Recent reviews by Ruikaen

Being a regular hot wheels enjoyer I've been yearning for a solid hot wheels game for quite a while and I haven't found anything I would like after the PS2 era of hot wheels games. I was reluctant to get the first Unleashed game having heard of all the fundamental flaws involved in that game, and decided to wait until Unleashed 2 when I heard about it. After having put some time into it, here are my thoughts:

It's very nice I gotta say. The overall handling model feels just right for controlling a bunch of toy cars, especially when it comes to the drifting aspect of it. You can pull off some long and satisfying drifts around corners. The addition of the lateral dash, jump opens up some fun possibilities on how you run the various tracks in the game, especially if you're one that enjoys speedrunning. It's also useful for getting you out of a tight spot during a race, like if you were about run off the track for example.
There's a good variety of tracks to play around on across the different locations featured in the game that provide some fun twists, turns, jumps and a decent assortment of obstacles to keep things interesting. Especially if you were to look at the community made tracks.
Tuning and upgrading your cars is a rather interesting part of the experience, there are three performance tiers for all cars that you can unlock to also unlock these perks which will give your cars a certain buff but also a certain debuff as a tradeoff. I don't quite agree with that system but you can still overall tune your car to fulfill a certain purpose if need be.
The A.i. opponents are manageable to deal with on a race by race basis across the 4 difficulties available in this game. The difficulty mainly affects the A.i.s car performance and aggression. As far as I can tell, there isn't any rubber banding non-sense like you'd see in other games. If there is, it's minor enough to be barely noticeable. One thing I particularly appreciate about how the game matches you up with a.i. opponents is that you don't absolutely have to have your car upgraded to the max in order to have a chance against them, especially on the hardest difficulty. You can go into a race with a stock performance car and the game with put you with a.i. that are also driving stock vehicles.
In terms of the actual vehicles themselves, there's plenty to choose from that handle accordingly based on their type. They are divided into 6 categories of vehicle types: Balanced (all purpose), Drifter, Rocket (high top speed), Heavy Duty (resistant to obstacles), Off-Road, and Swift (about the same as drift tbh). Some cars, however, are categorized in ways that don't make sense. For example, there's a car called "Hot Wired" which looks like a drag race kind of car but it's categorized as a "Drift" car even though it should more logically be a "Rocket" car.

The engine sounds for the vehicles are fantastic. They're a lot better than I expected for an arcade racing game about playing around with a bunch of toy cars.
The overall soundtrack is pretty good. I wouldn't really say it's the sort of sound track one would likely go out of their way to listen to outside of the game. Maybe the menu music if anything as it does has a couple of songs that I can really vibe to.

It goes without saying that it's definitely pretty on the eyes. A bunch of bright, vibrant colors as one may expect for a racing game like this. The attention to detail on the individual cars and environments are something to appreciate, especially with how the cars get visibly scratched and paint chipped during a race. The Menu UI is okay I guess. It's the same sort of square tile lay out you'd see in most other games nowadays.

The overall story to "Creature Rampage" is really bare bones. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect a deep or profound narrative especially considering this is a game about racing toy cars but it's just plain forgettable since it just centers around a professor dude accidentally creating giant monsters and two drivers needing to utilize a shrinking device to fight the monsters with the help of a robot assistant, the two drivers would suggest that there would be a two player element to this mode but there isn't at all. It's strictly single player the entire way through. It would have been nice to see some additional characters that could be rivals to the driver characters to keep the story interesting. There's good amount of events in this mode to keep you occupied for a while, after you have completed all the main events you unlock additional events called "Extreme Events" which are mean to be extra challenging to really test your skill with certain restrictions that they often enforce like only being able to use a certain vehicle type for a race or drift event. Completing events in this mode will get you in-game money, XP, unlock tracks, and track pieces to use in track editor but not cars. You can only obtain cars by buying them in the in-game shop or unlocking them through completing certain "Unleashed Missions" which are just side goals you can complete that gets tracked as you play the game in general regardless of what mode you play on. The Boss battles are rather uninteresting if you ask me, all you really do in those boss battle is drive around a race track and ram into a bunch of targets to hurt the boss while trying to get to each one as fast as possible in order to prevent this meter from filling up all the way which slowly fills up faster as you ram into more targets. If that meter fills up all the way you lose the battle. That's it, really. I think there was a wasted opportunity to include special obstacles that would act as the bosses attacks to make it a lot more interesting.

The DLC for this adds some nice additional content for you to play around with.... but that's it really. It's just extra cars, environments and tracks for you to play with. The "Acceleracers", "Made in Italy", "Fast & Furious", and "Alien Encounters" expansions have their own tie in campaigns but there's no story to them at all, it just gives you extra events to complete for some more money and XP and thats it.

