HIGH Tutorials that help me get better at Lumines.

LOW Visual overload can make it hard to focus.

WTF How is the soundtrack this good?

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everyone, Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com.

I haven’t played a lot of Lumines, historically.

The remastered version from 2018 was my first intro to the series, and honestly… well, I didn’t really enjoy that first pass at it. It felt too loud, both audio and visually, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the horizontal puzzle style. Knowing that the people behind Tetris Effect were also behind Lumines, though, I wanted to give it another shot and see if this new entry was a better way to get into this franchise.

Mea culpa, Lumines — I was wrong about you. (At least in some ways.)

Lumines: Arise is a block dropping puzzle in conversation with Tetris, but rather than the classic tetrominos filling horizontal lines, it instead focuses on asking the player to create 2×2 blocks anywhere on a horizontal plane. Blocks drop from the top of the screen, and players need to move them around in order to create 2×2, 3×3, or larger, in order to score points. A “timeline” moves across the screen and erases any complete blocks it comes across, clearing more room for players to create more blocks, and so on. There is also a rare “chain block” that will allow all linked blocks of the same color to be erased from the timeline, even if they’re not in the shape of a square.

The big mechanical addition to this version is “burst”.

As players create blocks, a meter will fill at the top of the playfield. At any point, players will be able to activate the burst, which then stops blocks from falling for a few moments. If players can create a block during this burst period, it will cause blocks of the opposite color to fly above the screen. Players can continue and make more fly up. All of those blocks come rushing back down once the burst is over, then creating a large chunk of squares to combo with.

Gameplay is broken up into a couple of modes for Arise.

Journey takes players through sets of stages (four or five, normally) with increasing difficulty as things progress. Playlist mode allows players to combine their favorite stages together in a custom order to play, or just to watch if they want to take in the visuals and music. Lastly, there’s multiplayer, which consists of some solo leaderboard competition or battle modes.

I also will shout out the tutorials specifically as Arise tailors them to new players and gives small missions that make it easy to understand and learn not only how to play, but also how to grasp more advanced techniques. These tutorials made me better in a way other puzzle titles haven’t.

At this point in the review, it feels a little like burying the lead to only just now mention the visuals and the music.

Since each stage only has two colors players need to match, this mechanical simplicity allows for some creative and striking ways to keep the play field visually interesting, and the developers lean hard into delivering over-the-top sound and graphics, far above what you might expect for a puzzle title.

One in particular that I enjoyed was a food-themed level. Blocks started as red apples and green melons, but then changed to broccoli and tomatoes as I got further in, while classical string music played in the background. Another had orbs of fish and hermit crab shells that changed color to reflect the sun setting on the beach landscape behind the playfield while listening to slow, smooth pop vocals. The visuals and music combine masterfully to pull players into Arise on a level above just block-matching, and it eats up time in a way that hasn’t happened to me in a long while.

With that said, some of the levels do get overwhelming as previous versions of the game. However, there is a moment of pause and the music fades out between each song, giving a welcome break to catch your breath and reset before going into the next stage. There are also a wealth of accessibility options that allow players to adjust any of the visual stimuli including background effects, particle effects on the playfield, and so on. If it’s too much to take in visually, it can be turned down.

While my memories of playing it in the past weren’t great, the masterful music and visual presence combined in Lumines: Arise really turned me around on the series. It’s not one to miss!

For me, Lumines: Arise gets 8.5 blocks exploding into glitter out of 10.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Enhance and Monstars, Inc. and published by Enhance. It is currently available on PS5, PSVR2 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 6.5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. Around 1 hour was spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E and contains Mild Fantasy Violence.  The blocks will explode into particles on screen, fantasy violence amounts to spiders and snakes that fight each other in the background (but these can be turned off in accessibility menus).

Colorblind Modes: There are multiple colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Sound is not needed to complete the game. Captions for character dialogue can be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls are completely remappable.

The post Lumines Arise VIDEO Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The first game where checking the chamber of my gun has a skill ceiling.

LOW The “worm worm worm worm worm worm worm” scene.

WTF Five headshots and an enemy still gets back up. Really?!?

The Metro post-apocalyptic series set in an irradiated, ruined Russia is a perfect fit for a VR experience – its intimate encounters, unwieldy (yet powerful) weapons, and horror-adjacent vibes all suit VR well. Plus, Metro Awakening is by the folks behind classic VR hits like Arizona Sunshine and After The Fall. When it popped up on my radar, it sounded like a dream come true! 

Mechanically, Awakening is a first-person shooter with stealth elements, light survival mechanics, and a emotionally compelling prequel story featuring one of the most beloved characters in the franchise, Khan.

Khan is an influential, mystically-inclined veteran of the titular Metro’s many struggles. After the bombs fell during World War 3, Khan was one of the few doctors still alive. Awakening focuses on showing how he went from a rational medical professional to the spiritualist most players first met in Metro 2033. There’s a lot of potential here that doesn’t get used, but it’s undeniably intriguing as a starting premise.

Sadly, instead of shedding light on events in this seminal series, I found a depressing nightmare worthy of Russian poetry. I wasn’t whisked away into the tunnels of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s beautiful apocalyptic nightmare. No, I was met with an abominable combination of the most underwhelming VR gameplay I’ve experienced in quite some time, combined with the small scope and the limited vision of a lesser spin-off title.

For those who haven’t played the mainline non-VR Metro games, they offer handcrafted worlds that pride themselves on attention to detail — they’re living, breathing worlds, with environments dotted by flourishes placed there simply because the developers thought they’d be cool. Very few assets are repeated in obvious ways, ensuring cohesive verisimilitude in aesthetics, remaining novel in every area.

