For anyone playing on HTC Vive, you'll want to read this.

BONELAB does not support Vive wands. The developers have said that themselves, although I only found that out after purchasing.

They do not plan on implementing Vive wand support either as it would be a "waste of time" to include support for a VR headset's native controllers used by 6.21% of all Steam VR users, including Oculus SteamVR users. [www.statista.com] This may not sound like much, but that still contains a lot of people.

The way they flat out do not support such a widely known headset's controllers is crazy to me. There's definitely money to be made with Vive users, but they can't be a**ed to actually implement the proper controller binds for the game. Personally, I feel this is because of personal bias towards the Vive headset. Especially considering that - at least, from what i've heard - BONEWORKS mocks Vive users using the Vive wand controllers.

I also feel it is very poorly communicated that the game does not support Vive wands. I had no idea they were not supported until I went looking for a fix for the many, many easily fixable issues with using the wands.

Now onto issues with the actual game.


The game was not advertised as what it really is: a modding sandbox game. This lead people into believing the game is like a sequel to BONEWORKS, only to be disappointed by the mediocre (and very short, like 4.5 hours long short) story portion of the game. The main gimmick of the game, avatars, is only given to the player after the halfway point of the story. This means you barely get to use avatars in an actual playthrough of BONELAB.

You may say, "Oh well, the game is meant to be modded and messed around with anyways." There are two major problems with this.


There is no public SDK for the game yet, meaning it is very difficult to mod the game. On top of that, the very few mods that are available for the game get entirely broken after every patch the game has. The lack of content in the game post-Patch 5 is abysmal. Most mods shown in any mod showcase videos are missing entirely, either because they do not work for the current patch or because the mod developer has quit the community and taken their mods down because of past wrongdoings coming to light/the toxic community (generally from Quest users, no offense) begging mod developers to make their mods compatible with Quest even if it is not possible.


Speaking of the toxic community, yes, the BONELAB community is incredibly toxic. It is not welcoming whatsoever and I have seen so much sh*t about people being harassed into leaving the community entirely. This is not really SLZ's fault, moreso the fault of undisciplined, unsupervised kids.


I'm not here to entirely sh*t on BONELAB (that's a lie, I pretty much am). The game has some good pros, in contrast of the many, many cons. The gun and physics systems in the game are very satisfying to use and I feel BONELAB sets a new standard for VR games (leaving a LOT of room for improvement).


I only have 3.8 hours on the game as of writing, and only around ~20 minutes of it was actual gameplay. The rest was trying to fix the multiple bugs I found even in the LOADING MENU for f*cks sake. I have a lot more hours on my old Quest 2, which I used before I swapped to Vive. I say this because my low play time may make people reading this think I don't know what I'm talking about.


This review may be a bit "unorganized," in a way. Randomly changing topics about issues with the game and all that. That's mainly because I have a very bad attention span and there's also so much to talk about that no matter what I do I'll never fully cover everything.


I have no idea.

I recommend watching both positive and negative reviews of the game on YouTube before buying. That way, you can weigh the pros and cons for yourself with both sides of the story. Personally, I'm refunding this sack of sh*t if Steam will let me.


There's also a bug with OpenXR which causes some players to not be able to load in the game. This can be fixed by going into your SteamVR settings, turning on advanced settings, and setting your OpenXR runtime (SteamVR>Settings>Show Advanced Settings>OpenXR>Current OpenXR runtime) to whichever decides to finally work. If that doesn't fix it, your next best option would be to pray to god, the holy spirit, allah, or whatever the h*ll you believe in that it randomly starts working for no reason. It randomly decided to work for me after I restarted my PC, but for others it has just decided not to work whatsoever. In that case, I suggest you make a negative review of the game and refund it. Review bombing tends to make developers actually listen.