Recent reviews by runtime

fpsVR is the easiest way I've found to measure your performance in VR games, and at only $4 it's easily worth it.

It does what it says on the tin: it shows you your CPU/GPU utilization and more importantly, frame times.

I use it in VRChat to see if avatars are horribly unoptimized. I just toggle the avatar on and off and see if fpsVR shows my CPU or GPU explode when the avatar is visible.

This game is amazing. I love it. There are so few games with atmospheric simulations and this game does it quite well. I've enjoyed 100s of hours in my singleplayer saves.

However, I cannot in good faith recommend this game while it advertises itself as multiplayer while simultaneously having extremely unreliable netcode, and a straight-up broken dedicated server. The Linux dedicated server has had crippling bugs that have been known for over a year, and cannot be called anything other than unmaintained. The Windows dedicated server is at least usable, but who hosts headless servers on Windows? Not me.

I was hopeful after the "Multiplayer Update" and the "Project Clinic" bugfixing update that multiplayer would be usable. It's not. I guess I'll check in again in another year or two to see if I can finally play this game with friends.

If this is somehow the first thing you're reading about Outer Wilds, for the love of all that is holy don't spoil anything for yourself. This review contains no spoilers, but be careful what you read as this game is all about the journey of discovery and it'd be a shame to have someone rob you of some of that.

This game is absolutely incredible. 10/10, I wish I could delete all memory of this game so I can play it for the first time again and again.

Before I played this, my all time favorite game was Riven. Now it's Outer Wilds. Riven came out in 1997. In 23 years nothing came close, and then Outer Wilds came out of nowhere and blew my mind.

Explore a beautifully handcrafted solar system. Camp with your friends. Roast marshmallows. Read the writing on the wall. Conceive of a Grand Theory of Everything. Receive the ultimate reward when your theory is correct. The credits roll, and a single tear rolls down your cheek. Your emotions are mixed: you feel fulfilled as you have just consumed a masterpiece, and you feel sadness as your time with it has come to an end.

Time to wait another 23 years for some other game to—WAIT WHAT'S THIS!? Dear lord, they've made a DLC, and it's MORE OUTER WILDS. Here we go again!

This game is a masterpiece. The way progression works is innovative, logical, and feels good. The story is great. The visuals are great. The music is incredible. The world design is amazing. It performs well on even mid-tier hardware. You'll be filled with a sense of wonder. You'll make startling discoveries. You'll make 500 IQ galaxy brain moves. You'll have a good time.

Play the game, already.

Holy crap, they did it again. Outer Wilds wasn't a fluke, and Mobius Digital can just poop out absolutely incredible games at will.

10/10, I wish I could delete all memory of this DLC so I can play it for the first time again and again.

I have a sort of weird, love-hate relationship with this game. Lets get the things I dislike out of the way first so we can end on a high note.

The Bad

The developers seem to lean towards infantry when it comes to both balance and general quality of life. This is unfortunate, as PS2 is one of the few games that has vehicular gameplay that excites me, and watching it get slowly but inexorably worse over time is painful for me. One huge example is when they totally borked the responsiveness of the air vehicle controls as a side effect of a physics update. The devs never had the balls to definitively say if the new behavior was a bug or an intended change, but it's still in the game to this day.

Now, the elephant in the room. The F2P garbage. I so dearly wish this game had a price tag on it, as then there'd be no reason for all the F2P shenanigans this game does. You know, the classics. We've got daily rewards to keep sucking you back in. We've got a painfully slow grind to show maximum disrespect to your time. We've got systems to reduce this grind, in exchange for money, of course. We've got loot boxes so you can get that sweet sweet dopamine rush that gamblers love. Bad luck today? A shame, good luck you can buy more rolls with... you guessed it! Real money! Yo dawg, I heard you like money, so we gave the game SIX different in-game currencies (this is not an exaggeration).

There's nothing else that really competes with this game. So every time I want to jump ship and go to that other game that's like PS2 but better, I remember that game doesn't exist.

