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This is a fun reskin of the original. Its biggest sell is the gorgeous art assets and the support for more resolutions, like ultra-wides and wider adoption of high resolution displays allowing a more enjoyable spectacle.

However, the fact that so many people have been playing this game from the year 2000, is an indictment to the RTS industry and other developers in general. I do have more than 100 hours in the game, so you might call me a hypocrite for saying that. But the main reason I played it for as long as I did is; well, I had a fun group that I like hanging out with. For this group of guys, it hit the combination of low system requirements, nostalgia, and the epic matches that would ensue between us as we gleefully waged wars. It felt awesome and intense trying to coordinate an invasion with 3-4 different factions. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have 8-10 players interested in playing in a day, and even a year into it we could still scrounge up 5-7 players, sometimes. The group’s interest was buoyed by the vicious and strong AI, pseudo random maps, interesting custom maps, and novel scenarios that would give us new strategies to play with and old ideas we could exploit in new ways. And yes, also nostalgia.

So the question is: why aren’t more games focusing on this MP aspect? Think about all the games set in this time period that are all single player: Banished, Going Medieval, Factory Town, Kingdom and Castles, etc. Bannerlord’s campaign could technically exist within a MP environment. Even the future cool ones like Manor Lords again are focused on single player, and even if it did, could it bring a cool mixture of cannons, trebuchets, muskets and cavalry to cover the couple of centuries this game covers? Because, let’s be honest, Age of Empires 2 is dated. The fighting in this game is simply too old and too basic. My knights can’t charge through a line of archers, allowing them refuge in a corner as a lone crossbowman fends off 2000 lbs horsemen charging into him since momentum does not exist. The melee fighting is tedious due to a lack of formation based combat and good attack move options. Taking down fortifications and cavalry charges feels so much better in Bannerlord and Total War. Having to constantly rebuild barracks at the gates of the enemy due to the 200 pop limit is boring and tedious, instead of strategic and tactical (yes I know you can now expand this to 500, but larger pop limit needs new mechanics to help you exploit the more numerical soldiers). The resource system, the main reason I fell in love with the age series, feels abstract now with so many new, and old, games really expanding how gathering and using materials work (although, note that it’s still the top dog in this RTS MP sphere). Basically, if I didn’t have a fun group of people to play with, I wouldn’t feel interested in the game beyond some quick hits of nostalgia.

I mean what have they really improved mechanically? The map is zoomed out more due to the higher resolution, and they gave the option to remove the pop cap a bit. But did they actually create a better system to control larger units? They could possibly have increased the number of players and the map size, but they didn’t. In some ways, it’s worse because of the lack of rejoining, which they had in voobly. They added a ton more civs, but this is just slight expansions with a couple of different units, and not worth too much thought. Even these nostalgic friends wanted to go try out a new game, something different. And AoE 4 just keeps the same formula despite the game having such a fertile timespan to try cool new ideas.

Perhaps it's impossible to do this with the Age series, all most people are asking for is a remake. Just look at Age 4. It is possible that "AGE OF EMPIRES" actually means the age of a couple hundred farmers and a few hundred military units. So yes, absolutely beautiful re-skin with gorgeous colors and art, and the best way to play AoE in the year 2020. But if you are a developer making a game NOW that is about building a village and warfare, at the very least, take a note from this game and make it MP so I can play them with my friends! The Age series is perhaps too old and stagnant to move on, it’s ripe to be taken down!

I have been playing with Retroarch since it's launch in 2014, thanks to having the best CRT shaders with halation, scanlines, curvature, you name it. This is phosphor + cathode ray simulation at it's finest. Along with all the cores you can use with it (pretty much all worthwhile ones), this is a fantastic platform. It has only gotten better over the years with people adding and more capabilities to this program (BFI, more shader support, etc.). They timed this release perfectly with the incoming Steam Deck as well, but more importantly, it will be fun af to play some old games with steamplay and even have be able to play across multiple machines thanks to steam cloud support.