The main titles also offer clever mechanical nuances like the bullet-based economy system that rewards stealth but grants brief moments of empowerment whenever the player is “rich” with bullets. The morality system is more complex than simply choosing to help an old lady across the street or kicking her into traffic, and there’s an inherent emphasis against violent force unless absolutely necessary. Worlds and systems like these possess the kind of depth that VR games are often still struggling to achieve. With a working blueprint to start from, Metro Awakening should’ve had most of this already solved.

Unfortunately, Metro Awakening has somehow failed to learn from the lessons laid out before it.

Here in VR, every combat encounter is unavoidable, and I’m often locked in claustrophobic spaces that offered, at best, an optional vent to flank enemies.

The levels can be so linear that I almost feel as though I’m on rails.

Combat itself is poorly implemented and enemy AI is absent, with foes often beelining straight towards me the second they were alerted.

Morality? Awakening has never heard of it.

Civilian areas are glorified loading screens between combat encounters.

Environmental assets are clearly copy-pasted, sometimes within minutes of each other.

Throughout Metro Awakening, the campaign kept trying to sell me mundane moments masquerading as intense thrills — things like random horror movie strings playing when there’s nothing to scare me besides another dead body after already seeing hundreds, or a room filled with two armed enemies — not a challenging hazard to get past. In another section, falling just a few feet (something Khan does regularly) causes enough ‘frightening’ damage to require use of a health item because someone scripted it so.

These banalities could possibly be forgiven if Khan’s means of surmounting obstacles were interesting, but they’re not. Too many puzzles grind down to flipping switches in a particular order after using his handcrank flashlight charger, and it takes over two hours before the player is offered anything other than a handgun and AK-47, and the later additions to their arsenal are far from exciting.

Meanwhile, the most reliable stealth option is punching enemies in the back of the head, which works most of the time, unless an enemy somehow becomes punch-proof and immediately starts shooting back with laser precision. Then I found I couldn’t move bodies, further undercutting the stealth. It’s as though years of genre refinements were either cut or went unaccounted for.

Not content to be mechanically disappointing, Awakening‘s script falls equally flat.

For a series known for its poetic, moving storytelling, this narrative is incredibly boring. In a post-Half-Life: Alyx world, how do developers repeat obvious mistakes like forcing players to listen to exposition while locked in a room with nothing to do for several minutes at a time while someone just talks? This is a mistake the mainline Metro games tried to avoid, often by having players travel to a location while talking.

Further, there are unskippable cutscenes where camera control is completely taken away from the player, sometimes going so far as to show the camera drifting out of Khan’s head, as if he’s having an out of body experience. It’s disorienting, to say the least, even for someone with a fair amount of VR experience like me, and anyone with a weak stomach should bear this in mind. There was also a recurring issue with subtitles oddly lagging and resetting my camera’s position, forcing me to shut them off entirely for smoother performance.

There’s simply no heart in Awakening. It’s a sad experience when looking back, and the biggest praise I have is that each gun makes it easy to check if ammo is already chambered, with the risk of popping out a spare round if not handled delicately.

If every element of Metro Awakening were on par with the reloading, it’d be one of the best VR games of the year. Instead, I struggle to imagine who this experience is for. I’m a longtime fan, and after spending time with it, all I have is a list of complaints about how the previous Metro style has been sanded down to nothing. I can only imagine new players being lost on its lore while finding gameplay that comes off like a blander version of every other shooter on the market. It’s not even a technical or graphical showcase. Instead, it feels like a product.

The Metro series is an incredible, harrowing journey with moving ruminations on the human condition. Metro Awakening is… not.

Final Score: 4 out of 10 

Disclosures: This game is developed by Vertigo Games and published by Deep Silver. It is currently available on PC VR, Meta Quest and PSVR 2. This copy of Metro Awakening was provided via publisher and reviewed on Meta Quest 3. Approximately 5 hours were dedicated to the single-player campaign, and it was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents:  This game is Rated M by the ESRB for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, and Use of Drugs and Alcohol. This one is not for the kids — both because of how likely they are to feel their stomachs turn, and because of the dark nature of the Metro universe. Graphic depictions of violence, lots of swearing, horrific monsters, and even a story beat involving human traffickers are all factors to consider. There’s also a substantial amount of leaning on arachnophobia in later sections.

Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available. This could be a problem with the stealth meter displayed on Khan’s watch, which dims in color when he isn’t visible to enemies. There are also very bright splashes and flashes of red when taking damage, and some strobe light effects.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are multiple subtitle configuration options for several languages, including the optional feature to enable an indicator of which character is speaking. Barring the glitches mentioned above with the subtitles, it’s a reasonable experience to play without sound. However, since there are audio cues which do not have visual indicators, I have to say that it’s not fully accessible.

Remappable controls: This game offers partially remappable controls. Players can swap dominant hands and adjust certain movement options, like automating climbing ladders, instant teleport jumping/falling, and select from multiple types of turning. There is no ability to alter the turn rate speed, which is oddly high and may further jar players.

The post Metro Awakening Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

TRANSCRIPT:

Is that hyperbole? Absolutely. But it’s not without truth at its core — after all, DOOM 3 VR had the potential to not only be a great game — which it is, when played with an AIM controller — but also to send out a clear message that classic First Person Shooters can have new life if brought to VR.

Really, it’s a no-brainer — they’re already in first-person, so conversion isn’t absurdly complicated the way it was with Resident Evil 4, and paired with the right control scheme, they’re all just as playable now as they were when originally released. The biggest obstacle for most games is finding a way to make menus and maps work naturally.

