Recent reviews by MelZai

I know they "Expect you to die" but when you die, you have to do the entire level again, and when every single obstacle kills you for even having your hand two millimetres to the left, forcing you to do the last 10 tasks all over again, including laboriously pumping something or holding your arm out for a bottle to fill, while you sit there with a tired, bored look on your face, it's hard to have fun. Especially since there's a bunch of traps where you just have to die to it to know how it works, including one where you literally have to prepare a bunch of stuff beforehand that you wouldn't know to prepare unless you died to it, giving your character futuresight powers.

I got bored after the second mission, i got annoyed after the third. Game uninstalled.

Escape to a place where people like that you exist.

Old Man Aldrin won't leave me alone. He keeps popping up right next to me to freak me out some more. But it's cool, he seems like a nice old man.

Seriously though, considering it's free, it's relatively pretty, and like a lot of these "Behold The Majesty of Space" experiences, there's always a moment of "Oh my goodness." A sense of either awe, or in this case a realisation that human colonisation of other planets is something we can totally do. It always seems like a distant dream, but when you stand on mars and see an imagination of an early scientific facility there, it revealed to me, more than anything else, that this is something we can totally achieve in this lifetime. And heck, according to Dr. Aldrin, Mars is only 6 months away as the intergalactic crow flies.

The good stuff most people are talking about is probably true... but...

Don't put combat in your airport game. The system does not work. It's not fun. It's stressy, fiddly and the third to last level is trash. It starts great, lasts up until they start asking you to command fighter jets, with a control scheme and AI that do not lend itself to it.

Also, it's badly optimised, and buggy as flip, causing multiple crashes.

It's fine... I guess. Not great though.

Gives a nice basic idea of microbiology in regards to cells, proteins and viruses.
Theres a decent selection of quality settings and options considering it's a free game so it does run well and is decently thought out, technically speaking. There's a fair bit of jank when it comes to camera movement and the decision to move too close to flat textures, but it does its job of providing an awe inspiring look at the incredibly small.

It was fun, short and a little exciting, but often i was too focused on the visuals to hear what the guy was talking about, and the sound effects from the controllers often drowned him out. I don't know if you can change the sfx indepentantly from his voice. The only sound settings was "Voice" and "Music".

As it is though, it's a fun time, worth the 12 minutes of runtime.

This was written, directed and produced by the same guy, and it shows.

There's some really cool ideas shown for animating in VR, such as putting in little scenes that are blocked off unless you move your head through a wall to see it, giving a little extra colour and background to the characters and world. It also all looks very nice from an art style perspective. Technically speaking, it looks blurry and runs terribly, but in terms of style, it has a nice physical feel to it.

However, products like this either have to have a solid story, or excel at visuals to compensate.
This does not have a solid story. Everything is way too heavily foreshadowed, nothing's surprising and you're just waiting for it to go through the motions. It gives it a slow dragging feel to the pacing, emphasised by the credits that end like 30 seconds before the film fades to black, so you're just standing there looking at the environment you've been staring at for almost the entire film.
The characters are flat 2D placeholders. The heroic caring mother who can do no wrong and the carefree child who doesn't know how to share. There's no feeling that there's anything going on in their lives. I don't actually have any idea what they do. I think they sell sticks? Their lives are a mystery to me because they don't do anything involving their own internal motivations other than the ones prescribed by their archetypes. There's nothing there beyond the surface.

Also sometimes their actions and motivations are hindered by ... forgetfulness? i don't know, but someone on sound design or animation supervising should have made note that if a crowd can't hear someone because something's being too loud... maybe you should be able to hear what's being too loud. I know that sound was occuring earlier, but when it was really needed, it was silent.

I think i'm so harsh on this because I genuinely see a lot of cool ideas here. this could have been great, but as it is, it's something for other animators to look at and learn from. Learn from the good parts and pick out the bad.

I recommend it since it's free, but I personally wouldn't pay for this.