I would highly recommend playing your favorite old CRT games with this program, as it looks way better than the upscaled crap you see in most other emulators. Hopefully, this program will reach critical mass and show these new kids that the old games actually did look pretty good for the time. Maybe it might even change the fetish for blocky pixels, who knows.

Note: Obviously the best solution is the actual hardware with an actual proper CRT. Just saying, if you want to play on an emulator, this is your best bet.

This is a minigame, it's Shadowboxing sim. If I could give it a meh rating, I would. It's ugly with subpar graphics. But it's actually pretty fun because it actually tries to calculate speed/power and actually requires a decent amount of cardio, similar to an actual fight. It's not great at it, because it can't actually calculate kinetic energy, only velocity of the controller, but it's still closer than before.

You would want something like this in an actual game or with some MP. The MP, however, is going to be a problem. The fact is, without actual impact and pain, boxing is very offense oriented. I have no idea how this guy is going to implement MP tbh, I mean how is that going to work when you can't get punched? Even though by instinct you want to do slips/defenses/etc. it's not really that important and doesn't seem that accurate. Besides, how can you do that without accurate elbow tracking or shoulder tracking? Yes, there is defense, and it's mostly limited to your hands/gloves. Basically, it does the job of keeping your hands up.

It also seems impossible to do anything like slips/pivots etc. Has very little ringwork, likely due to most people only having room for punch out like sequences. Despite all of this, it's the most complete boxing VR game out there, and that's still worth something.

Worse CoH in basically every way. Mechs were a bit enjoyable, but not enough to salvage the experience.

Mount and Blade made a pretty bad first impression on me when I first played it. My friend was obsessed with it so while I was there, I played it for a bit. It just seemed janky, ugly, and overall just seemed like it didn’t have any of the precision of control on the brawling mechanics that I was used to with Japanese games (Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry). I didn’t even get on a mount lol. A couple of years later, Warband came out, and a bit after that, Fire and Sword. And with a much better PC (in that it actually had a graphics card lol) I was ready to try it again. And what an experience that was.

Firstly, the game was and still is buggy. One of my adventures immediately started with me bugging out and leaving me with no weapons and a couple of bread. I took this as a challenge, so I tried playing a bit. Well a lot. The way this start played out, it was pretty much a dice roll on you getting to the nearest village and then to the nearest city without the steppe raiders hunting you down. I conceptualized my strategy: go to the nearest village and sell all my bread and clothes except for one to not starve and get gold. Immediately hire as many recruits as they have available with that gold. Now get to the town, if you can make it, or see if you can fight some looters, or go to the next village if your way was blocked. The town was very important so you could fight in tournaments, and the tournaments are how you get money after all. But if you could manage to get an advantageous fight here or there with looters, you have to capitalize on it to make enough gold as you are so far behind the curve. And you are VERY far behind the curve without horses.

Well, I managed to get to the nearest village and to the next one, so I had about 7 dudes at my disposal at this point and I was feeling pretty good. But as I was trying to get to the town, a group of steppe raider immediately noticed our little group and started hunting me. The steppe raiders were MUCH faster than my militia infantry, so I had absolutely no chance of outrunning them. Left with no choice, we had to fight as they charged us down.

But all was not lost. I noticed that in front of us was a little river. I decided to command my little group to stand on the edge of the river so that the horseman couldn’t charge at full speed to them. The three riders galloped through the map, but slowed to a trot at the river. I immediately told my militia to charge, I went in with my bare fists. A long melee broke out and we managed to down 2 of the riders, but the last one broke through. I had lost my entire militia and I couldn’t contain him so he charged me over and over again until he finally broke me.

I was imprisoned and dragged throughout the map. Eventually, I broke out and escaped my fate, landing in a town where I could start brawling some local drunks to make some money and eventually fight in some actual tournaments. I finally got enough money from these things to have some armor, a mediocre horse, and a respectable if not fantastic little squad. I was able to use this group to help out a lord and eventually got into his clan. Not bad for a dude that was stuck only bread and some peasant clothes some time ago.

