Recent reviews by T3cube

absolutely banger. the game is not for me, but the ost sure as hell is!

better than the first one for sure. though some abilities have overlap with some of the other ones. its not the best spread of abilities so far...but its not bad.

amazing animation detail with everything that ori goes through. absolutely fantastic attention to detail.

the ability to turn reduce or off camera shakes would be nice though, it messes with my vision and placement of ori during combat. using 2d pieces for some things is starting to show its age imo, hopefully 3d assets can be used in the next one (yes it would be a large amount of work)...hopefully there is a next one.

great ost. if a bit repetitive since allot of the music is remixes of the main theme.

love the different time signatures too.

ok so this game as very cool. its short but sweet, theres even a few dev easter eggs in the game. the story is excellent (so much death and sadness and moving on. the writers dared to have a sad story, well done. thankyou.), the visuals are great, ori feels real good to me to pilot...really makes you want to jump around from the mobility. (unlike hollowknight, yes im roasting the early game movement. its horrible.). the save mechanic is really cool actually. save almost anywhere!

there are a few things to note:
wall jump feels like it overlaps with the wall climb ability a little bit. why have both? they effectively do the same thing...just that wall jump is less clean and works in all areas, wall climb doesnt work in all areas as ori gets stuck, but feels more natural.

the camera shakes were jarring. i am unable to focus due to the noise these introduce. being able to turn these off would have been great.

direction in the temples was kind hard but solvable without guides.

learning about new mechanics was also kinda hard? especally since they just show themselves randomly often resulting in your death.

there were lots of blind jumps where ori gets thrown around the screen. good luck figuring out where they went. at first i thought that they were kinda small and i wanted a close up...but over time it makes sense to have a screen that large...though i would have liked to have the ability to adjust how much of the level i can see on screen

button reuse on the controllers was a little annoying. sometimes ori would climb and then need to glide but not glide. these caused reactivation of buttons to need to be a constant reminder.

i missed an entire area and was able to beat the game....oops.

Man I hate the controls of this game. Yeah I know there are upgrades and abilities and such, but the base feel of the game is just so bad to me.

Everything else is stunning from the environment to level designed to music to even the early bosses from what little I experienced.

If you're expecting something to feel fluid in motion, this ain't it. The only reason I'm giving this a thumbs up is because I think it's unfair if I downvote this game because of how stunning everything else is. This is not a polished turd.

I havent played this game for long given my current time and im already writing a review. why?

the graphics are dated, the game play is very arcady, the collisions and hitboxes are weird...the game feels old

none of it matters. the visuals are very pleasing to me, the controlls and levels thus far are amazing speed havens with interesting flight and gravity mechanics, there is a story here, no idea what it is as of yet. yeah there are some bs dark zones where you have to know the track or react quickly and yeah they are annoying as all hell sometimes...but like, thats the style and it adds to the apeal. its not unfair by any stretch. the sound effects are amazing, the voice lines are really nice as well, the track designs are cool. im having a blast.

the vfx are....old...or atleast feel dated. (would be cool to have a global illumination patch some day if possible. i think this game would benefit heavily from global illumination due to all of the neon and lighting trickery.)

GRIP combat racing was one of the racing games i enjoyed, this kinda slides into that alley with more air control.

absolutely worth purchasing

Someone made modded minecraft tech modpacks that also include a sprinkle of magic into a game and its great.

also go play modded minecraft tech focused modpacks like multiblock madness, create above and beyond, nomifactory....etc.

BUY NOW!!!

Whats this? a review getting updated a good chunk of time AFTER the release has passed? well this cant be right, after all how could a soundtrack change so much?

But change it did.

As an update (free to current buyers) and not a secondary DLC for 2 extra disks of tracks like some devs would do, an additional set of tracks was added! Now the collection is worthy of being called The Official Soundtrack of Everspace 2, everything is (hopefully) here at last.

Well done. And Thank-you.

What did I just play and why did I play it?

It was so pretty...

It was puzzle and art and complex math all at once... Like some sort of weird fever dream

Go play it.

Edit#3
After another really long break its time to revise the review again. so, here are my talking points of note:

-This game is really hard. There are options to make controlling stuff easier....however it is still a little...odd....that these would be required for some players. None the less, this is considered an accessibility feature.

-Rebinding controls works properly now with correct directions displayed for buttons IE left and right instead of increase and decrease (real smooth brain on that one. you'd think that QA would include making sure the UI actually functions the way its intended...I digress, weird stuff can happen in game dev so this can be dismissed if it "works on my machine", and then stopped working for the public launch)

-Match making is here to stay. join online and forget about making a room at the time of writing. your only options are unranked match making, and SRL match making with ranks. Instead of making a room, you can add friends from your steam friends list and then invite them to races. It would be nice to make a lobby so anyone can join...but I dont think thats in the game yet. Why not? Redout 1 already had this. Why take the feature away?