Of course, all of this is predicated on getting that control scheme right — modern VR control schemes have a distressing lack of buttons. The PSVR move controllers lack thumbsticks which makes moving around the game world a chore, while the Vive, Index, and Oculus controllers do have thumbsticks, but also a dearth of buttons. So long as the player merely has to shoot enemies things are fine, but add in inventory management, movement modes, and environmental interaction, and the controllers prove inadequate.

Here’s my attempt to play Doom 3 VR with a Dual Shock 5. As you can see, for some reason the gun hovers in the air approximately where the camera is placed, and although it’s kind of funny to watch imps charge at me before getting unexpectedly shot in the back of the head, this is obviously unworkable.

Now let’s see the Dual Shock 4 — the aiming is at least functional here, but it’s awkward as hell. Tilting a controller to target enemies is counterintuitive and slow, and especially rough when trying to deal with fast-moving enemies. So, unless the player has access to an aim controller which allows for free movement, easy menu and environmental interaction, and accurate aiming, the game is a complete waste of time.

The tragedy here is that the problem of how to play a VR first person shooter with a console controller has already been solved years ago. I give you Resident Evil 7, also on the PSVR.

It’s playable both flat and in VR with the exact same control scheme — the only difference is that the right thumbstick only turns Ethan’s body left and right, it doesn’t cover looking up and down. Everything else is the same except for the aiming, which the VR mode handles by (and I know this sounds crazy!) letting the player look at the thing they want to shoot. That’s it.

If they’re not pressing the aim button they fire wildly in the direction of the thing they’re looking at, if they press the aim button, an aimpoint appears on the screen and they fire at that. The system works perfectly, and it makes Resident Evil 7 a pleasure to play in VR — it has all of the depth of the main game, but the shooting is infinitely better because looking is, obviously, much easier than fiddling around with a thumbstick.

This control scheme could be tacked onto any already-existing FPS, transforming nearly any game into a fantastic experience — I’ve played a bunch of Doom 3VR and stalking around the Mars base is magnificent in VR. If only it wasn’t locked away for anyone who doesn’t have an AIM controller!

Also, the game doesn’t have subtitles. This is inexplicably hostile to the hearing impaired, and the developers should really do better. Here is a couple of seconds of a 90-second sequence of me standing in front of a screen, having no idea what a guy is saying, because I didn’t have headphones on. Could I have just put headphones on? Yeah, but there’s plenty of people who don’t have that option, and this should have been taken care of.

So this is my request to people who own the classic FPSs – I’m talking about your Urban Chaos: Riot Response and literally nothing else. I mean, I’m sure there’s Halo and whatnot, but who cares – Urban Chaos: Riot Response – the best console-only first-person shooter ever made!

Please look into this! It doesn’t matter if they’re low-poly worlds. Doom 3 doesn’t look as good as a modern game, but just being in that world in VR, as long as all of the art is internally consistent, is an incredible experience. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be all-encompassing, and the VR sells it all on its own. So, get us more retro FPSs in VR, and just let us look to aim. You’d be surprised how many people will be knocking down your door to doors to play these ancient games — and, of course, the real one that everyone wants… Can we get No One Lives Forever in VR?

That would be fantastic.

The post DOOM 3VR IS THE WORST GAME I PLAYED IN 2021 appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Getting a scope shot from 250 meters away.

LOW Fighting against technical limitations on PSVR.

WTF That’s a strange replacement for Swastikas everywhere!

There wasn’t a moment of Sniper Elite VR that didn’t feel familiar to me. Sniping German officers from church towers like a holy avenging angel, infiltrating rail yards to sabotage infrastructure, having run-and-gun battles through bombed-out villages — everything it has to offer, I’ve already seen in Sniper Elite 4. Literally, in most cases, because the game is built almost entirely from assets snagged from it. That said, if a game is going to be made out of recycled assets, this is the way to do it.

A first-person VR take on Sniper Elite 4, Sniper Elite VR starts in the 1980s as a now-elderly partisan spends his days reminiscing about the bloodshed he was responsible for while taking Italy back from the fascists, and attempting to convince himself that it was all worth it because it created a comparatively safe and free world for his children to grow up in. It’s a hell of a framing device to come back to between each mission of virtual reality sniping, because the game is constantly reminding the player of the stakes of each mission.

It’s impressive how thoroughly the developers have recreated the Sniper Elite experience in VR — this isn’t merely a stationary shooter where the player perches on a series of rooftops and kills their targets. No, players will be taking on nearly all of the activities one would expect from a SE game like sneaking through enemy lines, executing soldiers with their silenced Welrod pistol, and sabotaging generators to give them audio cover while they snipe enemy soldiers.

The only thing that doesn’t feel completely Sniper Elite is the stealth, which is a little on the awkward side. There’s a reason that most stealth games tend to have a third-person perspective — the ability to follow enemy movements while remaining in cover is integral to an accessible stealth experience. SEVR does a good job of keeping things playable by not packing levels full of enemies whenever stealth is a necessity, but they’re consistently the most difficult sections to play because of the limited perspective.

Thankfully, Sniper Elite VR‘s sniping is impeccably tuned. There’s a wide variety of rifles, and the devs go to great lengths to adhere to realism as much as possible. True to their historical counterparts, the rifles all have fixed-range scopes — the only zooming possible is when the player uses their ‘focus’ meter to slow down time and perfect their aim, and even that only lasts a few seconds. The vast majority of sniping takes place in the 100-250 meter range, though, so it shouldn’t be too taxing. There’s even an easy mode that turns bullet drop off and makes every bullet hit the center of the crosshairs.