And that was the thing about the game, there were so many layers to unpack. The combat on the ground felt like it could be done better, but this was a MELEE with a lot of fighters and that added a whole another depth. Then you had the capability to shoot arrows, ride horses, swing swords, use lances, and in the later game, shoot guns. Momentum mattered, so you had a strong reason to be riding at full speed which made for epic horse combat that was as fast paced as any action game. I still remember when I was playing MP in Fire and Sword and a lancer was coming at me at full speed and all I had was my little musket to keep him off. I had to wait until he was 5 feet from me before I could fire my shot (guns in this era are very inaccurate). And the sight of him crashing off of his horse and tumbling inches away from me is burned into my brain. And the battles. They were the biggest you could get at the time, especially at this perspective, and the mods just allowed them to be bigger and bigger. I mean, the game wasn’t really built with this in mind, it comes with a restriction of 150 v 150, but at least at the level of skirmishing... it was pretty good. There were no other game that even came close to it. Hell, even now, 10 years later, most of these battles aren’t that big (PUBG = 100, but that’s also with guns… so you don’t SEE 100 players on one screen).

And there was a lot to the game when you eventually got tired of the combat (which actually had a lot of intricacies as you explored it). Firstly, your character had his skills/attribute that you focused on, allowing him to be good at a couple of things at the expense of others. There was a lot to it, from trade, to tactics, to fighting. And you had the whole lord based diplomacy that was centered around the feudal aristocracy, and an ok trade system to exploit the economy. So overall, there was quite a lot of time you could sink into it. And the open world design with no game focused objective allowed the player a lot of freedom.

So overall, this was one of the best games to come out in the last decade and it’s fairly obvious why it had such a large following. There just weren’t any games doing what this did. Eventually Chivalry would be created in 2012 with a MP focus, and then War of the Roses, Life is Feudal, then For Honor, Kingdom Come, and later still Mordhau. Chivalry did away with the mouse movement and allowed them to be button based. War of the Roses… was crap. For Honor managed to add grappling and a deeper 1v1 system and a much more beautiful map and a much higher art budget. Kingdom Come decided to make a more personal story with a single player storyline and had more set pieces. Life is Feudal basically tried to marry this game with Dwarf Fortress and made it a MMO, which I know the M&B fanbase was clamoring for. But for some reason, no game has gone after the throne of this epic medieval battle… that is until Bannerlord.

Can it be better? Absolutely. There are thousands of things we could talk about, from the graphics, to the implementation of group combat, the 1v1 combat, to the tactics menu, to the size of battles, to all the other details of the game. The potential in this concept is incredibly high! And that's absolutely fine, because that means we have clear and obvious things to go after for it's sequels. But this STILL doesn’t change the fact that this was a game you just had to play back in the day. And, that’s what mattered.

If you want to be in an epic medieval war, there is absolutely no other game like it. Just imagine this: you are in a grassy field with trees surrounding you. The sun is rising in the morning and it’s almost serene, but you know the field will soon be painted red in blood. The infantry are in a line next to you and the archers close behind. There are cavalry on both wings. You are one of these wings. The commander sits on his horse in the back overlooking the entire sphere of battle. You wait in anticipation, the horse archers go out ahead to skirmish the enemy. It’s foolish, there are too many, and you see some of your companions fall in front of you. Quietly, as they are too far in the distance. You can see the enemy now, and they stretch out further than the eye can really see, easily numbering more than 500. Their cavalry comes into view, and the commander tells you to charge. You tell your men to follow behind you and start galloping, forming a spearhead. The sound of hooves thundering fill the air, louder and louder as you all get to full speed. You rear your spear in anticipation and brace yourself for the impact. The two tidal waves collide with an epic force.

