Recent reviews by Cyire

Larian casts Charm Person. Succeeded. Larian casts Hypnotic Pattern. Succeeded. Larian casts Hold Person. Succeeded.

I've been looking for a replayable sword VR game and I've found it. This blows Blade and Sorcery out of the water. In short, "Until You Fall" is a polished rougelite with great swordplay mechanics; think Risk of Rain meets For Honor. More importantly, it does not give me motion sickness like Blade and Sorcery.

Story Premise
You are magical or spiritual whatever knight that is revived by a sorceress in order to defeat the evil that has fallen upon the lands. The bosses seem to be corrupted version of you that is spreading this evil. That's as much as I know so far after reaching the first boss. Not a big deal especially for this game play type.

Game Design
You play through a series of levels until you die. At the end of every level, you get weapon perks, body perks, money or heart containers. When you die, you are spawn back to your lair with none of the perks except whatever is the stock perks provided by your weapon. You get in game currency from end of level perk choices or just by getting further in the levels. In game currency is spent on upgrading your weapons.

Difficultly Scale
The game is can be unforgiving in beginning, but gets easier once you start upgrading weapons and understanding the combat mechanics. You will die a lot however that depends on the difficulty. There are three difficulty settings, I've been playing on the challenging which lives up to it's name.

Enemies
All enemies have a shield pool and a health pool. Shield pools must be depleted before hitting health pools. The only way to do that is too either block or slash with enemy with attacks. Enemy shield pools can regenerate and for a brief moment enemies are invulnerable to attacks. Enemies will usually attack you one on one and they do not come at you all at once like in Blade and Sorcery. Only instance I've seen this is at higher levels.

Surprisingly, there are variety of enemies that you must face. Ones with larger shield/health pools, ones that require you to block more, ones that require to lean/duck from attacks and even ranged attack enemies. There is a boss that is at the end of every 6 or so levels which can be a combination of all the enemy types above including some extra surprises. All characters are wonderfully design and not boring to look at. My favorite being the giant enemy with a shield and massive hammer.

Movement
IMO: A VR game, especially one that is action based, should have movement that does not induce motion sickness as much as possible. Luckily, we see careful choices made here in this game.

The game uses blink teleportation locomotion tied to the dash mechanics which has a limit of three without any extra perks which will recharge. The dashing ability is used to break the characters attack and depletes a small amount of the shield of enemies. You can walk slowly in the game and your screen will vignette which I've personally haven't seen before in a VR game. Surprisingly I've played this game for hours without having any feeling of motion sickness. I cannot say this for Gorn or Blade and Sorcery.

Combat Mechanics
There are three main combat mechanics which are blocking the attacks from enemy characters, attacking the enemy and dashing at the enemy.

Blocking Mechanics
In order to block attacks, you need to hold up your weapons at precise positions when the screen shows a blue streak which indicate where the enemy will strike you. This is similar to the For Honor warning system or if you haven't played it, a spidey sense for where you will be hit. You must match these streaks with your weapon.

Blocking will do two things: Save your own health pool and deplete shield pool of the enemy. Without power ups or weapon perks your health pool is 4 hits. Three hearts and 1 extra chance to survive. If you do survive, you get a heart container at the end of the level.

Attacking the Enemy
As mentioned above, enemies have shield and health pools. The first time encountering an enemy requires you to deplete the enemy's shield meter, to attack it's health pool. Once you depletes the shield meter you will start a Combo Event. When combo event occurs, the enemy will be immobile and you have a short time to slash the enemy in a precise manner to damage it's health pools. If you do not slash in the precise manner, you get less damage output. The amount of times you can slash an enemy during this event depends your weapon perks and perks you pick up during the run. With that said, you can see that swinging at enemies mindlessly is not rewarded.

Dashing
You can help whittle the shield of enemy a bit or you can dash into the enemy to stun them. You can also dash away to avoid attacks from strong enemies.

Weapons
All weapons are chosen prior to every run. You get to pick two weapons to dual wield. There are swords, heavy weapons, daggers and non-weapons that give you a buff or magical abilities.

Weapons have their own stock perks which that can be upgraded through in game currency. Weapons also have their own ultimates that have varying charge rates with interesting outputs; There's a dagger with a short charge rate that can put a enemy in stasis (frozen in place). Having the ability to dual wield weapons has me trying different weapon combinations for every run. Weapons also seem to handle differently as well for example heavy weapons being harder to swing and block attacks.

Whew! If you made it this far in the review, maybe you should buy the game... idk...

To sum up:
My arms are sore. I have sweat towel now. I have block indicators burned into my retinas but I'll keep playing "Until You Fall", until I fall of exhaustion.