Recent reviews by DESCRIBE HIM TO ME

Oh god I wanted to like this so bad. But it just kinda sucks. I almost feel bad writing a negative review of it because the goal of "tarkov, but streamlined and in space" is a worthy one and it's definitely realized! The problem is just that tarkov *also* sucks, which has created a kind of suckage-vacuum from which Marauders cannot escape.

See, tarkov is an incredibly clunky game. Its menu is the worst offender, but the movement and shooting follow suit. I believe this is intentional, given how many of its vocal fans have touted that very thing as part of what makes it "hardcore" in my general experience. Copying tarkov's menu flaw-for-flaw is an incredibly strange choice for a game that ostensibly wants to be more approachable. But the menus aren't really the issue here, are they? It's a deeper issue, and ultimately it's one intertwined with the game's marketability. You see, Marauders doesn't know what it wants to be.

Its maps are small and intentionally cramped to drive fast, action-filled matches! But its menus are slow and its shortcuts unintuitive (whose bright idea was it to put "crouch" and "quickloot" on the same button?) so players who aren't already familiar with tarkov get bogged down during the looting phase. Small maps mean veterans from other FPS genres will win the initial fight, but won't survive the raid unless they take an overall loss on equipment. I can learn to deal with this! But you know who can't? The faster, snappier CoD-a-like FPS players that this game is trying to bridge the gap towards out of the land of extraction-shooters.

The weapons make incredible sounds and feel punchy and powerful when the shots land, and although recoil is high, learning to mitigate is not unreasonably challenging. But slow, realistically timed reloads and the lack of a dedicated melee button creates more opportunities for faster-paced veterans to get bogged down in the tarkovness of it all.

Space flight is on a fixed axis and uses only a few, easy to understand buttons. Score! But weapons are projectile-based and the shots disappear immediately in the visual clutter of deep space, making it extremely difficult to ascertain lead-times without detailed inspection. Yet another way Marauders can't let go of its desire to feel like a "realistic" shooter like tarkov.

Do you kind of see the theme here? I hope so, because I don't really want to keep going. The places where Marauders strays most from tarkov are, ironically, its best qualities. Conceptually, it's killer. But its inability to let tarkov's influence go is strangling it on the vine. You can see this for yourself in steamcharts. The population fluctuates, but no longer reliably averages over 700 worldwide. And, ultimately, it's this population problem that threads all the little fibrous flaws together into a negative overall sentiment on my part: because the game is driving away its casual audience, the only people playing it are too good for a slow trickle of fresh players to enter. This is a deathroll. I don't think Marauders will survive it.

I've seen this happen before. Titanfalls 1 and 2 are the biggest names, I think, to have had this problem. APB: Reloaded is a much more niche - and much more egregious - example. And those games do still exist, technically. But even player influxes from sales hemorrhage quickly, and it's core principles to their designs that are directly driving away the very audience of vaguely-interested casuals needed to keep the beast afloat.

I got Marauders on sale and still refunded it, because not only is it not enjoyable now, I'm pretty sure it's not going to survive the process of becoming enjoyable - a process which I have no faith in the developer's ability to fulfill, currently. It's not a lot of money, but I don't want to quite literally buy into a dying ecosystem. If nothing else, the time I would spend gitting gud so as to compete with the existing community is worth more than Marauders. Which sucks. Because this game is rad as hell and I wanted to like it so bad. Space piracy is such a cool concept.

I wanna die a little every time I play this game. sure is fun scoring those +250 long range headshots though. *ping.* down, boy.

the fun comes from making the game less fun for other people

I can't believe I spent twenty minutes sliding my mouse forward on my desk.

Update 31.5, Angels of the Zariman, is the final straw for me. It makes me sad, because I did truly love Warframe. Look at my hours logged. I bought a Founder's pack way back in the day, one of the expensive ones, too. I've put probably a grand or so into this game. Nearly every hour spent in it, I loved. But quite frankly, U31.5 is just kind of representative of a downhill slope the game has been on for the last four years.

2018 was the last year that Warframe updates were good. In late 2018, DE added the second open world. Placed on Venus and centered around a hub social zone called Fortuna, this new open world zone would be the last update that Warframe received without a curling of the monkey's paw - though even Fortuna was not a completely safe release. Alongside the new zone, a new class of "modular" secondary weapons was also added that introduced significant power creep in a way the game had, until that point, largely avoided. But at the time, it seemed harmless.