Your horse wasn’t taken out underneath you but you hear the sound of wood colliding into flesh and metal behind you as your troop collides with the enemy. The horses neigh and the men yell in sheer cacophony. You try to keep your momentum to clear the enemy and circle back for another charge, but now the battlefield has broken up into chaos. You go after an enemy horseman, but another cavalry comes in flying from the side, barely missing you as he swings. You see your men miss you by inches, and you them. It’s pure chaos and it’s impossible to keep together. As you try to down the enemies around, the back of your head realizes that the battlefield is quickly changing as men die by the droves. You see an enemy infantry position completely vulnerable and quickly charge in to sweep through them.

Except you don’t have to imagine it, you can play it, right now. This is the Battle of the Bastards in GoT made into a video game. I mean, what other game has this level of chaos, this level of sheer energy? If there was another one, I would be playing it already. Warband started off with only a 150 unit cap, so it never really felt epic in scope, but it managed to keep up to date with mods helping you get there if you were looking for it. But here, you can immediately set the unit cap to 1000 per side and never look back. And beneath this epic increase in size and the substantial graphical update from a decade old game, there is still the old combat system that manages to have so much customization and flexibility in it’s engine. Different swords with different weight and length handle differently. You have maces, axes, spears, polearms, two handers, bows, crossbows. Yes, they haven’t REALLY improved it, and there was a lot to improve: shield wall fighting, 1v1 duels, grappling, just to name a few. But I sunk tens of hours into just the combat portion in Warband, and that still hasn’t changed in this game.

If I had to complain about one substantial thing though, it would be the map sizes for the battles. They absolutely are not big enough for these insane cavalry on cavalry confrontations. And there are other things too, like catapults should be actually damaging fortifications. It would be awesome to see dust clouds behind the horses or covering the man in the desert etc. Remove those icons overhead, and allow us to use banners to mark our troops. I would love to see an actual improvement in the overworld/strategic sphere, maybe taking some inspiration from grand strategy titles and other games like Nobunaga’s Ambition etc. However, it already does so much of them, really the big thing would be watching your villages prosper due to your decisions and really develop the civic/resource side of it.

At the end of the day, especially with a game like this, there will be thousands of things to complain about. And I definitely ran into a few issues/bugs and had to finagle my way through the interface to get what I wanted done. This balance or that economy could be better. For the less battle hungry crowd, yeah, the things out of combat might not be as interesting as a well crafted narrative, although I find the diplomacy perfectly serviceable for strategy gaming. I don’t see how it's really inferior to something like Civ for example. Regardless, whether you buy it now, or a year from now once all the bugs are fixed and things have become more normal, it doesn’t matter. The game still has about the best medieval style battles and sieges, and that’s not going to change.

P.S. Multiplayer. I like the new captain mode which allows you to command your own troops and coordinate with other players. Definitely a really great addition. It’s cool to actually see some competent formations by humans utilized in the battlefield and would love to see if it could be made more interesting.

This is going to be a strange review, because it's really not about Cities: Skylines but what it could be.

As a city sim, this game is good. It's SimCity with better traffic and citizen simulation. Every citizen is simulated and has their own job, and the traffic is complicated enough to require advanced planning to make sure people can go to places. I also like constructing free-form roads, which is something that was missing from the original grid like SimCity 2000, the last game I played in this sub-genre. The power/water simulation is fairly simple, but it does an ok job with simulating waste and consumption. The needs of the citizen and the overall economy are all pretty basic, nothing too complicated. The meat of the game is the traffic, which you can definitely spend hours optimizing. If you like building complicated metropolises in a large environment, I think you are going to have a damn good time. I certainly did.

And I do mean large environments. Because what I really dug about this game is the MAP. At 36 sq. KM on default settings, this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing is MASSIVE and it easily goes up to 100 sq. KM with a simple mod. This is really the first time I would really consider a city-simulator simulating a CITY. Paris is 100 sq. KM and London, New York and Chicago are much, much larger. SimCity 5 was limited to 4 sq. KM lol. Here, it’s difficult to see the boundary when you are zooming out, finally crossing the immersion breaking limits of the previous kings: R.U.S.E. and Supreme Commander (80x80). Has there been a game in this sub-gene to go this big? Supreme Commander actually came close, but the “slice” map concept limited it’s immersion, and it definitely could not simulate everything to the detail this does. Hell, even if you open up the competition to it’s parent genre, the RTS, there are barely any competitions. Definitely not in 2013, and definitely not with a flat map. Planetary Annihilation tried, but to be honest, it was more like asteroid annihilation. None of the planets were big enough to feel flat when you zoomed in, and you never needed to in the first place. It’s hard for me to describe how excited this made me feel to look at a map as if I was flying on a Cessna.