As usual, there’s also a red dot sight that shows where a bullet will hit before the trigger is pulled, effectively teaching players how to compensate for bullet drop in case they ever want to play the game on a higher difficulty level. The developers even added a red circle that lets players see where their SMG and pistol rounds are going to hit for people uncomfortable with VR aiming — in a nod to realism, the aimpoint only appears if they physically raise the gun up to their eye level and look down the sights. Essentially, every aim support in the game is designed to get the player comfortable enough with the controls so that they won’t have to use them any more.

In a slightly bizarre move, the developers have made the decision to include their famous ‘bullet cam’ sequences — when the player makes a particularly skillfull shot, the camera will follow the bullet through the air on the way to its target, then show the bullet tearing the enemy’s body apart in excruciating detail. My objection isn’t to the brutality on display — I’ve long since made my peace with this aspect of the franchise — but instead, the issue is in how these bullet-cam sequences break the flow of gameplay in a way they never did in non-VR iterations.

In a regular Sniper Elite, when the bullet cam ends, the player is returned to the moment they fired, aiming at the exact same point when they pulled the trigger. In VR, if the player moves their hands even slightly while watching the violent execution, it’s impossible to predict where they’ll be looking when the camera snaps back. This loss of situational awareness got me killed more than once, and after struggling against it for the better part of an hour, I did the unthinkable and turned off the X-Ray camera.

Apart from this issue, I ran into a few fairly serious technical problems while playing the game. For example, when playing with a Dual Shock, instead of letting the player aim with their eyes as in Resident Evil 7‘s VR mode, the developers expect players to awkwardly lift their controllers in front of their faces. It’s a disaster.

The Aim controller makes sniping feel much more natural since I was actually holding a ‘rifle’ up to my shoulder to shoot, and the thumbsticks ensure that navigating levels is a breeze. Trying to use pistols or picking up items feels unnatural, though, so it’s a tradeoff.

The Move controllers let the player realistically grab things in the environment, wield a pistol in each hand, and manually throw grenades, so if immersion is important, that’s the way to go. That said, the biggest problem with the PSVR is an issue of lag. Not only did I have an unusually large amount of drift, but there was a slight lag between my real-life movement and actions happening in-game. It wasn’t much more than a quarter-second, but in VR any delay is extremely noticeable. I also played the game on Vive with motion controllers and experienced none of these issues — if it’s possible, PCVR is the best way to play.

Sniper Elite VR has scrunched down everything great about the series and created a near-perfect recreation that players can now experience from the inside.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Just Add Water and published by Rebellion. It is currently available on PC/PS4/PS5. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC and PS5. Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: The game was rated M by the ESRB, and it contains, Blood, Intense Violence, Language. There’s some mild swearing in the game, but as usual, the main reason to keep kids way from the game is the omnipresent hyper-gore that happens whenever a bullet explodes someone’s eye.

Colorblind Modes: There are colorblind modes for the game’s subtitles, allowing players to choose the main and background colors that are most visible to them.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be be altered and/or resized. I played much of the game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. While there’s no enemy radar, there are onscreen indicators to let players know which directions they’re being fired at from. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. There is no control diagram. The game can be played with a DS4, Aim Controller, or Move controllers on Playstation, and with Motion controllers on PC.

The post Sniper Elite VR Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Playing in VR.

LOW Not playing in VR.

WTF How did it take EA so long to do something cool with this franchise?

Star Wars Squadrons provides what might be the strongest before-and-after case for VR we’ve yet seen. It’s fundamentally the same game either way, yet my recommendation rests entirely on the hardware that the prospective buyer intends to play it on.

On a TV or monitor, Squadrons feels like the budget title that it is. It looks great and plays smoothly, but there’s nothing here that we haven’t seen in a thousand other Star Wars games or a thousand other space flight titles. The low-energy story campaign feels like it exists purely as a tutorial for the multiplayer mode, which itself consists of a measly two variants — one of which is a stock-standard deathmatch. It’s a scant offering even for a reduced price tag.

In VR, however, Squadrons takes on an entirely new shape. The cockpit instruments that did little more than reduce visibility in flat mode suddenly envelop the player, making them a more direct part of this universe than any game prior. Sights and sounds that we’ve grown accustomed to, like the bright colors of cannon fire or the whining of a TIE fighter’s engines, are redefined upon having a physical presence all around us. VR elevates Squadrons from something we’ve seen countless times before to something we’ve never seen before.

Following a brief prologue concurrent with the events of A New Hope — in which a unit of TIE pilots is betrayed by the only guy without a British accent — the story unfolds after the destruction of the second Death Star, jumping in perspective between both sides of the war. The Imperials cling to what little power they still have, while the freshly-christened New Republic are working on a secret project that will hopefully finalize their victory once and for all.

Those expecting a modern successor to the X-Wing series may be disappointed, as Squadrons is light on the space sim elements aside from the ability to focus power on engines, weapons or shields. Although the campaign does an adequate job of introducing players to the few advanced mechanics (like drifting), Squadrons isn’t complex enough to make its story mode worth a playthrough for learning purposes alone.

Meanwhile, those expecting an exciting new chapter in the Star Wars saga will find a frustrating lack of enthralling setpieces and a cast of characters more distinguishable by their accents than their personalities. Although there’s some joy to the campaign’s dogfights, they’re bogged down by the insistence on returning players to the hangar between missions to engage in one-sided conversations with people we couldn’t care less about.