Each subsequent update saw an aggressive curling of the monkey's paw. The Lich update was supposed to add dynamic boss enemies a la Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system. Instead it added boss monsters that must be manually spawned by players, and which, for the first three months post-release, had phases in their fight with mandatory player deaths. Yes, you read that correctly - Digital Extremes added a boss fight phase that requires the player to die. The Railjack update was supposed to add complex ship-crewing mechanics for four players, with one at the helm, two on the guns, and one on engineering. This update was also supposed to include an in-depth system for power management within the ship, a la Elite Dangerous. Instead, it added an even clunkier grinding zone that required randos to figure out how to patch holes in the ship lest it explode. The power management system was never added at all. Later updates would add NPCs that can patch the ship's hull, completely eliminating the need for multiple players. The Scarlet Spear event was supposed to add a squad-link functionality that would allow players to send each other benefits across multiple squads - a sort of multi-server buff synchronicity. Instead, it quickly became obvious that the system was obfuscating and fabricating this synchronicity - generating buffs from nothing, and doing nothing with buffs generated by players. The Heart of Deimos update was supposed to add a new open world centered around the game's zombie faction, with a complex ecosystem and new mission sets involving pilotable mechs a la Titanfall. Instead, it added an even smaller open world than the previous two, with more frustrating ecological mechanics, and tiny mechs that are (a) a giant grind to obtain, and (b) literally only useful in content that is gated off until you obtain one.

Do you see the pattern here? Digital Extremes comes up with an idea, they market and sell that idea, then they present "content" that is at best a baleful shadow of what was promised.

Angels of the Zariman takes this issue to its logical conclusion. Core to Warframe's gameplay is a duality between the Warframe equipped, and the Operator character used to control it. The player is encouraged to regularly swap between them in-combat; this system is meant to be quick, fluid, and flashy. Angels of the Zariman was supposed to make this system more fluid, give the Operator character more abilities and use-cases, and generally allow quicker and more convenient swapping between the two. Instead, it completely gutted the Operator's skillset, added a (frankly, bizarre) cooldown on swapping between Operator and Warframe, deleted significant amounts of player progress with zero rebate, and added *nothing.*

Angels of the Zariman is the culmination of Digital Extremes' boneheaded decision-making over the years. At this point all I can assume is that it is intentional sabotage. The people in charge of the title must, I can only assume, have grown bored of working on the game and are now trying to drive enough people out that they can shut it down without breaching their contract with Tencent. Oh yeah, did I mention Tencent bought DE? Because they very much did - right around 2018, actually. But don't think too hard about that, friend. That'd be Sinophobic.

EDIT: My hours have changed since posting this review. It is not because I have changed my mind, it is because I have failed.

It's fun, and more importantly, they got Rick Hunter back. I'll probably update this later with a real review. Or maybe I won't. Maybe you should buy it solely on the merit of Rick Hunter's voice work. Maybe God is real. Maybe pigeons spread deadly viruses. Maybe I can make a hybrid human-ant baby by squirting my load on an ant-hill. The world is full of wonder and mystery.

Don't buy this idiot crap. It won't boot, throwing an error that "Windows 10 version 1909 (build 18363 / codenamed 19h2 / November 2019 update) is required to run this application." Thing is? I updated Windows 10 before I even tried to launch the game. I'm as up-to-date as it gets, but whatever friggin' moron designed this garbage decided to put a version check over it instead of, y'know, LETTING IT TRY TO RUN AND POTENTIALLY CRASH. Perfect stability, at the cost of totally screwing seemingly random people! Absolutely bugnuts. Stay away.

This game is only fun if you have crippling ADHD. Did you enjoy watching the head-ache inducing CGI ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that was the entire Marvel franchise? Well get ready for 8-12 hours of the same. Combat is a frenetic mess of mechanics glued together with less tact than a cat assembling a hairball, the maps are all impossible-to-navigate piles of quivering daemonic flesh, and the movement system feels stiff and janky. No part of it is fun. Not even the soundtrack is worth this mess. Want more of Doom 2016? Play it again. Don't play this. I feel like my experience with Doom 2016 has been retroactively made worse after touching this steaming pile of garbage.

It's good. I'd write a long-winded writeup, but if you're already looking at the page, you're gonna buy it. Just play it.

Game seems pretty well designed, but the wall-running is so clunky that I'd go ahead and call it borderline busted. Wound up alt+f4ing out of the tutorial out of frustration. Half the time the wallrun trigger doesn't latch, leaving you plummeting into the abyss, and the other half of the time the jump command doesn't work properly when dismounting from the wall, leaving you plummeting into the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ abyss. ♥♥♥♥ this ♥♥♥♥.

Boneworks is a VR-only semi-linear first person shooter in the vein of Half Life and Doom. While each level contains only one entrance and one exit, the levels themselves are relatively large, with lots of hidden rooms and secrets (more on those later). The minute-to-minute gameplay involves managing where on your body you wish to store items and weapons, looting crates for ammo/money, and shooting various flavors of enemies. Every facet of the game is masterfully crafted, and it would be a steal at twice the price.

It's a shooter, and guns make for the flashiest gameplay trailers, so I'll start there. The weapons are simply phenomenal. The way the hands grab and interact with the weapons is masterfully done. Like Pavlov, each weapon has realistic reload mechanics that require the player to load the magazine and ♥♥♥♥ the weapon to use it. Magazines can be removed with rounds still chambered, slides can be racked until all the bullets fall out of your weapon, and panicking during a mid-combat reload can lead to embarassingly firing a weapon with no round chambered. The sound design for the weapons is meaty and makes them feel *very* good to use.