The map size is important for more than just aesthetics. Modern warfare/economy is huge, and to really push it to the limit, you need to make it massive. And I don’t mean just in terms of raw numbers, which is a relative concept (think Pikmin), but in terms of LOGISTICS. Think about the scale of warfare in reality: it requires ships, trains, planes, and transport vehicles to get your army and supply from one place to the next. But most RTS barely require your units go in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ van to go to the next conflict, never mind requiring actual supply of any kind. Maybe you will have some units that can pick up a couple of units to airdrop into an enemy boss, but transportation is not a fundamental requirement of most RTS. Hell, there are only a few games that require you to move your materials to construct your units and buildings (Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Kingdoms and Castles, Factorio, Factory Town), and almost none of them at the scale I am talking about. Most RTS will simplify this aspect by keeping the storage abstract which can then be consumed anywhere, nevermind that most games only keep track of two resources at any point. All of these shortcuts were built around the 1990s technology where you HAD to simplify all of these concepts because we were working with 16 Megs of RAM. This hasn’t been a limitations for years now, and it’s patently obvious when playing Cities: Skylines.

And THE SETTING. This game is focused around modern buildings with modern people. Why not have a RTS that focuses around warfare in a modern setting with skyscrapers and highway systems? Maybe human vs. human conflict is not exciting enough, but could you imagine fighting against an alien horde?! Think about flamethrowers lining down main street as they torch a horde of aliens! Think about aliens flying into buildings into skyscrapers to take down turrets and snipers! And the amount of mechanics that could open up! RTS games have been fairly limited in terms of verticality and buildings, you would have to use completely new mechanics to try to control these 100 floor towers and wide intersections, alleyways and subways. Perhaps, the reason this has never really happened is because of the limitation of the overhead view of most RTS, but does RTS have to be limited to this camera angle? Add a team dynamic, and you could easily have multiple perspectives in the battlefield and allow people to really hook into the multiple tiers of battles that can happen in a modern environment.

Anyway, as you can tell, I am more excited about the potential RTS aspect of this than the City sim. If you are looking for a city sim, this will suffice. It’s not overly difficult, but the sheer magnitude of it is enjoyable. That, along with the tiny citizens filling my metropolis with life makes it fun. There are many things that could make it more intricate, including much more complicated terrain manipulation, figuring out resources/economy etc. But for me, there is only so much I can care about the accounting and looking at cars piling up on the roads. Turn this into a multiplayer WAR, and I am freaking in.

TL;DR It’s Endless Legend with a worse strategic layer and a better tactical layer. Same as the rest of the Age of Wonders series, except with a Sci-fi theme (which I love).

Let's get to why this game is good. The battles are a lot more engaging than Endless Legend. It’s XCOM but with a large variety of aliens and factions. IE, there are aliens that resist heat, which allows you to walk over lava. There are fliers, rocks, abominations, mind controllers, pirates etc. The cover system and the flanking system both add a lot of decisions by themselves, but add overwatch, a variety of effects and you got yourself a really engaging couple of hours. The combat also allows you to SEE these factions in a way that a strategic layer just can’t provide. It’s just awesome to watch these abilities in action like a giant colossus throwing a giant meteor on your units, having to wear biohazard suits for a poisonous swamp, battling insects attacking a frontier outpost etc. It also does a decent job of tying the battles to the larger empire using “tactical operations” that make your battles seem larger than the small scale affair they are. I like being able to call down orbital laser strikes and valkyries in the middle of the battle. I just wish there was more map variety. Some of the unique maps are pretty cool tho.

