I've played around 2 and a half hours and I've had about enough.

Lets start out with the good - this game looks stunning. I'd say that it's probably the prettiest out-of-the-box experience I've played in VR, something about the semi-realistic artstyle and the lighting just works. The guns both look good and feel solid to use (from the 10 or so guns I've used in the story mode so far). The dog companion is an interesting gameplay twist and a welcome addition to otherwise very lonely singleplayer VR experiences. The protagonist while charismatic, quickly becomes a Ryan Reynolds situation where you like them to start and very quickly just wished they stopped talking so much.

Unfortunately that's where the list of good comes to an end from what I've played, and after an hour I can already feel the pretty tiring core gameplay loop get stale. For reference, I played on the hardest difficulty right out of the gates. You go to an area where you face a small number of enemies in a semi-open environment, you loot literally everything while conserving resources because a little time afterwards you fight a gigantic horde of zombies. Rinse and repeat through various environments and set pieces. Hell, there are some set pieces where you just run and don't even have to shoot.

The problem is, the zombies movement and AI is pretty bad, you never get a good amount of ammo from any source so you are constantly looting but there's no real diversity to loot. Every box, suitcase, and drawer has a magazine in it with 2-3 bullets, but the zombies don't reliably die in one shot to the head. In an entire area you might only loot 40 bullets, and even with excellent shot placement that won't be enough to kill a small horde. This extends to pretty much all pistols and rifles, and haven't found any meaningful gameplay difference between any of the guns within the same type. All pistols appear to do the exact same damage as eachother, the only real difference is magazine size and how loud the pew is. Same with the two rifles you get early on in the game, different mag sizes, different pew, feel exactly the same.

Melee weapons break so quickly that their only real service in the gameplay loop is to get you to risk taking a hit in exchange for not burning ammo on 4-5 enemies and then it breaks. I found myself just spinting backwards for 2 seconds, turning to take shots at a horde, then rinse repeating until I ran out of ammo, then slowly chipped away at hordes with melee weapons until they were all dead. Like, if you have seen COD Zombies high level gameplay then you're here.

The main issue here is that barring parts of the exploration, the combat isn't that engaging or fun. That's not a complaint from a high difficulty standpoint, that's just a complaint from a mechanical standpoint. Fighting the hordes isn't that engaging because your ammo is so limited that you have to kite and spam the dog just to make it through hordes, but then the exploration isn't fun because you're only ever picking up a handful of bullets at a time that make a negligible impact on combat scenarios. This loop is pretty visible just by walking around and trying to understand what the game is asking of you, and while I think that the average player will probably not feel the fatigue until the 5-6 hour mark, I felt pretty fatigued already after I cleared the second horde. Even extending to lower difficulties where you get more ammo and have to scavenge a bit less, it still feels the same.

Further on the exploration, the worlds are just empty. Yeah there's some minor set dressing, but the amount of gamey-ness pulls you out of immersion. Every container, every car, every box will only ever contain a quarter-filled pistol magazine. Maybe you're lucky and get a resource that will help you make an explosive later on, but that's it. It's quarter-filled mags in every hallway and scenario. This is an adventure game in the same way a CoD game is an adventure game. Every 30 minutes you get to go to a new location filled with exactly the same quarter-filled magazines in every container, then do a minor setpiece, then an arena, then a run away major set piece.

Perhaps that's a specific combination and set of criticisms towards AS2. I've played through ZONA Origin twice and loved the exploration and gunplay, finished After The Fall which has a similar gameplay loop minus the harsh ammo limitations, and I've dumped a thousand hours into Stalker Gamma digging through the mud and bricks for a single medkit or bullets. I'm not averse to this sort of loop and in many other instances I've enjoyed it, but in the particular case of AS2 I haven't found it compelling enough to continue playing. I struggled to enjoy Into the Radius for what I think to be the same reason as this game - the world feels grand but empty. The only interaction you have with the game and the environment are purely mechanical, like the arena mode of Ultrakill which only serves to be a different environmental configuration for your next identical combat encounter. Go here, pick up (gameplay relevant item), go somewhere else, shoot zombie. It doesn't feel like there's anything here to really, truly fill the world out. Like Duke Nukem but without the character or personality.

If you find it on sale and enjoy singleplayer narrative shooters, then this might be good for you, but if you are seeking deeper environmental exploration or gameplay mechanics then I would watch some gameplay footage from reviewers and decide that way.

Okay, at some point long ago I finished the game on my Valve Index. I don't remember how or when. I went to try playing this game again to finish up some things with it.

Won't load. Game gets through developer splash screen, gets about 3/4 of the way into loading the main menu... and it crashes out. A quarter of the time, it will crash SteamVR entirely.

Nothing I've tried works. Run as admin, change the page file size, unplug my extra monitors, turn off the VPN, install on different drives, even turning off the GPU Scheduling settings in Windows 11. There's a longer litany of things I've tried, but it still doesn't load at all.

It's a shame. I recall this game actually being kinda fun and wanted to relive the experience. But I can't. I am also reminded that when I played it before, it crashed after nearly every level. And unless this will load consistently, I can't in good conscience recommend the game. If it breaks for me, it'll likely break for others.

I know this dev can do better because After the Fall doesn't crash like this.

Doggo 👍