Recent reviews by Sherlock

Best game of 2024 easily.

Far more accessible and dynamic than other pve games like vermintide. Community is periodically wholesome.

Almost enjoyed it. But too many systems are working against you.

Cons:
1- Only about half of the keys are remappable. Which means the other half can't be remapped either because they overlap with the unremappable ones. Why?!
2- The environment seems designed for close quarters. There are very few places with sight lines. This means you'll likely use your sniper rifle for in-close combat, since the other options aren't quiet. Makes for not a fun sniping experience.
3- Enemies spend a LOT of time in cover when alerted. This makes #2 especially bad since the lack of good sniping spots means you can't really reposition. So, instead you sit and wait.
4- The character controller is sloppy. It has too much inertia and reacts oddly to terrain that doesn't have scripted handholds. You essentially feel like you're babysitting a drunkard as you navigate the terrain.

Pros:
1- Sniping feels good. In fact, all the guns so far feel nice. This part is really well done. Too bad the environment prevents the rifles from being fun.
2- The free-form objectives system is interesting. Though the levels feel a little too closed-in for it to feel sandboxy.

Anyways... it feels like the team that was working on game mechanics might have said something that upset the team that did the environment design. Because the latter almost feels purpose-built to sabotage the former.

Left mouse shoots the right gun. Right mouse shoots the left gun.

They built this for console.

Absolutely awesome. Been waiting for a new proper Castlevania for years. It's even got the same style of music! Soooo goood.

Also, a personal thank you for not doing something scummy with the Epic store. I know it's an Unreal-based game, and the deal would have been especially tempting.

The best utility if you have an oculus. This lets you work around the BS facebook main screen and the crappy/incomplete Steam VR UI.

When you put on the headset and launch to the BS mandatory facebook screen, you can launch Virtual Desktop from there, even if you bought it on Steam. From there, you can get to your desktop steam UI and launch your games from there in their correct Oculus mode, which isn't always accessible from Steam's VR UI.

This means you can launch games like X-Rebirth VR without taking off your headset twice (once to launch steam, and once to launch the game with the correct executable, which cant be done in steam vr)

Added more bugs, and made it harder to mod them out. Keyboard isn't remappable without introducing serious interface issues. The menu highlight bug that's been in since original-skyrim 1.0 is still there.

They didn't even bother to hook into windows APIs enough to have the program respond to events during loading screens (causing program not responding boxes to pop up) or handle perfectly standard events like volume up/down events or even alt-f4.

This is what you get when a game company hires all artists and no programmers. Content without function.

Best. Game. Ever.