However, if you are a fan of strategy games like me, the strategic layer will leave you sorely disappointed. Like most 4X games, the beginning is shrouded in mystery, the unknown. In this game, your decisions seem relatively simple. As the mystery disappears, you should be left with with an intricate and complicated system, but I just found it to be just as simple as the beginning. It took me a while to get into the game just because how disappointed I was at the empire building aspect of it. For example, Endless Legend will force you to research technologies to find new and and advanced materials, and then build mines to generate the various metals, which allows for higher tier weapons require ever higher tier materials. Here you only have one special one. EL also requires you to build buildings that changes things in the map and how your cities look, just researching the technology doesn’t do much. But here, all you need to do is grab a sector and clear a couple of baddies and that’s really it. The city building was meager affair, and I felt a simple plan of expand aggressively and grab cosmite would get me 90% of the way there. Disappointing for an empire building strategy game.

The strategic maps are also random and not very interesting. They do the job of keeping your guys moving and trying to organize your sectors, but there is no sense of world building for me. No plate tectonics, no continents, etc. I don’t get a lot of pleasure looking at it. I think the idea is that you barely look at the strategic layer and just get to the meat of the game: the battles. I just wish there was more.

It would be awesome if they align the strategic AI with the units themselves. IE, there is a minor faction that basically mind control your dudes. Lower units remove the ability to use weapons, higher tiers can straight up control them and lay eggs on them. It would be really interesting if they start doing that to your citizens, not just in combat, depending on how the diplomacy goes. But I think that's still far in the future. Overall, the diplomacy is a fairly simple affair with a simple influence point system to compliment and trade with factions.. It does have racial relations and various other gimmicks, but it’s pretty straightforward and doesn’t do anything more than other strategy games.

It’s an interesting game with a lot of cool things to offer. It’s definitely worth a look. If it also had a strong strategic layer, I would be much more excited. And if it could do proper large scale combat… man, it would be the best strategy game yet.

The main reason I am giving it a positive review is strictly because it was the first racing title to go VR, and there really is no going back after that. Yeah, there was and is a lot of annoying aspects to this VR implementation still, the UI isn’t great, the menu system doesn’t make much sense. But, it was the first true photo-realistic VR game and I loved it for that. It’s not shy about it’s demands, you need a 1070 to really experience it in all it’s glory (well, in VR)! The cars are lovingly detailed to an insane degree, I remember open wires being modelled in some of the cars for god’s sake! It’s genuinely one of the coolest ways to see these beasts. And the sheer novelty of just getting out of the car and walking around it and being able to study each section is awesome. At max graphics, the cars feel very real, even though the VR headsets might not be able to pull every detail of the texture. Only the mirrors break the illusion, they look really fake, but everything else looks great. Seriously, drive around in an open top convertible in Spa and you will feel fantastic.

The games in this sub-genre (Project Cars 2/GT/etc.) sit in a middling place between the virtual and real. And this is really where the problems with these games exist. Because if you read the sim fans talk about these games, you will see an almost fanatical devotion to the mechanics of the car. One forum post details how the developers weren’t able to replicate the exact time on a specific track because the car lost traction on a specific turn, so the developers went to the car manufacturer to get the exact algorithm that it used to move the wings/spoilers until they finally got it down. Talk about attention to detail! And you will see pages upon pages of discussion about tire modelling and why one sim is superior to another about various aspects of the physics around driving lol. And props to the Kunos team, I am sure they have managed to model more mechanics than I would have the patience for (except for collisions, which surely would be fun?).

So cool, we got some really detailed piece of machinery. But really, why in a track? The only reason people have tracks in the real world is because there are significant consequences to breaking the speed limit! If you get caught, it’s jail time, and even if you don’t, there are real consequences to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up at 200 mph! But this is a virtual world! There are no consequences at all to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up a couple of virtual lives! The reason they didn’t is exactly because of this insane devotion to the physics of the car can only be compared the car 1:1 in a track. You can track the performance down to the millisecond in those closed tracks. And there are indeed videos of people driving in reality and virtually… and it seems almost frame perfect.

