Recent reviews by Snowcone Guy

It's very early development, and currently thin in content and settings.
But I would not regret the purchase if the price was double.
This is an investment in the future that already pays out in fun right now.

Yes, this will take years to feel "complete", but those years will be filled with hundreds of hours of fun.
You'll see and experience things -insane and hilarious things- that people who'll wait for the finished product will never experience or understand.

I have full trust in the developers to see this through, based on their previous behavior.
And it's fun to be here for the early days, without an established meta, seasoned pro players, and tons of armor and tuning settings to micro manage for every single track and class.

Just join a server, enjoy the improved look, feel, sound and destruction model, and be here from the start, while the game changes and grows around and with you.

If you're going to buy this game sooner or later anyway, might as well do it now.
It won't get any cheaper, only get better, and what's there already runs decently and appears to not be glitchy.

(Of course I will update this review to negative, if they'll ever stop working on this before it feels complete.)

This is a complete and utter triumph. It actually gave me goosebumps.
The full path tracing, 4K quality assets, volumetric lighting, material-based shaders .... it's breathtaking.
This is a gaming experience from the future.
Something that shouldn't be possible for another 10 years, unless you have a 200K super computer.

But here it is, thanks to modern RT cores, DLSS and Ray Reconstruction.
And it runs amazingly well, if you understand what you're actually getting the game to do here.

Sure, you can max out each setting and turn off all DLSS, and then wait for the RTX 7090.
This is one of those experience like Crysis, where you will come back every time you get a new graphics card for the next 10 years, to see how far you can push it now. They future-proofed this for years to come.

But you can also select reasonable settings that still look mind-blowing, and play this at 1440p/60 with an older mid-tier card like the 4070 Super.
The settings are extremely flexible, but the result stays stunning through and through.
I can't wait for the full release, this is how video games usually only look in your dreams.
Now I hope they build HL3 from the ground up with path tracing in mind.
It's hard to go back after this ...

The game makes you punch walls.

Everything was fine the first time I played this.
My play area is bigger than recommended (I have 4x4 meters) and I started playing while standing right in the center.
I could move around and use the whip in the whipping areas with the confidence that I would not run into walls or punch them.

But the game fell apart my second play session.
I started by standing in the center, loaded the save game, stood on the feet symbol at the ground and ...
I now constantly have to step onto blocks that are half in the wall, or have to swing my whip when standing right next a wall.

Restarting the game didn't help, and there is no option in the settings to reset/redefine the center of your play area.

I assumed the game is smart and always analyzes your VR boundary to make things work, but I guess I was just lucky the first time, and that things break apart when the spot where the game auto-saves/loads you in the game is not the center of your VR boundary ( a whipping area).

The game was fun so far, but three wall punches are enough.
I'm not gonna risk damaging my posters or hurting my fingers any further.
Maybe the dev should have a look at "Tea For God" and see if he can learn any lessons on how to handle this better.
Can't recommend this at the moment, but would highly recommend this once the issue is patched.

There is nothing horribly wrong with this game, but it just gut boring really fast.
Picking up object and 'cleaning up' the world might be fun when you roll around in Katamari, but in this game ... you stand around, point a vacuum cleaner at object to make them disappear, and then you shoot at those mouth boxes.
It doesn't take many loops of this process before your mind starts to zone out.
It doesn't help that the world doesn't feel very alive.

I don't want to be mean to a free game (an in-game store is of course present), especially when it's made with competence and a sense for art style, like this one is.
But I can't recommend it if you want a fun time. Maybe it's better with other people, I only played it singleplayer.

Also: You can switch arms to left-handed mode. Great! Not so great: the thumbstick that controls movement remains on the left hand, and doesn't switch sides. And I see no in-game option to change that.
I understand that some people prefer this, but at least give us options. If in doubt, copy what Half Life Alyx did. :P

The main appeal of this game should be exploring the levels and seeing all the objects.
This works in Katamari, because you feel like you get to explore Japan or interesting places that have a story to tell with the people and objects within.
But that's not really the case in this game.
You get levels like a house on a street (could be anywhere in the world) with no people walking around and random item placements like milk bottles and walkie talkies that don't really tell any story or create any scenario. It looks neat, but means little.

The gameplay mechanics are really well made and fun to an addictive level.

So why the negative review?

It's because this game let me down in the one area that is most important to a music game: the music.

All you get out of the box is a a mix of very similar Euro pop EDM and soft techno.

There aren't really any other genres, there is no variety.
Especially the lack of rock music (an equally great match to this kind of gameplay) is very painful.

So if your taste in music is ever so slightly off the provided bland mix of soft, mainstream EDM,
this 30 Dollar game (that never goes on sale) quickly becomes an 80 or 100 Dollar game.

