR experiences I’ve played but I totally understand the negative reviews. I do recommend this game but there are definitely some caveats that might be deal breakers for some. First the Pros: I think what this game’s biggest strength is the running, jumping, climbing, and using all your unlocked abilities as you progress. It might not be for everyone but I found it a whole lot of fun. As you progress you unlock abilities and optional power ups as you explore. The climbing felt natural but it has a very welcome “obviously you’re playing a video game” feel. It’s not a rock climbing sim. I think the progression feels really well balanced as well. With new abilities comes more complex jumping and navigating the world. The unlocking of abilities and finding power ups gave me a metroidvania vibe for sure. The whole world’s atmosphere, enemies, and tools reminded me a little of Half-Life in a way (a little!). The visuals and audio (including voice acting) are also great. Gameplay felt very smooth and even though the game is pretty linear, it was a very enjoyable experience 90% of the time. The mid: Okay even though I did enjoy the combat, I’m putting it here because unless you commit to the game, combat will feel a little bland. When you first start off you get the bow which is cool but it feels like a toy. Eventually you will unlock some cool additions to the bow as well as some other combat abilities. By the second half of the game the combat feels a lot more complex and challenging. The story is okay. Like most VR games the story isn’t the reason you’re here. It isn't bad by any means. Last mid thing is sometimes it isn’t super clear where to go. You know how a lot of games these days have the super obvious yellow highlighted paint on ledges or shiny boxes telling you they’re breakable or obvious signs telling you “This way, idiot!” Well this game doesn’t really have that (I actually was okay with this, buuuuut it also was hard to figure out where to go sometimes which is why I’m putting this in the mid section). You do have a little droid companion that will make a sound hinting you to follow it but sometimes he’s out of sight and it’s not clear where to go. Also a lot of the walls and stuff look like they could be climbable. Pair this with not being sure where to go lead me to jump and fall to my death a few times. I will add a positive note here though…there are some intense “run away!” parts in the game and the threat chasing you is pretty avoidable and doesn’t punish you hard for looking around figuring out where to go (most of the time). I appreciated this a lot. The bad (and some caveats): Okay so the first issue I had was the default index control scheme is not good. Very bad. The right controller would not register that I was grabbing onto things. The left worked normally. The right was all messed up. Thankfully I’m pretty comfortable with finding/editing the very detailed and somewhat confusing controller editing in steam vr. I found one that worked perfectly. Second thing and probably the biggest issue was I found out this game has a handful of soft locking spots. Basically making it so you cannot progress and you need to restart the latest checkpoint or even a whole level. Now to my knowledge at the time of writing this review, the biggest issues folks had with this have been resolved to some degree. Thankfully I ran into a pretty popular one early on which prompted me to do a little research about it. I did run into 1 issue involving needing 2 fuses to open a door. The quest progression says to go get the second fuse. But I decided to put the first fuse in the door and then go get the second one…welp when you come back the door acts as if you never put that first one in. You need to wait until you have BOTH and put them in at the same time. I had to restart the level. Way better than needing to restart the whole game (I probably would have quit, uninstalled and wrote a negative review). I spent the rest of the game just following the quest directives exactly and trying not to do things differently. The last kinda bad thing is the full price. 40 bucks for a 9 hour VR title isn’t cheap. That being said, I’m pretty sure I got it on sale for half off and I’d say that is definitely a fair price. Overall I do recommend Reach. Give it more than an hour or 2 to grow on you though. It does get better the longer you play.