But you just can’t get away from the fact that most track driving sucks, at least visually. The sheer superiority of driving in an open road with fantastical environments cannot be understated, especially when lacking the real physics (on your body) of cornering at the limits of the car. The virtual needs to be more alluring than the real exactly because of all the other factors it lacks. And even if we assume it is out of their budget, unfortunately, their actual tracks aren’t that impressive either. Look at a codemasters game vs. this and you can immediately see the lack of detail. In these games I usually try to find some tracks I enjoy driving in for the sheer pleasure of driving in gorgeous tracks, I just don’t get much pleasure out of setting lap times. There are only a few here, Spa being the easy stand out.

This is where I really wish it was a DRIVING game and not a racing game. Because I love cars, I can feel all the things that it’s missing. Where are the fantastic landscapes to drive through? Where is the sound of the insane rush of wind on a convertible? A car with a 1000 horse power is the sound of EXPLOSIONS in front of you driving you forward to an unfathomable speed, the shockwaves rumbling across your bones. The crackle of the engine and the exhaust. I do not feel this with most of the cars I have driven, although to be fair to AC, it does vary widely with cars.

To summarize, for sim fans, this is absolutely a solid simulation. Get one of those Fanatec wheels that can put out 50 lbs/ft of torque and you might even consider it good training for real driving. But as someone who is in it for the graphics and who really loves the DRIVING aspect of racing, I just want to feel like Bond driving an Aston Martin, there are quite a few things I wish it had. However, my experience was still positive just for the sheer enjoyment of VR and being one of the first games that really went balls to the walls in terms of the graphical fidelity of the cars in VR (check out those metallic reflection on the hood of the car, absolutely insane detail). It’s just a shame that we can’t get the advanced physics simulation of something like AC/PC into an open world like GTA.

PS: If you don't wanna bang around a game with crap UI, PC2 has a much more intuitive system. But it also has some trade offs. More to come in a PC2 review. Also, I wasn't really impressed by the career mode in these games. So make of that what you will.

This is the best melee combat made in VR currently. I can't believe it's taken this long to have combat with collisions with shields, weapons and bodies. It's just thrilling to actually be able to use actual martial techniques from real life, completely relying on physics instead of abstract hit points. It finally feels like a game liberated from the old 2D gaming conventions. The other positive is that the brutality in this game is both comical and enjoyable, it's kinda like having the ability to do glory kills from For Honor or cool execution supers for realz.

The combat would be even better if the weapon got stuck in the bones and the flesh of the people and you had to rip it out, or seeing bones fracture when you hammer them, or decapitations. That and armor and horseback would make this really fun. The game needs to handle things better for throwing (setting up your sword/spear/dagger to throw is very finicky), and needs to make momentum, leverage, and mass matter (no, you can't block a sword or an axe with a dagger). But you can get around some of it's issues with some finagling due to the ability to slow down time.

The reason I would put this over Creed: Path to Glory and Thrill of the Fight is because you can move around and actually get around people, flank them, and distance yourself. You can even grapple to a limited extent. On top of that is the friends v. mercenaries combat, which is much more entertaining than 1v1s. And I would put it over the rest of the "melee combat games" (including Skyrim) for trying to have actual physics and collisions instead of an archaic HP system. Plus, it's a lot more fun to ♥♥♥♥ around with weapons. I would put this over Gorn purely on aesthetics and having a halfway decent collision system. If they can figure out co-op and create an actual campaign like Mount and Blade, I might just give up on reality for a while. Or a multiplayer experience like Vermintide would work too, I guess. Too bad we can't expect anything substantial with this because of the indie developer syndrome, but it is what it is.

P.S. I hear the developer is trying to make the game more HP based like the rest of these melee games. I hope it doesn't happen! Work on armor if you want these enemies to last longer!