-There is a replayable tutorial to help get you used to the game. Thanks devs, this is a wonderful feature

-UI/UX is overall improved from redout classic. There are some areas where I think it could be further improved, and other areas where I think its COMPLETE and UTTER TRASH. Mission selection in campaigns is made much easier now instead of one giant scroll wheel like in redout 1. everything is in tiles and neatly managed. The HUD ingame is nice and neat though it would be cool if certain areas of the tracks had effects that got displayed on the HUD. for example, enhanced cooling when driving over water. The UI/UX for selecting ship parts and upgrades is ok. One giant scroll wheel near the bottom of the screen that transforms to show all sub options when you select one of the parent options. I wish that when you selected a parent option, it popped up a vertical scroll bar with 5 options so you could see 2 ahead and 2 behind with the middle one being the selection. the scroll bar could be put to either side of the screen to make room for the ship and the statistics display. The devs really messed this part up. Why do I have to push a button to examine the ship? The ship is already there, just let me move it with the second control stick like redout 1 damnit. Serious smooth brain moment. If I am using the UI to customize it, why not let me manipulate the camera angle while I am customizing it with the second stick. The preset angle when you select a asthetic part is often not good enough. Fix this please. The last atrocity is the main menu itself with selecting racing modes. In order to use career ships in arcade you have to push yet another button to switch over. why not just make these 2 separate options. Setting custom arcade races is a nighmare as well. The way to set them with redout classic was nearly perfect, you had all the stats of the race and what you would be racing with on one screan. why did you change this and make it a convoluded sub menu with tabs? Just use a submenu under the main menu's tile theme for each mode and then the settings there in when you select a tile for time trials. This could all be under arcade. Come on guys, this is seriously an EPIC fail for UI/UX design. Take inspiration from mario kart or even your own redout 1 game. Go look at windows 10 live tiles and the folder option for them when grouping them together. Hell, look at android or IOS app folders. you could have easily done something with that with the tile menu for arcade instead of whatever this current garbage is.

And then we have simple things like why cant I set lap counts for time trials, why cant I Mirror the track....all of this could be put under a tiled submenu under arcade, but instead its all hidden. Come on guys.

-The game is slower than redout 1. now now wait a sec, let me explain. Redout 1 featured open tracks and because you had a significantly larger distance to cover, you went way faster...at least visually without any FoV trickery. Where you were going could change quickly with momentary areas of pure speed. Redout 2 on the other talon uses FoV trickery to make you think you are going faster than you actually are. In addition, the tracks are much tighter in redout 2 with antigrav vehicles that handle much better than redout one. The flat and wide straights that existed in redout 1 dont exist here and as such moving at redout 1 speeds is not required to make this game a fast paced one. This time tracks are significantly more technical than redout 1 and your speedometer will be wrong if you compare redout 2 directly to redout 1. I guarantee it. If you wanted something faster....redout 1 will be the game to play....but if you want something more fast paced, redout 2 will be your poison. That being said, the trophy challenge difficulty is all over the place and in some places are nearly impossible without a spoiler or several hours on a track to figure out where all the death planes are or get the fastest time that would rival nightmare mode gameplay.

Now to the music. Ah yes, the music...and audiophile like me loves so much if done well. I LOVE the main menu music. It's as banger as redout classics menu music. Music, a form if audible arts is very subjective, what I like might not be what you like. There should be something for everyone to enjoy here. Here is where we smack into a concern of mine. There are tracks in the game that make up the redout experience while being copyrighted to hell and back preventing you from so much as whispering them on stream. Its not many (only 9 tracks out of 51 tracks) and redout INCLUDES AND OPTION TO TURN THOSE TRACKS OFF FOR STREAMING (thanks devs). "Aww boo hoo im missing 9 of the 51 tracks I want to listen to on stream": SHUT, you have 42 other tracks, deal with it, you wont miss them. Now, my issue is that I cant fully share the experience of the game as a whole with my stream even if it IS only 9 tracks missing, but that's not the main problem here. The bigger problem here is going to be able to actually buy the game. In order to distribute these tracks in the game, 34bigthings has a contract or a licensing agreement with whoever the media labels are that manage the rights to the works....and as 34bigthings should know:

Contracts and licensing agreements can:
-Have escape clauses for both parties incase one or the other decides the agreement is nolonger viable or beneficial.
-Expire

This could lead to the game nolonger being able to be sold in the future unless the offending content is removed. Want 2 examples? GTA4 and (almost) GTA5. I am making a call right now that Death Stranding will have this issue as well. The good news is that the songs can be stripped if devs care enough to keep their IP on the market.....but why include them in the first place if this is the risk you are taking? I dont fully understand. This is just a concern, it doesnt affect the gameplay (atleast at a technical level) and only affects you if you stream.

Overall...this is not redout classic...if you came from redout classic....you're going to have to relearn quite a bit due to the handling of the crafts being very very different. If you played wipeout or ballistics NG or some other form of anti grav racer with tight tracks and bouncy controls, this is gonna be your game, strap in and blast off.

Do i recommend the game? ]No. Redout 1 is the better game. its got a specific art style, less offensive sounds, a good ui (unless youre in the campaign, then it sucks), and a banger ost that slaps. Redout 2 has bits of poor design and lazyness everywhere.