Recent reviews by Lumminating

Into the Radius 2; the good, the bad, the ugly.
GOOD
I'll start with the things that are good, firstly the atmosphere of the maps (I've only explored peninsula/forest at time of review) are very similar to the first game. For those who haven't played it or are unfamiliar somehow it's very eerie and apocalyptic. The day you can see destroyed cars, buildings and floating anomalous amalgamations around every corner. At night you can barley see what's in front of you, toss brass casings into the dark praying you don't run into a hostile anomaly or worse yet a creature warped by the zone jumps out at you. It really puts you into an amazing world to explore that is fun, frustrating and really rewarding all at the same time. You have one entry and exit which lends itself really well to having much larger maps as however far you make it out to get home you have to travel that same distance back. However unlike the first you don't have to travel through multiple maps to get further into the radius. Your one entry point essentially fast travels you between the different maps. This CAN be a fine dynamic if the other maps are as large or larger than Forest, however I'm not sure how I feel about the change yet so I will leave it as a good thing for now. The guns, this is what most people care about with these kinds of games and if you like Russian armaments you will not be disappointed. It boast a similar arsenal to the first and for the most part satisfying gun-play and weapon mechanics. I do have some gripes with weapon handling but I will save further comments on that for the "bad section". Now the Hub world you main home base has been significantly improved from the first and has been one of my favorite improvements so far! You have three separate buildings that you will mainly frequent in the current version/progression. The first is your personal quarters which have a bed, cleaning rack (not used in current update) shelves for storage, a fridge, and some guns racks that actually click your weapons into them! There is also an attachment to your home lodging that you unlock at a higher security level with more weapon storage and wall racks for you guns similar to Ghost of Tabor. It is such a breath of fresh air and had me giggling like a little kid on Christmas when I first explored it. Next you have your shop where you first walk into your selling bays to unload your junk before going into a large room with all the different equipment you can use in the radius. The shop is another HUGE improvement from the last game. I can tell they took a lot of inspiration with their hub world from Ghost of Tabor with the shop and personal quarters which is a good thing. GoT (Ghost of Tabor) does those very well (minus the lighting lol). While in the shop you just grab what you need and put it on you or in your bag (just don't put your bag away!) and check out when you have everything you need, where as in the first game you had one small bay that you bought and sold from and had a wall with a clunky menu to buy from. Lastly at your hub base you have your mission room where you get jobs from. There is one large screen with different options on it (only missions and Co-Op options do anything in the current patch to my knowledge). When selecting missions you are able to see a large view of the map and see on there where either your active missions or missions you can take on are located (depending on the tab you have selected). This is also where you turn in completed quest or mission items as there is a bay attached to the screen you use to complete the missions, which you can also view from the new and improved version of the clipboard from the first game your tablet! Which by the way is so much better compared to the first games UI. This wraps up the current goods, and the next section will have the "bads" essentially the gripes I have with the game in its current iteration.
BADS
So, I would like to preface this section by saying the game is in pre-release and is expected to be updated so the things I talk about in this section are subject to change and be fixed possibly, but I would like to comment on it to hopefully see some of these issues addressed by the devs and to warn anyone looking to buy the game what the current state of development is looking like. Firstly I'd like to address something I mentioned in the good briefly which is some weapon handling issues. I was really surprised how rough it is in this game compared to the first. Grabbing and using weapons is to snappy. For example when you are trying to second hand grip the gun a lot of times if you don't catch the angle right you will just swap your pistols between your hands. When trying to grab the SMG out of the holster I consistently grab the front of the gun as opposed to the handle. Then when trying to correct this I have a similar issue that I described with pistols which has gotten or almost gotten me killed waayy to many times. I will say when the guns are in your hands and working as they should they're just as good as any other VR game and the gun's audio is great. I just really think the snappyness of them needs to be adjusted, it's okay if it doesn't click right into place from a wrong angle. Like the first game make it a little less responsive unless you are no in the right angle because that is much less annoying then your weapon jumping between your hands. Next complaint is with the audio for the pulse anomaly (I'm not sure of the actual name of it, but it is the blue one that repels you) it should not be as loud as it is. I understand why they made it louder due to it not being as visible, however it does not need to be as loud as it is. If any of the credits are around one of them I just won't hear them because the pulse anomaly is just to loud. Lastly for the bad, the sliders (not sure what they're called in this one) the enemies that jump at you to attack have no way that I've found to counteract them besides getting them to hit a tree or wall. They hit way to hard for having no real way to dodge them and I've died so many times to a group of them all jumping at me while at half health. It took four hits from half health with no amour. That is way to much damage for an early game enemy that I've seen in groups of three on the forest map. If you encounter them with less than full health if you don't have anything by you for them to hit you're essentially dead if you don't land your shots before they jump. It's very possible it's some sort of skill issue but I never had any difficulties like this with their counterparts from the first game. Either they need to do less damage or need to be possible/easier to dodge. That will wrap up the bad and lastly I will go over the "ugly" things I've dealt with.

UGLY
So I included this section because these are the issues that are really egregious and need hot-fixes or priority in my opinion (ie game breaking bugs or close to it). The first one that I've seen being a common issue with players is ladders increasing your velocity to a trillion and slamming you into the ground at mach 100 and instantly killing you. I may have overplayed how fast you're going but regardless it is very frustrating that in my 6 hours I've died to a ladder more than any or all of the enemies combined. I should not have to save and pray before I climb any ladder in the game, this NEEDS to be fixed ASAP! The next issues is not as game breaking but is none the less VERY frustrating...When you drop ammo out of a box in your base the next time you load into the map it will be floating in the area you dropped it out of the box. At first I was a fan of this because I thought it was just a helper to the player..then I came back to the hub world and the ammo was there again. It just keeps reappearing after I box it all up just floating where it was, this is really frustrating to say the least!

Current game state would not recommend buying (wait for more updates)

Solid role playing game. It puts you in a world where you can make your own choices and story and the modding community for this game has released a lot of amazing things