Recent reviews by TheShoxter

It's a fun game. The game gets better once you have a bit of grasp of how the world works and have better gear. There is a surprising amount of details in the clutter, textures, and items of the world. Unfortunately, performance is rather poor. I am thoroughly enjoying the game now, but I think once it gets patched up over the next year it will be a very well received game.

This is definitely Bloober Team's best work. It is elevated beyond their prior "walking-sim" projects and is a horrifying, almost survival horror, experience. The gameplay pacing is pretty good with a good mix of puzzles, exploration, and combat encounters.

However, the combat is very clunky. At times it feels like it's trying to imitate the modern RE titles, albeit with much worse weapon handling and a total lack of progression system. Now, this is is a remake of an existing game so it makes sense that it would not add such features as weapon upgrades, or any other form of progression as they are not in the original. However, it just ends up creating a tiresome combat experience that gets very repetitive very quickly.

I really did enjoy my time with this game and the visuals are very good, with lot of small details in the scenery and a real hand-crafted presentation. At no point do you feel as if you are seeing level tile sets or generic assets.

I commend Bloober Team on this project and it makes me excited to see them take on even bigger and more complex projects in the future.

Very fun and not that punishing. Has souls-like elements, but not to the extent of which the game becomes cruel or unusual. You can tell that the focus is on having fun and overcoming challenges without trying to make you also feel despair at the same. Overall a fun game if you have any interest in souls-likes or even God of War.

Really fun and unique take on survival-craft games. Priced very modestly, you can't really go wrong with this one.

Hopefully the devs implement a bit more explanations for what the various items you might encounter do. There are a lot of things thrown at you with little explanation as to their purpose or what you should be doing with them. Part of this leads to natural experimentation, but also part of it leads to frustration and having to look up what something is used for. The in-game codex doesn't really give you explanations.

I still highly recommend this game, it's super fun and charming.

Overall a great game. Really good VR gunplay and great hand interactions with the world. Everything feels intuitive and responsive.

However, my three main gripes that I would love to see addressed:

POSITIONAL AUDIO: Right now, the audio of enemy footsteps is lacking any depth and position. You will hear enemy footsteps to your left that sound like they are 3 feet away. But in reality the enemy is 50 feet away behind 3 walls. This creates a lot of unjustified tension and poor spatial awareness. In a tactical game where you have to be careful about moving in the open, having poor positional audio is a big hindrance.

INVENTORY POSITION: There are a couple of settings that affect the position of the inventory, but none of them solve the problem that many other VR games have already solved. The inventory should ALWAYS lock to my view angle. If I turn my head to the left, the inventory should be also facing that same direction. Currently, you might turn your body 20 degrees to the left but your inventory stays facing the previous position. Then, when you reach down to grab your ammo there is nothing there because your inventory is floating on the wrong side of your body. Please let me lock the inventory to my view angle. Currently, the "static" inventory option keeps it facing one direction regardless of your view angle. Not sure how that is useful. For an example, look at a game like Arizona Sunshine 2. Your ammo and weapons are always where you expect them because the inventory is locked to your view angle. Please add an option for this.

ENEMY AIM TRACKING: This game has the issue of AI tracking your position through walls and other occlusions. You might peak a corner, and sustain fire from an enemy. So you relocate to the other side of the wall or cover where they couldn't have seen you move. Yet as soon as you peak there is already a bullet coming your way because the AI tracked your movement behind the wall and readied another shot before you even re-emerged. This is very frustrating and removes some of the strategy. The enemy should not be able to trace my position through walls.

This game is better than Arizona Sunshine 1 in every way. But it's essentially just more of the same.

The story is simple but more meaningful and engaging. The gunplay is more refined and visceral. The pacing is better, with not as many zombie onslaughts (although there are still many) and slightly more environmental storytelling.