Ultimately, the campaign is something to test and then forget about in favor of the more immediate thrills in the two multiplayer modes. Thankfully, that’s where Squadrons soars.

Both modes are five-versus-five, pitting New Republic pilots against the Empire. Each side offers four ship classes — the speedy vessels are fragile but can easily outmaneuver attackers, bombers are slow but deal heavy damage, balanced ships have a bit of everything, and support craft are big and sluggish and provide the opposite team with easy kills.

The basic deathmatch mode is self-explanatory, but Fleet Battles is where Squadrons shines. It’s essentially a virtual game of tug-of-war in which the ultimate goal is to destroy the enemy capital ship. The team that’s on the offensive is decided by whoever’s scoring the most points at any given time, and victory involves first blowing through two frigates and then meticulously chipping away at the target ship’s shields and support systems. It’s a large-scale, drawn-out process that feels like something out of a Star Wars movie.

Also, the map design is great. One doesn’t usually associate dogfighting games with “great map design,” but I’m serious. They do a wonderful job of balancing large, open spaces with narrow corridors and tight crevices where players can attempt to lose assailants who then need to weigh whether or not a higher kill count is worth risking colliding with an asteroid or chunk of debris. When paired with a wide array of secondary weapons and countermeasures, dogfights are so much more dynamic than just a bunch of ships firing lasers at each other.

Again, though, it’s going to feel like an awfully slim package for anyone not experiencing it in VR, which pulls players further into this universe than they’ve ever been. We’ve controlled Star Wars ships before, but to see the cockpit instruments physically wrapping around me is a entirely new feeling.

Even better, the ‘tunnel vision’ sensation of playing in first-person on a TV screen is gone in VR, when the massive cockpit window of an X-wing provides substantially more visibility above and to the sides. But even with the much more limited viewing field of, say, a TIE fighter, I was still aided by the unbroken sense of action unfolding in a 3D space around me. When an enemy ship would disappear to my left, I’d still be aware of that ship’s position relative to mine in a way I wouldn’t be in a traditional format. I was frequently the top scorer in Squadrons matches, and I don’t chalk it up to skill — it’s because I was playing in VR.

While Squadrons has likely already come and gone for those who can’t experience it as its best, I can’t overstate just how vital it is for Star Wars fans fortunate enough to play in VR. This is arguably the first productive thing EA has done with the Star Wars franchise — I don’t know what took them so long, but I hope it’s a sign of things to come.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Motive Studios and published by Electronic Arts.It is currently available on PS4, XBO and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via paid download and reviewed on the PS4 with PSVR. Approximately four hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. 20 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Fantasy Violence and Mild Language. Removed of context, the violence itself is relatively harmless, as it just involves ships firing lasers at other ships. However, the campaign does have players playing as an Imperial pilot and occasionally attacking civilian ships at a couple of points throughout the campaign.

Colorblind Modes: There are colorblind modes available in the options for deuternopia, protanopia and tritanopia.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Subtitles are available for all dialogue. Much can be happening in a match and audio cues can absolutely be helpful in locating threats as the player is twisting and flipping along three axes, but there’s enough visual feedback (particularly through the ship’s radar) that they’re not necessary. Squadrons also offers a voice-to-text option for incoming chat, a text-to-voice option for outgoing chat, and a narrated path to accessibility options by default.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls. The Y-axis can be inverted.

The post Star Wars Squadrons Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Freezing a flock of sheep and launching them into the abyss.

LOW Having all of my progress eliminated by glitches.

WTF Walls are people, too!

On paper, The Mage’s Tale is exactly what VR gamers have been wanting–a relatively lengthy, highly interactive RPG with good production values and attractive gameplay. As a spin-off of The Bard’s Tale, it takes dungeon crawling action, combines it with hand-tracked sorcery, and throws in a dash of the irreverent fantasy gags for which the franchise is known. In execution, however, The Mage’s Tale left me wanting more.

As a mage’s apprentice, I was tasked with finding the whereabouts of my master in order to rescue him from the clutches of a rival wizard. However, being a weakling apprentice (a status I was constantly reminded of by my comically-condescending sidekick) I needed to build my strength in a handful of dungeons while tracking down my master’s peers in order to gain their help.

Mage’s is a first-person dungeon crawler, so I cut my teeth on fairly linear levels filled with traps, puzzles, and combat arenas that gave me the opportunity to flex my magical muscles. A bevy of comfort options were available to me, allowing me to smoothly walk or teleport freely around the levels and during combat.

It came as no surprise that a title about mages relies on spellcasting as its primary form of combat. Using the two Move controllers, I could intuitively cast one of four spells equipped in my arsenal, each with their own elemental effect.

Throwing a fireball felt as normal to me as lobbing a baseball, and the ability to lock on to enemies by fixing my gaze on them helped mitigate the inaccuracies inherent with PSVR’s notoriously lacking tracking mechanism. However, the most useful weapon was also its most unreliable: the ice-javelin.

When it worked, I felt like Iceman and Zeus’s lovechild as I hurled quick-traveling spears at groups of enemies, freezing them in their tracks. But when it didn’t work, I was frustrated and oddly humiliated. It was frustrating to dodge enemy fire while waiting for my spell to recharge, only for it to twirl about like a broken baton at my feet. Other times, I’d find myself rearing back to launch a spear and notice that I’d sent a health potion soaring through the sky, leaving me with no hope of finding it until the current battle was finished. Throughout the 12 hours I spent with Mage’s, I never quite figured out what specific recipe of button presses, throws, and releases it expected of me.