This is an updated review for an updated game. The original review is at the bottom.

This is the best looking VR game out right now. It looks utterly sumptuous with glorious colour, and more importantly, crisp clear objects. I have a minimum spec rig for VR as defined by valve back when the vive launched and it runs most things on ultra in this game. For an early access game, this runs absurdly well and looks amazing. The new world that they've added brings new styles of level design and enemy patterns that changes this from a stationary arcade serious sam and turns it into an arcade shmup with projectiles filling the screen and enemies moving in swirling patterns. This is particularly clear in the final level that is a joy to play.

The only issues are the new weapons they've added. The shield is fine, and helps make what would be near impossible become much more manageable, and lets the devs throw way more at you. The swords are sometimes fun to bounce projectiles back at enemies but as a weapon suffers from wiimote flail syndrome, more so than any other vr sword. The sniper rifle feels very early access. It doesn't have muzzle flash yet and there's no recoil or animation of any kind. Also the only use cases for it are very specific and situational other than it doing crazy high damage.

Other than that, fantastic game, they've figured out what it's supposed to be and i can't wait for more.



ORIGINAL REVIEW FOR FIRST TWO WORLDS:

At first I wasn't sure what to think of this, but now that i've played it through, it's exactly what i should have expected. It's big, fast, stupid and simple. You stand and shoot waves that come at you. As simple an arcade experience you can get, shooting projectiles out of the air, shooting enemies as they come, but as is the Serious Sam way, it's a simple old formula done particularly well. It's a joy to mindlessly firing guns, using different weapons for different situations, burning through ammunition as you wave your arms around, probably hitting something since there's so much on screen and so much going on.

Since it's early access, there's very little content right now, as such they also made it quite difficult. You will run out of ammo for your special weapons real quick because you're constantly firing. I recommend it because right now it's quite fun and it can only get better as they add content.

Hilarious, Inventive, disturbing and highly uncomfortable. It's what you'd expect from Crows Crows Crows and Justin Roiland.

That said, there's a couple of bugs and has trouble with minimum room sizes. It's doable, but it's clearly made for a 2x2 room rather than 2x1.5

After multiple playthroughs, I can feel how rich this game is, and it'll take some time before a true sense of the story is torn from its guts. Nothing is exactly what it seems, but the way the world has advanced from DS1 is utterly inspiring.

However, the overwhelming feeling from all the endings and all the lives, and all the souls that form such cinder, is that in the end, nothing you do matters. Even if you usurp and consume, you will be naught but a hollow, and those that follow you will still live in a broken world with broken people.

Life sucks and there's nothing you can do about it. But that's okay, cus everyone else is here too.

Just putting my opinion in because i don't feel like this deserves a Mixed review average. It deserves Slightly Positive or whatever the level above Mixed is.

It's overpriced, lacking features, has way too much downtime and not enough social features or esports integration.
The story mode has tons of plot holes and inconsistencies.

But it's one of my favourite games of the year.

The ranking system and matchmaking are fantastically solid, almost always giving me fun matches. The fighting system with V-skills V-triggers, a lack of true combos, tons of ways to get around spam based gameplay, and a mindgame focused core means that I feel like I don't need to know the secret tricks and flowcharts of street fighter to still be competent and still have fun.

The character designs are utterly impecable. The only one I think looks weird is Guile with his too tight shirt. They're either excellent advancements on an existing design (particularly Balrog, and in my opinion, Ken), reflecting both their personality and their fighting style well, or they're stunning new designs that bring a fresh flavour (Raaashiidooo).

The story mode certainly has its problems but most fighting games and capcom games do. For what it is, this story is a hell of a lot of fun with insane anime moments, a bunch of likable characters (except birdie) and a real flair for the dramatic. Rashid's moments in particular are glorious.

If you can buy it cheaper on other websites, I sincerely suggest that you do. I got mine from cdkeys for £25 and it was totally worth it.