It's a rather lack luster experience honestly, mainly because of there not being enough players to get the most out of it. Most of the time you'll be finding players in the lobby for normal race events but the time to get queued up for that drags out. On average it has taken me roughly 1 to 3 minutes to get put into a lobby. There's two multiplayer exclusive modes, one that has you only driving the monster trucks in an arena and ramming into each other to score points. The other has you running around in one of the environments picking up gears and cashing them in to score points. These modes are pretty fun but I was only able to to play them a couple to times due to the aforementioned reasons

Beyond the performance aspect of the cars. The game lets you change the livery, boost sound and boost color of a car. Though the boost sounds in questions are just a bunch of horns so I don't understand that at all. The livery editor is comprehensive and offers some really nice flexibility with how you set up the visual look of your car. You're able to change the material of your car as well as the stickers you put on it. It gives you a 1000 layers limit to work with so that should be plenty for most people. You can even creator your own stickers. One big gripe I have though is that once you're done with your custom livery, you have to publish it in order to be able equip it onto your car, I don't understand that at all especially when it's not a requirement in any other racing game. The track editor provides a nice assortment of options for you to utilize in order to build your own track across the assorted environments available.

800+ hours spent (at the time this review was written) playing this game and it feels like time well spent. I showed up to the community shortly after the controversy broke out regarding VRChat's update adding EAC and banning mods all together. Not as a refugee, mind you, I have had no prior experience with VRChat or anything else like it before that update but after having seen some people recommend this game over VRC, I was curious and decided to check it out and boy oh boy am I glad I did. I was hooked on this right away. Why? The main reason: the community itself. While it is very small compared to VRC, 9 times out of 10 you'll find a friendly face that you can strike up a conversation and goof around with too. Of course there is some bad actors you likely come across but those are few and far in between, in my entire time playing this I've only encountered 2 trolls and 1 crasher. Granted, I typically occupy instances that have low player counts but I digress. Fact of the matter, ChilloutVRs player base is a pleasant bunch of folks.

Chillout has a pretty unique feature for this genre of game called "props" which is publicly available community made content that anybody can spawn in and play around with much in the same sort of sense as you would expect with, say, Gmod. There's a wide variety of things the community has made from cars, guns, toys, furniture, food, pocket dimensions, writing utensils, meme based stuff, etc. You name it, you'll likely find it.

The developers are actively working on this game and are doing their due diligence to make it the best it can be. It's a small dev team tho so of course updates are gonna be infrequent but they're trying and that's what matters. They recently started doing monthly blogs to keep everyone up to date on what they plan on doing and how they plan on doing it. You can even check out the AlphaBlendInteractive website to check out what they have done, what they're working on, and what they plan on doing.

Unlike VRC after that one update, CVR has it's own mod support through the use of melon loader and ABI added in their previous update to the game something called the Mod Network What is it? "The Mod Network is a built-in networking layer that mod developers can utilize. It allows for Mods to communicate between Users in the same instance in a secure way without needing any third-party Networking library or services." So yeah. There you go. The modding community has made some well crafted mods that adds some some fun goofy features to the game or some much desired quality of life features as well so if you decided to try this game out. Don't hesitate to check out the mods as well!

Of course with this game being early access, it's not gonna be the best experience out there. The previous update upgraded the game engine to a newer version which, of course, is gonna cause some issues with user made content. Mainly speaking in terms of the shaders used. As it currently stands, VR users are gonna suffer from this shader issue the most compared to the desktop users and there's no real certainty as to if the content makers are gonna fix this issue with their content as a large percentage of them have come and gone from what I can tell. You wont find much in terms of interactive experiences across the various worlds you find, this is mainly due to absence of any sort of scripting to allow for custom interactive experiences to be possible but some users still have been able to get something done. The menu UI could be better, it's not terrible but I'd argue it could benefit from some improvements.

TL;DR
-The community is friendly
-This game has user made item content you can spawn in and play around with
-The developers are actively improving upon this game.
-It has good mod support
-This game being in early access , it's has some flaws.

While it saddens me that this game is mearly it's own demo spin-off of the full BroForce game. It defenitely has a pleasent replay value to it none of the less. I have not seen the Expendables 3 movie itself, but needless to say that I never realized how fun it would be to play as the characters featured in the movie and being able to blow up a bunch of terrorists because you know, WHO DOESN'T LIKE EXPLOSIONS?! In a good way it surprises me how that almost everything is destructable except the ladders (but personally I think it creates a disadvantage at times for when you need to reach higher altitudes but the climbing using knifes makes up for it) since I'm so used to playing shooting games, regardless of the kind, where almost everything is practically indestructable and that gets boring after a while. Ultimately this game kind of represents the fighting spirit the United States and how we appreciate being a part of a free nation and having liberty as well as what we would do to protect it. If you want a fast paced side scrolling shooter with a bunch of explosions, then definetly go for Expendabros, you won't be dissapointed