Recent reviews by Doug7070

Update:
Since posting my below review it should be noted:

• None of the below mentioned issues have been fixed, or even remotely addressed. The developers are fundamentally and completely deaf to any and all community feedback and/or taking basic quality assurance measures in maintaining the game.
  
• Multiple new, game breaking issues have been introduced, and game balance continues to deteriorate. Additional pay to win premium vehicles have been introduced, as well as extremely unfair ingame events based around squeezing money out of players through the game's online marketplace,
  
• The game continues to be based around a single core design concept: strongarm players into paying exorbitant amounts of money through intentionally damaging the quality of the core gameplay loop and dangling solutions in front of the player that must be repeatedly paid for.

The game is, has been, and will remain utterly terrible.

Original review:

As a disclaimer, I exclusively play this game for the ground forces mode, so won't be addressing the air combat or naval modes, though in general many of my larger points carry over in some way.

First off, what this game does well:

• The modeling of the vehicles is amazing. Both in terms of detail and (mostly) in terms of handling, the models and effects for each vehicle make for a truly beautiful experience, especially when compared with other competitors in the armored combat game genre.
  
• The actual basic gameplay mechanics of the ground combat are excellent. The realistic way in which vehicle damage and dynamics are modeled gives the game a weighty feel that captures the subject matter with enjoyable heft. Driving a tank in War Thunder feels much more fundamentally appealing than in other competing games such as World of Tanks.
  The rush of successfully scoring a kill in armored combat is awesome, and has kept me coming back for more despite the game's many glaring flaws.

With that out of the way, here are some of the reasons I do not recommend anyone pick up this game, even at the entry price of free:

• The ingame economy and progression system is an exploitative, broken, and endlessly aggravating mess that has been terrible since the game first launched and has received only the tiniest of improvements over the many years it has been in active development. The rate of gain for 'Research Points', the experience points used to unlock new vehicles, and 'Silver Lions', the currency actually used to buy things, are both horrifically low, with the express goal of getting you to purchase 'Golden Eagles', the game's shiny play money that costs real money and can be used to effortlessly breeze your way forward so long as you're willing to drop hundreds if not thousands of dollars (US, or your regional conversion) into the game.
  Rewards for gameplay are terribly low in the first place, but only get worse when you realize that the game makes you pay to repair your vehicles and buy more ammunition after each battle. That's right, if your vehicle is damaged or destroyed in a match, you have to pay Silver Lions to repair it. Even worse, each vehicle has unlockable ammo types, which are almost always much better than the vehicle's free stock ammunition, each round of which will cost you more Silver Lions to purchase. This gets especially bad with high tier vehicles, the constant hype machines that the game uses to lure people in, resulting in many matches where you will lose significant sums of money if you miss a shot or have your vehicle damaged or destroyed. Given that the whole point of the game is to fight other players using, you know, tanks with guns on them, you will generally end close to 50% of your games looking at being charged for your insolence in thinking you can actually play the vehicles you spent hundreds of hours grinding to use.
  And the vehicle grind? If you want to have the privilege of driving that shiny M1A1 or T-80u you had better be prepared to play every day for several years to top even one nation's tech tree, which will probably be soured in the end because of the game constantly introducing unbalanced new units instead of fixing any of the glaring issues with the economy and progression system.
  
