Recent reviews by aaronfranke

The UI is absolutely terrible. It is tiny. It can't be scaled up. If you have a modern 4K or 1440p screen, your options are either to make the game blurry, or not be able to see anything. It's utter nonsense to have a game from 2014 and still having DLC released as recently as 2021 that can't handle modern high resolution screens. There are tons of games from the early 2000s that can handle 4K screens properly.

The tutorial is terrible, it just throws massive block of text one after another, it's like the tutorial is trying to put you to sleep with how boring it is. I sat through the tutorial for over half an hour before giving up. Maybe the rest of the game is good, I will never know because the tutorial is horrible.

The gameplay is like Civ 6. Hex based, map resources, food, science, production, districts, dust/gold, factions/city-states, ruins to loot, units gain XP, etc. But it's much more confusing than Civ 6, and I don't see the appeal. Anyway, I am biased because I don't really like Civ 6 either. I got this because it was free and because a friend told me to check it out, and I can't recommend it even at the low price of free.

Note: I played this in VR.

Pros:
* Great mechanics
* Great puzzles
* A good level of difficulty, not too easy or hard.

Medium:
* The game is short, it took me about 85 minutes to complete the game.
* The game takes place on a grid, which is unlike most VR games, and may be disorienting, but worked fine for me.

Bad:
* Bug: The camera position gets desynced from the actual position. This happened to me about 5 times while playing. Each time this happened I had to kill myself, because otherwise the game was unplayable. Luckily killing yourself resets the camera and fixes the bug.
* Bug: On the first level, I got softlocked inside of the manhole, and it refused to load the next level. I had to restart the game. This only happened to me once though.

This was so fun to play. Both the song and the beat map are excellent. 10/10 would recommend.

Darude Sandstorm is awesome!

This game only has 3 levels, so I can't recommend it. We played through the entirety of the game's content in less than half an hour, at which point we were just repeating the same thing.

Also, the real cost of this game is not $20, it's $320. The environments are big enough that people are forced to move around and forget they're playing. Someone fell over, injured themselves, and broke a Valve Index controller - $300 to buy a new set.

I bought this game because Linus from LTT mentioned it. Big mistake, it has very little content, injured someone, and cost me $320.

Uh, yes, I would indeed recommend SteamVR.

I played this using an HTC Vive from a perspective of someone who has played about 100 hours in VR already and all other Half-Life games. EDIT: Just wanted to say that I personally only spent about 12 hours playing, any additional playtime is from my friends playing it on my account.

I'll start with the downsides because overall this game is fantastic.

* Even with local motion mode, the game is still teleport-heavy. It's the only way you can go through windows or jump up ledges.

* I hated how grabbing the ladder makes you teleport to the top. I really like climbing the ladders, so every time I screw up, I would teleport down and climb the ladder again.

* There is no indication of where your hands are in real life. If I move my hands in a way that isn't allowed by the game, then they just stop moving in the game and I don't know where my hands should be. It would be nice if when I picked up something heavy that Alyx would say "Oof... this is heavy" or something to let me know I should stop trying to move it.

* Enemies despawn about 30 seconds after they die, this is a dumb feature.

* Loading screens are too long. It sucks when you die and have to wait 30 seconds to play again.

* Too many control hints. I've been told how to "mantle" at least 50 times.

* One time the game dropped to 1 FPS and started flashing black, I had to restart the game.

Now, the pros:

* The world is super detailed and awesome to look at and interact with. Russel is a great character.

* Climbing on ladders feels awesome. Same with pulling down wooden boards. Really anything using my hands feels awesome.

* The gravity gloves are great. I love flicking my hand to pull items towards me.

* Contrary to popular belief, melee combat kind-of exists. You can throw props to damage enemies, you just can't hold the props and whack enemies, you have to actually throw them.

* Reloading feels nice. I've played Pavlov and I found it confusing, but it's really intuitive and fun in Half-Life: Alyx.

* I played on hard difficulty and it was a challenge while never feeling impossible, it was a good level of difficulty.

* The ending was really awesome, both the gameplay and story were awesome.

* Really there's too many things to list but you'll just have to play it yourself.

Overall I'd rate this game a 10/10 but it could still be improved.

Played during the free period in December 2019, having been familiar with other Paradox games.

Pros: Combat and conquering is fun, conquering territory doesn't leave you with too many burdens to manage, game is very aesthetically pleasing, great tutorial compared to other Paradox games.

Cons: The game is extremely menu-driven. For example, unlike EU4 where you can visually click on the map to select places to take at the end of the war, this game simply gives you a menu of places to choose from. Some things highlight on the map when you hover over them in the menu, but it's hard to see the map with the menus open. On a 1080p screen, having some menus open almost entirely fills my screen with menus. The menus are huge, I easily get lost in the labyrinth of menus.

This game is truly garbage. There are so many game-breaking bugs it's not even funny. There were several times where the game broke and I wasn't able to progress with the story, so I had to restart the game. Then, I started getting a bug where even though I have right-handed checked in the settings, it forced me to be left-handed. Luckily I have a Vive so I can swap the controllers in my hands, but swapping the controllers still meant that the ammo came out of the wrong side of the chair, and I decided I'm just not going to put up with this anymore.

Such a shame, since the concept of this game is fairly amusing to me. I bought it because of UpIsNotJump's review since it looked fun, but this game just has terrible execution.

Really fun, but mostly if you have VR, since that's most of the fun of this game - socializing in VR.