The spellcrafting portion was an entertaining-yet-mixed bag. The actual mechanics of crafting a spell never got tiresome — a cauldron in my headquarters was surrounded by ingredients I found during my adventure. I could create my own spells, to a degree, by pouring in a specific elemental attack, dropping in a color potion to alter the visuals, and then adding in modifiers and bonuses to enhance particular parameters. Once all of the ingredients were added in, I stirred up the cauldron and equipped the result.

Some modifiers were simple effects, adding tracking to my attacks or decreasing their recharge time. But some were more powerful and/or humorous. My favorite combination was a fireball that simultaneously turned enemies into a sheep and also exploded with confetti and kazoo fanfare.

With the spellcasting and spellcrafting being (mostly) well-designed, this good work was made somewhat moot by the overall feel of the combat.

I’m not sure if it was due to a lack of variety in enemy encounters, or if it was a result of the stilted, glitchy and unresponsive animation of the enemies, but every fight in the game lacked impact — they lacked any strategy beyond running right at me or standing still and shooting arrows, and they barely reacted when I sent them careening over the edges of cliffs. While they made for decent fodder for my spells, there wasn’t much excitement.

The biggest letdown was a miniboss encounter where I expected a challenge, or even some puzzle-solving in order to overcome the enemy. However, the giant lumbering demon was too slow to catch even my most basic movements, and the reliable method of victory was simply spamming a barrage of seemingly-ineffective attacks until the enemy abruptly died.

Aside from the mundane enemy encounters, the dungeons also included puzzles that ranged from half-to-fully baked. Some toyed with my perspective as I moved from room to room, which is always welcome in a VR title. However, many puzzles devolved into (literally) turning cranks. Also, a majority of puzzles felt glitchy or under-developed, making it hard to determine if my solution was wrong or if the game was having a hard time understanding what was happening.

The glitches came to a head when after solving a puzzle, I had to re-enter the main chamber of a dungeon and fight a handful of enemies. With all exits blocked by a magical barrier, there was no way to escape without defeating the enemies first. Unfortunately, I died and respawned outside the main chamber. The game also respawned the enemies within the chamber, and the barrier as well — I was locked out of the room, and no amount of level-resetting or reloading would save me. I had to start over from the beginning and burn through half of the campaign to regain lost progress.

It’s unfortunate that The Mage’s Tale feels so unfinished. The developers have all the requisite ingredients — experimental combat, entertaining writing, impressive visuals, and interesting environments. They just weren’t able to do the most important part of spellcrafting and mix it all together.

— Alex Pegram

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by inXile Entertainment. It is currently available on PCVR and PSVR.This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PSVR. Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Suggestive Themes and Violence. Most of the violence is a result of magical fighting, with no real gore or reaction taking place. Some environments are a bit unsettling with bones and tissue present, in addition to the overall demonic settings.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game has subtitles for all voiced situations. The game does not rely on audio cues except for when indicating combat — most of the time, the only way I knew enemies were going to be around was because of audible combat music or enemies’ distant noises,and there are no visual cues for these.

Remappable Controls: This game’s controls are not remappable. There is no control diagram. However, there are ample comfort settings, and adjustments available for things such as turning and movement speed options. The game also allows for smooth locomotion or teleportation.

The post The Mage’s Tale Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Finding out what was behind the special locker.

LOW Attempting to play the game on a television.

WTF It really bothers me that the SUV got turned around.

Simulated helplessness is difficult to pull off in a standard videogame. Put the character in chains, lock them away, send them crawling down an endless hallway while they’re irradiated by a submarine’s reactor — the player can sympathize with their avatar’s predicament, but they’re not the trapped one. They’re not helpless. It’s always just a figure on a screen. However, this isn’t a problem that VR has.

By placing the player quite literally behind their character’s eyes, it can easily create the kind of panic that even the best traditional horror games struggle to achieve. There’s something about being able to freely look around a seamless world that cuts through players’ normal defenses — what could be dismissed on a flat screen is harrowing when it’s all around, and removing a VR headset is a much bigger commitment than simply looking away. Intruders is keenly aware of this, and leans on it, hard.

Intruders: Hide and Seek casts players as a young boy on vacation with his family. They’re off to a forest estate for a relaxing weekend, but things quickly take a dark turn when a trio of criminals arrive, tie up the parents, and start demanding something that the family’s patriarch is unwilling to give them. It’ll be up to the player to evade the boy’s pursuers, figure out a way to save his parents, and expose the mysterious motivation of the home invaders.

Luckily, they have some help in the form of the boy’s younger sister, somewhat safely locked away in a secret room, with access to surveillance cameras and a walkie-talkie. I say ‘somewhat’, because the sister needs regular medication, and there’s certainly none in the hideaway, which just adds one more hurdle for the player to overcome. Without spoiling things, it’s safe to say that the story starts out ominous and then grows openly horrific as it rolls on – while things never get explicitly bloody, there’s a darkness here that could disturb more sensitive players.

Intruders gets a lot of mileage out of its main character’s size. As a child — and not a very large one — the player will find themselves faced with a world built for people much larger than them. Doorknobs are set to eye level, furniture looms high above their heads, and everything of interest is placed almost out of reach. Perfectly convenient for an adult, of course, but seated players will find themselves wanting to stand up to get a better look at things, while standing players will find themselves frequently getting up on their tiptoes. The developers have done a brilliant job of building a location that at first glance seems to be utterly commonplace, but by shrinking the player it becomes alien and overwhelming, especially once the lights go out.

