Recent reviews by Giant Cheese Wedge

Reviewed on a 3060 12GB, experience may differ depending on your hardware.

It was nice playing Portal again, however, if you do not have a top-of-the-line 40 series GPU, don't waste your time with Portal RTX, the performance is miserable, to the point where both 20 and 30 series have to run the game at DLSS Ultra Performance and sacrifice the graphics to enjoy the game at playable framerates, at which point, you might as well not play the RTX Version at all.

It's a nice bit of nostalgia spruced up with modern technology, but still just a tech demo, if you never played Portal, i'd recommend playing the original instead.

Clunky and unpolished just doesnt quite describe it.

im confused

Receiver 2 is not your average first-person shooter. It’s a game that defies genre conventions, blending intense gun realism with a surreal, philosophical atmosphere. If you're looking for a game that challenges both mind and reflexes, and offers something more than just gunplay and loot drops, Receiver 2 is a standout.

The most striking aspect of the game is its attention to detail when it comes to firearms. Every weapon is modeled with precision, down to the smallest internal components. The game simulates the actual mechanics of loading, unloading, clearing malfunctions, and operating safeties. This makes the experience feel authentic, if occasionally slow and methodical. It's a refreshing change from the usual arcade-style gunplay, but it does require a willingness to learn and adapt to the realistic controls.

The world is procedurally generated from pre-made rooms, which keeps each playthrough varied but doesn’t stretch the visual design too far.

The sound design and music are incredible as well, music is intense, with an intense beat and singing that increases in volume as you get closer and find more tapes, the environment is brimming with audio context, which makes every prefabricated room feel alive and unique.

Enemies in the game are simple in design but deceptively difficult to take down. Their placement forces you into tight, tactical decisions. You'll often find yourself in a situation where engaging one drone makes you visible to another. You must adapt and learn to engage enemies with patience and method. While the enemies themselves are basic, the challenge is very much real.

Progression in Receiver 2 is tied to listening to tapes, listening to enough tapes let you go onto the next level, this means that the world becomes more hostile, and the drones get more varied and more dangerous. This system encourages you to not just progress, it gives the game a kind of slow-burn intensity.

One of the most powerful elements of the game is the voice acting on the tapes. The recordings are well-written and thought-provoking. I often found myself pausing in a corner, just to listen to them. The tapes explore themes of gun safety, mental health, media influence, and personal responsibility, and they do so with a level of respect and intensity that is rare in gaming. Some of the tapes deal with suicide and the importance of asking for help, others deal with gun history and safety.

The "Threat Echo" tapes are particularly powerful. They depict the internal struggles of someone under attack by the Threat in a way that is both intense and human. These tapes, and the "Recovery" tape that follows them, don’t just serve as narrative devices, they feel like real people reaching out and having their stories told. They changed the way I think about suicidal thoughts, and my friends suffering from it.

There are also tapes that discuss asking for help, the nature of struggle, and the importance of connection, and they deeply changed how I approach these subjects in my own life. I believe Receiver 2 fundamentally changed me and how I think about life itself. It doesn’t just make you think about the mechanics of firearms or the nature of threat; it makes you reflect on your own mind, your choices, and the information you let shape your reality.

Receiver 2 is not for everyone. It is slow, methodical, and often frustrating. But for those who are willing to sit with it, listen to its tapes, and engage with it, it offers a deeply personal and thought-provoking experience.

This game is an experience, I'd go so far as to call it a type of meditation, one that challenges you to think, to listen, and to understand. And in doing so, it might just change the way you see the world.

i remember playing the prototype and being excited what this game could bring to the table, alas, the game is extremely short, and a recent update has basically removed the "Story", if you can call it that, due to featuring self-harm, instead of taking a look at Receiver 2, who handles these themes with respect, while still keeping an option to disable them, they were removed entirely, making the game nothing more than a short, mindless shooter, not worth 23€, get it for under 10.

I'm pretty much your cliché Jack of all Trades, and master of none, i pick up new hobbies and interests CONSTANTLY, just 2 years ago i was into Amateur Radio, now it sitting in the corner of my room, unused, ohwell.

i was developing an interest in DJing and Mixing, as i was always very invested and into Music, i opened up my favourite webbrowser and went on looking for Decks..

But hold on a minute, i know NOTHING about this, i don't even have a big music collection, what am i meant to do with this? And jesus, it's expensive, alright, nevermind that.

This is where Vinyl Reality comes in.

So i went back to watching streams and youtube videos about it. sitting on social media looking for my next hobby, when i saw something on Reddit, an Advertisment of all things, for Vinyl Reality! I was immediately hooked, downloaded the Demo, loaded my (small) music collection on it and started messing with it.

I have never had this much fun while listening to music, wow.

and all of a sudden it stopped, did the game crash? Oh. Demo over, darn.

Restarted the game, had great fun for another 30 minutes, once again, disappointment, when i finally said "alright, this game entertained me for 1 and a half hours already, im buying it.

And so we get to the Review of Vinyl Reality.

The Game presents you with a small tutorial in the beginning, explaining the very basics of mixing, it also ships with a few songs you can immediately start using to train your mixing and transitions, the songs are basic enough and so they help massively in learning how to queue songs, as they are very similar and don't change much, not my kind of music, but great for training.

About the actual Deck, yep, its a Deck (as you may have noticed, i am clueless about this), as far as i could see from other people more experienced than me, the deck used is one of the more expensive ones, apparently rather good! You can switch between White/Black Designs and change the slipmat texture on it, which is about what i would expect for customization.