• The balance. There is no balance. Vehicles are thrown with minimal concern across the Battle Rating (a number used to quantify a vehicle's power and match it with similar vehicles) field, constantly leaving you fighting much more powerful units as you painfully claw your way up the tech tree, only to finally reach top tier and...
  There is also zero balance at top tier. New units are introduced constantly to keep the game rolling on announcement hype, with little concern for their performance or the meta they will create. The only pitiful excuse for balance the developers do implement is in increasing the costs for repairs and ammunition for over-performing vehicles, which does nothing but ensure that players who pay real money for in-game currency (did I mention you can just straight up buy Silver Lions with Golden Eagles? No? Yeah.) have a quantitative advantage in being able to operate overpowered units in every match, while those who refuse to invest their life savings into the game are left out in the cold, unable to pay the repair costs on vehicles they spent hundreds of hours earning.
  It gets even better when you introduce aircraft into the mix, because all modes for ground vehicles are actually "Mixed Battles", which let aircraft and helicopters join in on the fun. What I mean by 'join in on the fun' is that in most matches where you play a tank you will end up being killed by a plane dropping a bomb on you rather than being destroyed by another tank. This only gets worse in top tier matches, where helicopters can hover at extreme range from the battlefield and one-shot-kill tanks using anti-tank guided missiles, which they get a large number of, meaning that you have to spend half your time trying to enjoy playing a ground vehicle constantly looking out for and dodging air vehicles. The developers' fix for this? Introduce overpowered anti-aircraft ground units, which are of course top-tier vehicles that you are required to grind for.
  This is all made much, much worse by the design of the maps that you do your actual fighting on, most of which look very nice, but are some of the worst I have ever seen in terms of game design. Sight lines are nonsensical and cover is scattered around seemingly at random, with many maps allowing enemy vehicles to find ways to shoot into one team's spawn locations from the mid point of the map, leaving players respawning late in the game to be instantly annihilated. And added bonus is that there's also nothing to prevent aircraft from camping players leaving their spawns, meaning that you might not even get the chance to see your enemy before a bomb or missile exterminates you 10 meters from your spawn point.
  
• The bugs. There have been reasonable improvements in the game over time in the bug department, but there still remain many annoying issues that will swoop in to disrupt your experience. The game's physics engine is a common culprit, ensuring your tank is launched into the air by a rock or killed by an enemy shell that ricochets through the Nth dimension to somehow wipe out your vehicle. It's less of a pain point than the above points, but it does happen, and it will ruin your day.

All in all War Thunder offers a unique and compelling gameplay experience that I do not recommend anyone check out, because it serves only as a lure for a terribly unfair monetization scheme backed up by countless glaring issues in basic game design that will leave you gnashing your teeth and swearing profusely far more often than delivering the tantalizing enjoyment that the game might otherwise deliver.

It's not worth your time, and it's definitely not worth your money.

Quite simply one of if not the best VR experiences you can get. If you are new to VR this should absolutely be your first purchase, and if you're an old hat who somehow still doesn't have it no VR library is complete without it.

Beat Saber is one of the killer apps for VR in that it has a super simple core gameplay mechanic that anyone can pick up and enjoy within seconds of putting on the headset, as well as an astronomical skill ceiling that will keep you coming back again and again for more helpings of a fundamentally satisfying gameplay loop that never stops feeling awesome.

The basic mechanics are dead simple: stand on a platform in a wild Tron-esque rave stadium while colored blocks approach in time with pounding electronic music, and hit those blocks with the titular neon sabers you hold in each hand, matching saber color to block color and slicing the blocks in the direction of the arrows on their faces. There are also occasionally bombs to dodge with your sabers and walls to dodge with your face, adding to the basic arm swinging motions. All the mechanics are self-explanatory and can be picked up in seconds once you enter the game, as well as through the convenient built-in tutorial. The real magic comes from the satisfaction of slashing in time with the beat, the controller vibration and particle effects reinforcing each hit, until you end up feeling like the manic digital conductor of some sort of otherworldly battle-rave.

Starting off on the lower difficulties makes for an easy intro to the game that everyone can enjoy, making the game perfect for parties and showing off VR to friends, but there is also an extreme level of challenge available for those who want it. Bumping up the song difficulty to Expert or even Expert+ will put you into a whole new world, flowing through the frenetic neon notes in an instinctive blur of flailing arms and pounding music until you find yourself completely zeroed into the game. It's an awesome experience and works on a basic level that will constantly keep you coming back for just a few more songs.

Besides being a crazy amount of fun, it's also worth noting that Beat Saber can be a real workout depending on your physical condition, and makes for a great way to burn a few calories while still having a ton of fun. This is one of the few VR games with a health and safety warning when you first open it that actually has a very good reason to be there.