However, it still feels a bit dated. My biggest gripe with Arizona Sunshine 1 was how shallow the game was. It was quite literally a corridor shooter with no sense of progression and hardly any story to follow. You find random guns that are arbitrary and oftentimes just reskins of each other. At the time of its release there was not much competition and its gunplay was quite novel at the time, and was held up on that merit alone. But now, we have games like Half Life: Alyx which set an extremely high bar for story-driven shooter VR games.

Obviously there is no comparison to a game from one of the most well funded studios in the world (Valve) with one of the richest lore stockpiles to choose and build a game from. HOWEVER, I think games like Arizona Sunshine 2 would do well to take inspiration from it. Specifically when it comes to progression.

In terms of progression, Arizona Sunshine 2 suffers from the same problem of its predecessor. Seemingly arbitrary weapons that feel randomly placed around the world. For example, one of the best weapons is one that you can find very early on and it completely defeats the purpose of any other weapons in the game, as they mostly share ammo pools. I think this game would have benefited heavily from a weapon progression system in which you actually had to work towards getting better weapons, such as by crafting weapon upgrades, attachments and modifications. The game has a material loot system! But it's mainly pointless...

Why is the loot system pointless? Because you don't have any sort of inventory. You can only hold TWO items (grenades, mines, molotovs, melee weapons, etc) in addition to your three total weapons (hip sides, and back). This means you will accumulate a hoard of crafting materials as you can only make and carry two grenades at a time. And then you throw the grenade and kill a couple of zombies, and will only encounter another crafting bench in another 20 minutes! What even is the point? At least in Arizona Sunshine 1 you could hold grenades on your chest with your ammo.

In addition to the extremely stiff inventory space, you can only hold three weapons (two small arms and one long arm) so there is very little room to experiment. If you want to try out a new gun you find, only to find out that it's not as useful as the previous one, you're out of luck! You'll have to backtrack (if you can) and hope the weapon you dropped didn't despawn. Your furry companion does have room for two small arm weapons as storage, but typically it's not useful because the most variation in weapons come from the long arm weapons. Ideally you would be able to store two (one on each shoulder).

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this game. I do think it's worth the asking price. The voice work is very well done and well written. The game ran well for me with Virtual Desktop and I'll be sure to check out any future content if they release any DLCs. I just wish it was a little more deep in terms of mechanics.

This is a fun VR experience, however it has some unnecessary filler that adds no value to the game. For example, large rooms that require jetpack navigation which is extremely slow and cumbersome. It's not difficult or challenging, it just takes forever to jump on one box.

The story is somewhat interesting and the visuals are great! It runs pretty smoothly and worked flawlessly with Virtual Desktop on a Quest 3. I think it's worth it's asking price, but definitely a steal if you get it during a sale.

All of Bethesda's weaknesses with none of their strengths.

This game runs SHOCKINGLY well for a Fromsoft title, with native support for 120fps out of the box! Really happy to see that.

While this is no souls-like, don't mistake that for easiness. Instead of a focus on hyper accurate positioning and attack timing, this difficulty comes more from the puzzle-like bosses that require specific AC builds to conquer. You might spent an hour slamming your head against a boss, only to then find the perfect weapon combo to counter them and blast through them on the next try.

Thankfully, this game is much less punishing for failure (no penalty) with helpful checkpoints, and the ability to re-build your AC during the mission smooths out possible annoyances of difficult bosses.

In terms of story, it's told through voice briefings with no visible characters or NPCs (as far as I can tell), which to some will be a very big deal breaker in the world building. I personally think this format is a bit boring, but I'm sure most people aren't playing a game like this for the story.

I'm enjoying the game, but I really don't think it's for everyone.

Post completion edit: I've finished the story and all arena battles in about 12 hours. Definitely not as much content in this game compared to other Fromsoft titles. I also stumbled upon a build that let me beat about every boss without much trouble, so the boss encounters lost a lot of charm as I just used a single build for most of them.

Just doing my part to put my money where my mouth is and support quality game development.