You put on Music like you would on an actual one, pull the Vinyl out of your infinite box of music, put it on, turn on the turning on the turntable, position the needle and there you go, in the center you have multiple controls to control volume, balance, EQ and a few other things i don't even understand.

Music can be output using a seperate Audio Device on your System, so you dont accidentally mix your headphone output with your Deck output.

Why would you want this? Well. You need ears to mix your music, and you don't really want your Audience to hear the annoying scratching and speedups/slowdown as you desperately try getting the next song queued before the current one ends, so there is this feature the Vinyl Reality devs have implemented called "virtual headphones", you can click on one of your ears to put on a set of virtual headphones, these can hear music which is set to the "queueing mode", which means you can hear it in the headphones, but it wont necessarily be heard by the audience, given you muted it first.

If you dont feel like going that way, you can also simply use a physical pair of headphones, however, this gets rather awkward with your Virtual Reality headset on your head.

If you are so inclined you can manually add BPM Infos to your Music, you can either do this automatically using one of the programs out there, they may or may not work ok, i have not had any good experiences with my type of music, it always seems to think the BPM are about half, or even less than that. anyways, thats not Vinyl Reality's fault anyway.

The BPM gets displayed if you hover over the controls for the speed, you can speed the playback up by about 10%, which is enough to make a song sound quite a bit different, i would say i even "improved" some songs, personal opinion of course, but it will show you your BPM live, while you shift its speed.

Now, as you can probably tell im anything but an expert, so "just" having the turntables is quite a steep learning curve, what i would probably like is a more modern, maybe even digital deck? Of course, implementing something like that with the features these offer would be.... quite a feat, but having automatic bpm sync would be an absolute saviour for me, i could actually show this game to people without embarrassing myself.

Anyway, i have absolutely been enjoying this game, i just wish it had a bigger community, it definitely deserves much more attention than it currently has, but i understand that it's quite a niche.

If you have an interest in DJing and enjoy VR, and can deal with the fiddlyness which can sometimes occur, try the demo! It's 30 Minutes long, can be repeated as often as you like, and it sure was one of the reasons i bought the game, thank you, developer, for including it!

I got pulled into this game by my Friend who is absolutely addicted to it, and i'll be upfront, i don't get it, i see where the appeal is with the "oh look i'm a different avatar", for furries specifically it seems like a fun thing but, its not for me, i feel weird with a virtual avatar that strongly differs from my actual size.

but that's not what i'm rating this game for, what i WILL rate this game for are the Technical, Design and Community Issues this game has.

First off, everyone should know by now that this game is based on the Unity engine, if you didn't know that, there you go, this brings along its own issue, but the fact that VRChat runs a version of the Unity engine that is.. well, frankly ANCIENT and buggy, is not helping people use their own Avatars or Develop them, i tried my hand at it and it was safe to say, not fun.

Then, the issue is that avatars are basically unregulated, except for some restrictions in polycount and similar, which shaders, how many objects an avatar has is almost completely unregulated, making avatars that do nauseating effects, crashers, or are just generally annoying widespread and _very_ annoying and impossible to avoid.

There is also a **MAJOR** lack of Accessibility options, text chat? Nope, Colourblind assist? Nuh-uh, One-Handed mode? well, no, not really.
The game blatantly disregards any player that may be disabled or otherwise unable to completely use features the game offers, there are basically 0 accessibility options, as such i have seen actual Mute players resort to avatars which have a literal typewriter scripted into them to display on-screen text. Insanity.

Now, this is rather subjective and may not reflect your opinion at all, but i am utterly bored by the game, or lack thereof, 90% of the lobbies i was in was between 3-10 people standing around facing a mirror, looking at it, not moving, completely and utterly astonished by the fact that they don't look like they do in real-life.
Now, this isn't the fault of the game at all, but jesus christ, if there is one time where i despise the rise of realtime reflections, this is it, the community is garbage, holding a conversation for longer than 5 seconds is often impossible as people seemed to have developed an attention span which is shorter than your average person with ADHD, and when you do manage to strike up a conversation with someone, chances are a random kid will join and either scream a certain word roughly similar to a certain vanilla ice cream with nougat filling and chocolate shell, or straight up just crash your Game and/or Graphics Drivers with a Crasher Avatar.

But fine, looking past all that, and looking at VRChat in its basic form, yes, it is a VR-Based Multiplayer Sandbox which is highly moddable, it achieves that, congrats.


Oh, and apparently the Game Developers are not the most down-to-earth people, this is however, not my personal opinion, and just what i picked up from my friend and other members in the community forums and reviews.


Be glad its free, download it, try it out, make up your own mind about it, this is my own opinion.

A Webbrowser Nightmare.

Maybe i'm nitpicking, maybe my technological background makes me naturally hate it, but the fact that it _constantly_ runs a, what, in the most basic sense, is a chromium instance, in the background is something really dislikable, and people complain about windows having "useless" services running in the background...

oh, and it eats about 300mb RAM and VRAM each, so if you have <4gb vram, good luck running games while Wallpaper Engine is active.

4 Years On Update: The game is still not on 1.0, instead, the developers just tack a new decimal on the version number whenever they feel like it
A stretch goal isn't valid if you keep moving the goalpost.


I cannot recommend this game for one simple reason -- you can not host your own server on your own hardware, this is is a deal breaker for me and probably many more people, as i don't see the point in paying someone else to do the thing i can do on my own Hardware at home for free.

a classic, played this before on disk, now got it on steam, amazing game, great soundtrack, if you're interested what the Wreckfest developer did before Wreckfest, take a look at this, its certainly a fun game. (do get the inofficial widescreen patch though!)