Because, it's not like they don't do other music - they just never include it.
It's always DLC, where you pay 1.99 per song or 10-20 Dollars per music pack.

Nobody is asking the developer to cough up the license fees to include The Beatles, Linkin Park, or The Rolling Stones in the base game for free.

But just get some unknown, up-and-coming Metal and Punk bands to contribute some music.
Have some orchestral songs. Have some Jazz. Have some Rap. Video game OST collaborations.

But nope - nothing of interest and variety is included.
Even if you're into EDM (and I am!) at least include some interesting music that isn't bland as toast.
There are some bangers from Skillrex provided, but you guessed it: Expansive DLC music pack.

You might think the option of using custom songs could fix this problem for free,
but the implementation is too lackluster.

You can't just get those in an in-game browser - you have to go to a third party site and manually download, unzip and copy each one to the correct folder.
There are no leaderboards available for them, and you can't play them online.
Also, those are still very slim pickings. You can enter the biggest names, and consider yourself lucky to find more than 1 or 2 songs.
And most of them have no normal or easy mode.
The custom song scene seems focused on hardcore Expert and Expert+ levels that require hours of practice to not just die within the first 10 seconds.

So if money is no issue and you have no issue with paying through the nose for DLC songs that cover genres that should be included in this quite expensive game, it's all good times.
Otherwise, keep your expectations in check and don't count on the developers to ever provide any variety for more than one music taste.
Withholding other genres seems to be the business model here - not an oversight.

This was a very annoying playthrough.
As you keep waling forward through the linear levels, scripted events will happen every few steps.
Those might be enemies jumping out from behind somewhere to ambush you, objects coming to life, or buildings collapsing.

And almost every time these things happen, Alan stops walking, the controls are taken away from you, and the camera flies through the level to show you these things.
You are in a constant state of the game being a bully who keeps taking away your controller/mouse every few moments - and that for 10 hours.
When the game doesn't outright disables your controls in those moments, it forces you to slow-walk, as the game constantly goes in and out a pointless slow motion effect.

You might be able to deal with it, but it will eventually break you after some hours.
Then you only want to rush to the credits to be done with it.
That's at least the experience that I had.
It doesn't help that there isn't much variety in the level design.
(Woods and streets at night, connecting barns and small buildings.)

The shooting mechanics themselves aren't much fun either.
There is no crosshair, the game constantly takes away the weapons you found, and breaking dark shields with your flashlight always takes to long, resulting in the enemies attacking you before you make them vulnerable, and the flashlight needing a battery change just to break a single enemies shield.

On the plus side, the story and characters are fun, even though their decision are sometimes stupid.
If you want to play this game to be better informed before/after your playthrough of Alan Wake 2,
I highly recommend you just watch a story recap on YouTube.

The 4.0 update is probably the single best update that has ever been delivered to a game.
There are some absolutely amazing changes.
The game is re-born with two generations of improvements, worthy of a complete remake.
- And that for free! -

Obviously there are those who simply turn every of these new settings to the max and then complain that the game is poorly optimized, because their 5 year old RTX 2060 can't do this in 4K at locked 60 fps.

But if you consider what the new options are achieving, and if you pick your settings smart, with a realistic expectation of what your hardware can do, you will find that the performance is more than fair.
There is always a sweet spot, and this game now looks absolutely stunning, even if you don't crank every single setting to ULTRA+.
Just make sure to have all the Ray Tracking features (especially shadows and global illumination) turned on.
You will stop every 10 seconds to take a knee and take in how breathtakingly the scenery looks like a painting....
And then a draconid comes out of the fog and terrorizes you :O

The game runs and looks well on the Steam Deck too, after the next gen update. If you pick good settings, you can have pretty stable 40fps, while the game looks SO much better than it did back in the day at it's original release, when we played this with the best PCs we had back then.

Gotta salute CDPR for this achievement.
I can't imagine how much time and love they put into this complete remaster/remake ~50GB patch - and that for free.

My new favorite way to replay Portal 1 <3

It looks and runs well (at least in 1440p with DLSS. I can't speak for 4K.)

There a a few minor sound bugs, (turrets getting destroyed by the desegregation field make no sound),
but I'm sure that will get patched soon.
The graphics are breathtaking, especially the lighting in the sections after you escape the testing process.
I generally like all the new assets too. Only the new pressure plates kinda look like plastic toys.
Just make sure to open the RTX Remix interface (alt + X) and disable motion blur.

I can recommend playing the game with the RTX version to returning and new players.
I can't see myself going back to the old version, unless it's on the Steam Deck.

Some good puzzles and variety.
Story takes all the kinda meta turns you expect,
but it's done well and most sections don't overstays their welcome.