Recent reviews by VanillaIris

SteamVR

The Half-Life series, while fantastic games in their own right, have never been just games. They've always been a method to introduce new groundbreaking technology onto the gaming market.

I thought VR was a fad. A neat novelty, but never something that would become truly breathtaking or mainstream. This is why the arrival of Half-Life: Alyx was significant to me. I went from previously being uninterested in VR to searching all over ebay to find one. Eventually I found an Odyssey+ at a good value and bought it.

Sadly it did take a while for me to get to playing Alyx, but when I did... wow. Valve's decade of VR experiments has created the ultimate VR experience. I might as well start with what impressed me the most initially...

This game is beautiful. Looking at the game as a spectator doesn't look that special, but behind the headset... my goodness. You notice so many little details that you never would from behind a monitor. The game has to run in 4K 90fps, and somehow pulls it off nearly flawlessly. My RTX 2070 couldn't handle the last combat encounter, but other than that I had no performance issues with 3GB of graphics card RAM.

The sound design is also excellent. I don't hear people talk about this aspect much, but the sound team did an amazing job with this one.

But what about the gameplay? Well, it's also pretty great! This is definitely the best playing VR game of all time. Valve has a certain talent of making limitations into game mechanics, in the case the RUSSELLS. Picking up objects in VR can be very tedious, so Valve designed them to get objects easily and efficiently. It's so intuitive that when you finish playing you try using them in real life by accident until you realize how much of a goof you are. Valve also turned the simple task of searching around the environment a blast. Everything is interactable, be it Cupboards, Filing Cabinets, Doors, and even Pianos and Dry Erase markers. I loved searching around for Resin because it's hidden around every nook and cranny, and even if you think you found everything, you probably missed at least five Resin within the map.

The ending is absolutely amazing. It's gotta be one of the best endings in gaming. I'm not gonna say anything else.

I will conclude with some (but very few) critiques. First of all, the difficulty curve is very off. You go from dying every 10 seconds in Is Or Will Be to whooping the game ass by the time you get to Captivity. Second, the loading screens are probably some of the worst I've ever experienced. Finally, some segments of the game just aren't fun and are often too long. Is Or Will Be was way longer than it honestly should have been and The Northern Star has some combat encounters that weren't really enjoyable.

That said, this game is absolutely worth your time. I wouldn't recommend buying an Index just for this game, however. There are cheaper options that don't hinder the experience whatsoever like the Oculus and WMR (O+ especially).

this game is a masterpiece.

make sure to download OpenRCT2 along with this, an open source re-implementation that lets you play at modern resolutions and other nice improvements. you can even mount RCT1!

very simplistic yet good version of the game of life. really fun with friends.

it's chex quest in high definition

I don't really have much to say. It's just a fantastic game. Get it.

this game made my right thumb hurt so much

but i mean hey it's fun, so go ahead and buy it, the steam version is the best because of custom levels you can play

This is a story of a steam user named senlahe. Senlahe played games on steam, as user number 427. He would buy a game on sale, play it for 0.4 hours, and move on. This is what user 427 did of every second, of every day, of every month, of every year. And despite some people questioning his weird game buying habits, senlahe was happy.

And then one day, something very peculiar happened. Something that would forever change senlahe. Steam wasn't opening. He waited at his desk, waiting for steam to load, however, it refused. Senlahe decided to leave his desk, and call steam support. Perhaps they were doing maintenance.

But there was no answer. Senlahe was getting desperate. He really wanted to play his games, so he- Wait a minute, what are you doing, senlahe? Don't hit the "Post review" button, I'm not done narrating this story you are typing. It's not finished. Think of the- NO, NO, NO!!!!!!

wait, this is a community mod?

i thought it was official dlc by valve

why did i buy this