21 people found this review helpful
2
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 59.1 hrs on record (19.8 hrs at review time)
Posted: 12 Jun, 2021 @ 12:52pm

TLDR:
Stalker fan, don't mind some inventory management, and ok with some pretty tense situations? Get it.
Sweaty palmed Index players, you may need to disable the touch portion (not the pressure) of your controllers to keep from losing your hand control during hot situations.

Full text:
If you like the slow-fast-slow-oh shi- flow of the Stalker Series, and you want to do that in VR, then this is for you.

Fun to explore the ghostly world, that is decently populated, and feels massive until you get used to it. The orienteering aspect is pretty cool, you can mark up a map at your home base to remember what was interesting (or downright 'NOPE'.)

The story is on the lighter side, so I won't spoil it, and I am only about half-way through, and I think it picks up.

The enemies are easy, as long as you are in the light, and there is only one of them. Once you get a few types of enemies mixed together things can get pretty hectic, and some enemies hit like a truck even if they are 'easy' so you can't let your guard down.

The graphics aren't exactly mindblowing, but it does run with hardly a stutter at all, which is a very uncommon experience (nvidia 1080) for me, and I honestly think the sharper look lends itself to the grit of the genre and isn't a negative.

Very tense, every little sound will have you jumping until you are 100% used to them. Sounds of the trees, ancient steel, whizzes, pops, and bangs of anomalies, or wait, was that gunfir-.
Playing on the non-ironman mode is pretty nice, if you die and don't like how you can reload a save, although you might be moments from the same death with the autosaves.
The map is the same each run, but the anomalies like to shift around a little between runs, so you always need to be on your toes as you trudge along your established routes.
There are a few points which feel unfair in terms of suspense, either they are similar to jumpscares, or turn the freak factor up to 11.
If you do not like inventory management this might not be for you, there is a decent amount of prep for each run in terms of what you take into the radius, and what you are willing to carry out.
The backpack feels tiny when you are a loot hoarder and pick up every little thing, but makes it fun deciding what is worth it to bring back and leave.
The game does have some janky physics regarding inventory and item management, but most of it is not terribly critical. I think the worst was that I lost a pistol in my room because I grabbed something behind it and the pistol was yote.

If you have even the slightest sweaty palms with the index controllers you may run into issues getting your hands to let go of stuff when things get heavy.
I hear there is a setting you can disable in the steam settings to combat this, but you lose the light contact grip and need a little more pressure.

(Written in steam's tiny tiny tiny review window, sorry if the formatting and spelling is terrible.)
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Developer response:
kkruglov  [developer] Posted: 14 Jun, 2021 @ 5:44am
Thanks for sharing your feedback about your experience as an Index player and various parts of the game. Would not say that we can promise improvements for Index users, but we test the game on it ourselves and we'll do our best not to neglect players with this hardware in the future.


Also hope that Radius 2.0 update that should come in the late summer, might reopen the game for you from another side.