The combat itself is nearly perfect as well. Enemies flinch from impacts and ragdoll in a satisfying way, lending each shot a sense of real weight and heft. Gun-wielding enemy attacks are telegraphed using uniquely colored weapon laser sights. If this is a turnoff, don't worry: the AI is fairly intelligent, and they *will* flank and gank you. Remaining situationally aware is critical during fights. The combat feels dangerous in that regard, but it rarely feels cheap or unfair. I would be remiss if I did not include some nitpicks, however, and there are some things about combat that feel janky. Most of the game world is composed of physics objects, and the AI's ability to detect line-of-sight through tiny cracks and holes in prop geometry can lead to some frustrating scenarios where you'll be crouched behind cover, unable to identify where you're being shot from. This, however, is a very minor issue in a combat system that otherwise takes full advantage of the VR platform.

Levels are relatively large and open ended, filled with hidden paths, secrets, and little bits and pieces of lore. Environmental storytelling is the real name of Boneworks' game, and you'll frequently find graffiti and other things that play the story out and hint at a greater narrative. Each secret offers a tangible gameplay benefit as well. All of Boneworks' map secrets do things directly for you. Sometimes they're keys to open alternate or secret paths, sometimes they're weapons, and sometimes they're a little "plastic" bauble to hold for seemingly no reason.

Boneworks' movement mechanics are the first out of any VR title I've seen to do two major things: (1) They take full, and I mean completely full, advantage of the game's level design and (2) they trust the player to figure out and understand how they work. Don't misinterpret my second point to mean there's no tutorial - in fact, there's quite a long one at the beginning of the campaign, and it teaches basic mechanics such as climbing and object manipulation very well. Boneworks' movement is deeper than that, however, so while it does teach you the movement equivalent of, "this is a screwdriver, this is a screw," it doesn't overexplain itself and leaves a lot of things to player curiosity, which is to the game's credit. Discovering and mastering the movement mechanics offers a simple joy that not a lot of VR games get right. The movement also takes full advantage of Boneworks' semi-linear level design. Map secrets are usually only accessible by tinkering with the movement system in some way. Steam has informed me I've run out of space, or you'd get an example here. Suffice to say, you'll climb stuff.

There are good, though less noteworthy, aspects as well. The story is only borderline present, but it's just foreboding enough to lend credence to the game's general creepy atmosphere. In the same way that Half Life was always a particularly macabre action game, and not a horror game, Boneworks is a particularly horror-inspired action game. Enemies hide in corners and behind things to spring upon you if you're not careful, and getting pounced upon by the mechanical headcrabs is genuinely frightening. I had one spring on my face and, unlike Half Life, it actually attached itself and I had to shoot my own face seven or eight times to kill it so I could rip it off. I am not an easily frightened creature, but I got a shot of straight adrenaline from that. In addition to basic enemy behavior, the whole game is dripping with creepy atmosphere, from the sounds to the visuals. Speaking of sound, the soundtrack is quite good. It's got a strong synth influence, and most of it seems to be original compositions, which is pretty cool. Think Half Life 2 but with dynamic, event-based music instead of static map-triggers.

Everything I've described so far more than justifies the $30 price tag. Honestly, I'd feel like I paid a fair price for $60. I love this game, and I easily consider it one of the best shooters of all time. Half Life 2. Titanfall 2. Doom 2016. Boneworks. This game knows exactly what it's doing, and it isn't ashamed for you to see it.

Of course, being human, I've got things about the game that irk me, so here's a short list of nitpicks:
-The nature of a physics-based VR title is that your hands will get caught on things. Sometimes that means you have to fight the controller a little. Sometimes that means your reload-hand got caught on a piece of jagged world geometry and you just dropped your magazine instead of reloading, and now a very angry man has blown your head off.
-Speaking of, the way the game handles death is simply baffling. Map checkpoints are few and far between, and when you die, nothing is reset, you're simply teleported unceremoniously to the last checkpoint. Any currently living enemies will still be alive, and any killed enemies will be dead. Puzzle solutions will still be in place too, though that's really a good thing since, depending on how badly timed your death was, the last checkpoint could be a long walk back. The actual act of dying is a bit odd too, in that when your health drops to zero, there's no indicator that you've died right off the bat. Instead your vision slowly tunnels down into blackness before fading completely, and by slowly, I mean over the course of 8-12 seconds. It's a bit jarring and awkward, and has led to some situations where I've run away from combat muttering "wait, wait, am I dead? did I die?" which is probably not something your players should ever say.
-The physics simulation is *generally* great, but things are of course buggy to some degree, and getting particularly large and bulky props to move like you want them to can be a hassle. Climbing over things without getting your character's feet caught on spare clipping is a bit awkward too, but can be mitigated by crouching, which causes his legs to contract.

Don't let the game's "orangemap" art style fool you, Boneworks is the first VR title I've played that feels like a fully fledged, fully realized concept, without a hint of tech demo. The game's quite long by VR standards, I'm about nine hours in and I'm *pretty* sure I'm approaching the end, but I don't know that for a fact. Shooting and moving are possibly the most satisfying gameplay mechanics I've interacted with in any game, VR or flat, to date. Not merely a hold-over until we get Half Life: Alyx, Boneworks is itself a fully realized spiritual successor to the Half Life franchise.