So, the gameplay. After a chapter of spending time with the family and getting a sense of the house’s layout, night falls and things get intense. What seemed like a startlingly huge house suddenly becomes claustrophobic once three stalkers are wandering around with flashlights, trying to track the player down, and the titular hide-and-seek works quite well as players listen for the footsteps of the intruders and watch for the beams of their flashlights. Situational awareness is key – every room is littered with furniture that players can duck behind, crawl under, or even open the door of and slip inside, which can lead to a minigame where they have to keep their heartrate under control as intruders close in. The game doesn’t let players set traps or fight off their attackers, so if they fail this one check, or get grabbed during a chase, they’re immediately spirited back to the previous checkpoint.

Over the roughly two-hour campaign, players will find themselves crossing the house four or five times, but it doesn’t get repetitive. With three stories, multiple paths through two of them, and marginally randomized enemy AI pathfinding, players have an incentive to keep trying new ways of sneaking past foes as they move from one objective to the next.

While the core play is tight, that’s only true of the VR version. Intruders can be played on flat televisions, but it absolutely should not be, because of a design choice that doesn’t translate well.

Think of the player’s core – the part that enemies can see via line of sight – as a floating ball of light. While the player can’t look down and see it, it casts light within the game’s world, creating a glow whenever close to a wall or piece of furniture. The game is built around this ball of light, and it’s what players move around with the controller. This works great in VR, because players are encouraged to hide behind walls or objects before leaning around or over to check enemy positions, and it works perfectly – so long as the ball of light is hidden, they’re hidden. In the flat version of Intruders, no leaning is possible. Instead, players have to blindly turn corners and enter rooms, and if the enemies happen to be glancing their way, they’ll be immediately caught. It takes the game from thrilling and intense to profoundly unfair, to the point where I’d say the flat, non-VR version is nearly unplayable.

As a VR experience, however, Intruders is jarring and involving in equal measure. Most importantly, the developers understand how to create the experience of being a child in a high-pressure situation — everything is too big, too scary, and too fast. It’s only by resolve, wit, and bravery that the little boy can survive the night and save his family, and Intruders makes players work for it by putting them through some genuinely frightening situations. There are emotions that only VR can get players to feel, and Intruders is built to push those exact buttons. Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Daedalic Entertainment. It is currently available on PS4. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4 Pro. Approximately 3 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood,Strong Language, and Violence. It’s an intense, violent game, where children are constantly threatened with death. It also features a particularly bleak storyline, so please, keep younger teens away. In addition, you would not believe how much wine this family drinks. It’s madness.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: While the game has subtitles, there’s no captioning to let players know about the sound of approaching or receding footsteps, which will make the gameplay much more difficult. It is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Intruders: Hide And Seek Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The concept’s kinda cool.

LOW The execution certainly isn’t.

WTF It honestly feels like large chunks of the game are simply absent.

This year more than any other, VR has gone out of its way to persuade gamers that it’s more than just a platform designed to shuffle neat-but-limited gimmicks onto our shelves. With titles such as Astro Bot and Tetris Effect proving to be both wondrously immersive experiences and rock solid games at the same time, some of 2018’s VR releases have been some of the best yet. Others, however, very much aren’t. Gungrave VR falls into this latter group.

I wasn’t overly familiar with the IP before playing Gungrave VR, and having finished it, I’ve still no idea what it’s about. Main character Grave looks kinda cool — he’s a dual pistol-wielding undead warrior with a demonic coffin chained to his arms that can be used to annihilate foes, but beyond that… well, there’s barely any storyline throughout, and Grave is shunted from one location to the next with no explanation. One moment he’s gunning down enemies in a city street, then suddenly he’s on a train, then before long he’s off battling a giant mechanical samurai or appearing on a flying bike and taking on a battleship in the sky.

There are two main types of gameplay encountered during Gungrave VR‘s short runtime. The first and better of the two is when it plays as a third-person actioner. There’s a large aiming reticle onscreen which the player aims by looking directly at their target. Grave can roll around to avoid enemies, melee anything that comes into range, score headshots, and initiate one of two special attacks, such as a minigun-style first person sequence or a short-range barrage of bullets. He doesn’t have to reload, but rather vents his guns as they begin to overheat. He can also slow down time briefly if need be, so he’s reasonably well-equipped to deal with his foes. (I’ll get to the second gameplay type in a moment.)

Looking at what I’ve detailed so far, there are solid building blocks of a much better game embedded in Gungrave VR, but it all falls short due to a plethora of issues.

For one thing, there’s no option to have the camera turn smoothly. Players are forced to watch it jerk around, slowly tracking offscreen enemies at a snail’s pace – if an enemy gets behind Grave, using the right analog stick to find them takes an obscenely long time.

The implementation of VR is fairly shoddy throughout as well. At one point I found that I couldn’t read the instructions on a floating text box within the heads-up display because the letters were jumbled around in such a way that my eyes couldn’t focus on them. It turned out that part of the nearby scenery had ‘pushed’ this text box closer to my face than it should have been, and that the viewing angle made it almost unreadable.

In terms of enemy types, the game fails to impress with only a handful of normal foes to deal with. Gangster-styled hoodlums, mutant dogs and what I’m assuming are large dominatrix-style cyborgs make up the bulk of the adversaries, alongside turrets and some occasionally tankier foes. Elements of combat can also be unclear. Enemy attacks can sometimes be deflected back to dish out serious damage, but sometimes they can’t, and there’s little indication of when it’ll be successful.

Things like these are poor, but ultimately fairly minor issues. The first real indication of how much of a mess Gungrave VR can be is when fighting a giant samurai boss. It has a habit of charging into Grave and continually knocking him down before he can recover, and doing so obscures the player’s view by clipping into the space where the VR headset is positioned. It’s disgustingly disorientating and makes fighting him a confusing, fractured chore, especially given that there seems to be no invincibility window during a player’s well-timed dodge.

