Recent reviews by Kurisushimoa

Brilliant gameplay. Really looking forward to the AI and performance upgrades coming.

I have 200 hours on this game on GOG. I bought it here so I could play it on my Steam Deck easier. Works amazing and having it be mobile is great. The game for me is a 10/10, if a game has an "overwhelmingly positive" review status it's likely worth your money.

As for performance:
I have a pretty decent PC, RTX 3080 and Ryzen 5900x. Performance pre Next-Gen patch was over 100fps maxed out. The new patch is really taxing on my system (and everyone's too if you check the reddit), on Ultra+ with all RT effects on, I get between 65 and 40. 30 ish if there is a lot of foliage around. I have some of the Ultra+ settings turned down now and it helps a lot. The RT features are amazing but hopefully one day we won't have to rely on DLSS to achieve a playable frame rate.

Unexpected gem. Browsed some demos, found this one and played it with a friend. We both bought it day one and it's been a great little game! Highly recommend!

Firstly, Boneworks was one of my first VR games. It was the game I used to get my "VR Legs" so to speak. It's story felt cohesive and was pretty fun overall. I bought this within minutes of it coming out and my initial impressions were good. Dropping you into a cave/dungeon then eventually leading you into the hub world.

Now, it's only after researching that I learned that whole section is supposed to be a tutorial explaining the mechanics. It's truly awful and without a lot of prior VR or Boneworks experience I imagine it would be confusing as hell.

Speaking of confusing, I get that games nowadays hold the players hand too much with telling them where to go and what to do, but Jesus Christ who thought a bloody crane mini-game with no explanation of what it was for was a good idea? It's bad game design if you can't even figure out how to start the campaign or if there even IS one.

The campaign itself is a disjointed mess of what feel like tech demos each designed to show off a trait of one the avatars you can choose to play as. This is a cool idea in theory but in reality you end up using a single character for the entire game anyway until a specific situation requires a change. The subway tunnel for example.

Oh, and that whole moon level can do one. What a waste of my time that was.

The weapons this time did feel satisfying to use, I loved the inclusion of shotguns this time around but this leads me into my next gripe. The amount of time I've wanted to change a character using the left arm ball thing and grabbed an ammo mag instead and vice versa is too damn often. I was unable to reload at all while crouched as for some reason grabbing the ammo pouch grabbed the weapon under my left arm instead. Leading me to have to stand up and leave cover every time I needed to reload. Not ideal if you are using a shotgun and have to manually load each shell. This was never an issue in Boneworks. I was able to zip around the arena and zombie warehouse never missing a reload once, however in this game it was almost all of the time and it was so frustrating. I even measured myself and inputted the correct dimensions during the setup phase.

To sum up:

This game feels like a tech demo for new projects rather than a finished title. It has a disjointed campaign leaving you with that feeling of "Is that it?" and it looks like it will be heavily relying on modders and future DLC to provide any actual substance. The combat whist impressive just annoyed me more than not due to the reloading issues I experienced. The avatars you can switch between is a nice gimmick but something you will likely forget about until you need to absolutely switch.
I will dive back in after a few updates and possibly update this review if anything changes.

- A disappointed Boneworks fan.