It's also worth noting, as the game has as of this review picked up some unjustified negative reviews surrounding it, that Beat Saber also has a quite solid mod community. This has incurred some negative press due to a recent game update breaking mods temporarily (for about 3 days, heaven forbid), which seems to have gotten a lot of people who don't understand the basic concept of how mods work upset that the game has somehow intentionally removed mod support. This isn't the case, and the Beat Saber developers have voiced support for the mod community. Should you want to mod the game, which does have the potential to add some great community developed features, please keep in mind that game updates often break mods, and the game is in early access. In lieu of people being sensible, however, consider it safe to ignore the wave of recent negative reviews for the game made by ignorant people who don't care to take 5 minutes to read up on the facts of the matter, and enjoy the game's flourishing mod scene at your discretion, with the understanding that updates may break things for a little while sometimes.

In summary: if you have a VR headset that can run it, you need Beat Saber. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

A game with a ton of potential and a deeply enjoyable core gameplay loop, ultimately brought down by a thousand cuts of poor publisher and development design and balance choices. In the end, much as I've gotten many hours of enjoyable play time out of this game, I really can't recommend it to others.

Some of the core issues with the game include:

• An incredibly exploitative F2P economy.
  The game lures you in with the promise that everything can be unlocked for free, which is technically entirely true. What they don't mention is that all of the really desirable items and content are put behind a monumental amount of grinding, making unlocking items without paying real money an utterly exhausting chore that would take hundreds upon hundreds of hours and many months, if not years of committed play, since the game is arranged to keep you coming back day after day for rewards. To add monetary insult to time investment injury, the actual prices for ingame vehicle packs and premium currency are incredibly high, meaning that investing $50 or even $100 into the game will only get you a very small taste of the endgame content, with the most coveted items being effectively impossible to earn unless you devote your entire life to the game or spend hundreds of real world dollars to purchase outright.
  I have personally been lured by the promise of the paid purchases in the game, and frankly in retrospect I feel more than a little cheated in terms of what play value I got out of what was a quite significant monetary investment.
  
• Terrible network latency.
  Your mileage may vary here, but in my case I have been plagued by constant network issues with the game, most of which are infuriatingly based on poor server selection rather than any network fault of my own. I know for a fact that the game is capable of putting me in a server with reasonable ping, since occasionally I will see games with 30-50ms ping throughout. For the vast majority of the time, however, be it due to server population or some other networking malfunction, I will end up seeing anywhere from 110-200ms ping consistently, making the overall play experience a stuttering, spiking mess.
  In a game where rapid reactions and high speed vehicle driving go hand in hand, poor network code often ruins the experience.
  
• Huge, persistent balance issues.
  A certain level of balance difficulty might be expected from a game based on building your own vehicle, but in this case the flaws are painfully large and seemingly left untouched by the developers in many cases. In the top level matches of the game there are a very select few combinations of weapons and parts that are dominant in the meta, and anyone not playing in what amounts to one of 4-5 nearly identical basic vehicles will be absolutely trampled by outright overpowered items and combinations that the developers turn a blind eye to. Every time a new item is added to the game it's a fresh rush to find the latest and most overpowered thing, only to have it be nerfed into the dirt in another update, or be left to completely dominate unchecked for months, if not years.

At the end of the day, Crossout is a game with some really genuinely fun dynamics. It's really enjoyable to build a Mad Max-esque battle wagon, and driving it out to blast other players is solid and a ton of fun. Unfortunately, however, the level of aggravation that the game also generates often overshadows the enjoyment in numerous small ways that eventually add up to a combination that will leave you turning away in disgust, only to be drawn back in later by the addictive core gameplay.

Unfortunately there's not much similar to this game in terms of competition, however at the end of the day I still really can't see recommending anyone play it, because you'll only end up wanting more, with the only place to get it being this infuriatingly flawed and horribly overpriced mess.