Then there’s the second type of gameplay I mentioned — it’s a first-person action sequence with the same basic concept of looking at whatever needs to be blown to hell before blowing it to hell, but Grave is completely immobile during these sections and can’t avoid incoming attacks. Frankly, these setpieces soon become interminably dull since they largely seem to last forever. Each one feels like an endurance test rather than an action-packed extravaganza.

Then, having played for less than an hour, Gungrave VR sputters to the finish line with an ending that essentially tells everyone to buy the next game in order to find out how the incomprehensible storyline ends. I barely even understand how it started, and there’s little reason to replay other than unlocking what appears to be a single bonus costume by SS ranking on every level.

Now, I’ve a history of championing B-tier games. Done well, they can outperform so-called triple As in story, heart and especially gameplay, even if they rarely match up in terms of graphical prowess or polish. Gungrave VR, however, isn’t one of the underdogs I’m cheering for. It may have the right attitude and style for a VR shooter, but nearly everything is implemented abysmally. From its awkward controls and awful presentation to the fact that the whole experience lasts less than an hour, there’s no reason to invest time or money. There’s almost certainly a much better game lying within, but for now Grave should probably stay buried. Rating: 2.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by IggyMob and published by XSeed Games. It is currently available on Playstation 4. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4 Pro and PSVR. Approximately 2 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated Teen and contains Blood, Mild Language and Violence. I’d be surprised if anything in here even mildly upset younger players other than the quality of the game itself.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Generally speaking there’s enough onscreen information that hearing disabilities shouldn’t impact playing Gungrave VR too much. Subtitle fonts cannot resized, though they shouldn’t be too small for most players to see clearly.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Gungrave VR Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Getting out of narrow passages and into open space.

LOW Repetitive corridors and a dead multiplayer scene.

WTF I’m in Ancient Egypt now, and I don’t know why.

It’s unfortunate that Downward Spiral: Horus Station hit PSVR after Detached. Re-reading my review of Detached and going over Mike Suskie’s PC review of Horus Station, I found that we were both enamored with the novelty of zero-gravity gameplay in virtual reality. The combination of VR and the exploration of space left a lasting impression on both of us. However, having played a similar title right before this one meant that there was now a risk of novelty’s sheen being worn off. Luckily, Downward Spiral brings a few extra features to the table.

In Downward Spiral, I was an astronaut exploring the abandoned Horus Station. While a standard first-person ‘flat’ mode for standard TVs is included, I opted for the first-person PSVR mode using Move controllers.

Downward Spiral initially had me navigating through a ravaged space station by grabbing features in the environment with the Move controllers and pushing my way around. While this mechanic was useful at times, it quickly became awkward. It only took a handful of instances with a wall just out of reach to grow tired of drifting helplessly through space until I could finally reach something to push from. Conversely, I found that my helmet frequently blocked my path in cramped quarters with plenty of objects to grasp.

Fortunately, DS:HS soon introduces a grappling hook which provides a comfortable, yet exciting locomotion mechanic. Being able to pull myself across a room in one direction while scanning a hallway in another and firing off rounds at enemies in a third was one of those “only in VR” moments that made me happy to be in a headset. However, these tense, action-packed moments were sparse since the majority of play consisted of traveling through narrow corridors, pressing whatever glowing buttons I could find in order to make the next door unlock.

Another issue was that when combat was occurring, it suffered from lopsided design. It seems much thought was put into weapon design and variety, but little was put into enemy design and strategy. By the end of the adventure I had a varied, exciting arsenal that could only be put to use against a smattering of repetitive and annoying drone types.

The combat also demonstrates another confusing split in design because DS:HS offers both an combat-free singleplayer mode and an online multiplayer deathmatch/horde mode. The short time I spent in the combat-free mode was enjoyable from a zero-G exploration standpoint, but it made the inclusion of the arsenal even more pointless. The multiplayer mode was dead on arrival due to a lack of players — a shame, since it might be what the weapon variety was intended to support.

However, despite the incomplete design of its combat, Downward Spiral still provided moments that made me hold my breath with tension, and moments that took it away with spectacle. A couple of stealth situations combined the quick-shooting of the grappling hook with careful peek-a-boo mechanics made possible by grabbing tables and walls to hide and look around them to avoid a dangerous enemy’s detection. Similarly, the end of the first act had me making my way outside of the station to bask in the glory of the planet I was orbiting. With only a few chunks of debris to jump between, the risk of floating off accidentally into the void felt sensationally real.

Moments like these filled me with conflict as I both wanted to stay out there forever and also wanted to immediately scramble back to safety. Unfortunately, the story is hard to follow and ultimately unsatisfying — the strongest moments were purely environmental, and by the time credits rolled, I was left wishing for more of them.

— Alex Pegram

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by 3^rd Eye Studios LTC. It is currently available on PC, PS4/PSVR, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4/PSVR. Approximately 6 hours of play (5 hours in VR, 1 hour in non-VR) were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. No time was spent in multiplayer modes – there were no other people online.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Violence. The only violence is shooting at robots. There are a handful of dead bodies floating around in spacesuits.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: For the game mode with combat, it’s rare to know about enemies approaching unless you hear them first. Once they get near, visual indicators let you know when you’re being damaged. There are options for subtitles in the game, but oddly, I never encountered audio dialogue nor subtitles.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. There are two different control schemes using Move controllers or Dual Shock, but they are not adjustable.

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