The Good

Again, there's nothing else that really competes with this game. FPS combined-arms MMO doesn't seem like a particularly huge innovation, but heck it's clearly difficult to pull off as no one else is doing it. And boy, is it an experience. The whole premise of a huge spread out war happening all over a continent is really neat. On a small scale, you're just one dude shooting another dude. But that's just the minigame within the strategy game that's playing out at a much larger scale. Players can form 12-person squads, four of which can merge into a 48-person platoon. All led by a single person, and with pretty good in-game voice comms to boot. That's a huge amount of strategic power in the hands of the platoon lead, and their leadership has a tangible impact on the entire continent-wide fight. That's incredibly cool to be a part of, either following directions with the rest of your team, or maybe even being the leader. Seeing your team win a huge fight between hundreds of real players and knowing that it wasn't all RNG and that the things you did mattered is wild.

I like vehicles. This game has fun vehicles. I've spent way too many hours flying around the map in my sci-fi aircraft bothering people, and having a blast doing it. Having a tough time driving your vehicle and aiming it too? Well, here in PS2 we have this wonderful new concept: the gunner seat. Now you can focus on your driving and have your friend handle all the aiming!

The game is being actively developed, even after it's been out for years. While I don't agree with every single change the devs make, at the end of the day that's fine. Game balance changes, while necessary, can't make everyone happy. Overall, the devs having a net positive effect on the gameplay over time. The game's already built so there are certain parts of its design that can't really be changed, so I'm sure polishing out the various flaws hasn't been easy for the devs. But you know what? They're doing it, slowly but surely.

The Conclusion

It's a good game, and free to boot! Give it a go. And just for me, try gunning someone's tank or aircraft. If you're like me, then you might like it...

Neos is a great platform, and has the potential to get even better... if it ever gets out of the limbo it's presently in. The CEO and the CTO have some beef with each other that is taking quite a while to sort out, and the future of the game is uncertain.

That being said, in its current state it's a great game, I love it, and I hope to see more people discover it.

So, with cautious optimism, I grant Neos the most prestigious honor: an upwards-pointing thumb.

I don't write a whole lot of reviews, but this game has recently given me the unusual motivation to write one. Unfortunately, it's not good things I have to say.

This is a game where 100% of the content is created by the community. In recent news, the developers have shown that they really don't care what the community wants, and are willing to take a giant step back backwards in terms of quality of life features for the sake of solving the problem of users being "harassed, griefed, and constantly crashed" by users of malicious mods.

There's one simple problem: This doesn't remove all harassment. This doesn't remove all griefing. This doesn't remove all crashers. This DOES remove all anti-crashers and other such safety mods. This DOES remove important accessibility and quality-of-life features that VRChat has no replacement for today.

There's an argument to be made that this could remove a large proportion of the harassment, griefing, and crashing that's happening today. However, based on what I've seen in my many hours in VRChat, the vast majority of harassment, griefing, and crashing is being done using non-mod-based methods. I firmly believe that blanket-banning all mods will result in a net increase of successful attempts to harass, grief, and crash users.

All I've said so far isn't even taking into account the fact that developers of malicious, closed-source, paid mods have both the incentive and the potential to play cat-and-mouse games to bypass Easy Anti-Cheat while the developers of non-malicious, open-source, free mods now have the deck so heavily stacked against them that the only way to win is not to play.

VRChat has some wonderful quality-of-life mods, and their developers are some of the most underappreciated content creators in VRChat. They have been getting the short end of the stick for ages, and with this latest update they're getting supremely shafted one final time.

I don't know if this anti-modding change will stick. I hope it doesn't, but if it does... well, there's other social VR games out there that allow modding. ChilloutVR and Neos VR come to mind. Maybe I'll hang out in one of those games instead...

TL;DR:
Now that I can no longer use my cheat codes to spawn friends, I've lost my unfair advantage in this highly competitive social game. My social credit score has plummeted and I'm now at the bottom of the leaderboard.

gg no re

FTL is massive. For an inexpensive indie game, the amount of high-quality content is astonishing. It gives you a "spaceship captain" feel that's hard to find anywhere else. The gameplay is amazing, and the soundtrack is incredible. And to top it all off, Subset Games has recently released a massive and completely free update to the game. What isn't to love?