Recent reviews by BinarySplit

I'm a huge fan of single-player FPS games. I grew up playing Doom II, Duke3D, Unreal, Half-Life, Serious Sam, etc. I love this genre of games, but 45 minutes into Doom I can tell I'm not going to get any enjoyment from it.

Doom seems to be confused about what it's trying to be. It's too slow and the environments are too cramped for it to be a good deathmatch/arena shooter(like Doom I & II, Unreal or Quake 3), and the enemy placement is too chaotic and the environment is too open for it to be a good linear/corridor shooter(like Half-Life or Gears of War). Depending on your upbringing, when you see an enemy you will either (a) circle strafe, which doesn't work well in Doom because you are slow and the environment keeps getting in the way, or (b) duck for cover, which doesn't work well in Doom because randomly spawning enemies will quickly flank you.

I recommend watching the first episode of a Let's Play to see if you'd like ETO. This is the video that sold me on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNKq8IBDddY

The gameplay is relatively easy, but novel enough to keep you engaged. The characters, the music, the art, the "realness" of people are where Even the Ocean shines.

I'm a massive fan of the original Deus Ex, and after Human Revolution I thought Square Enix had permanently derailed one of my favorite game series. Mankind Divided isn't perfect, but unlike the last game it actually lives up to the legacy of its source material.

The maps are sprawling mazes of alternate paths, filled with side missions, lore and secret stashes. There are numerous conspiracies and depictions of how modern society is being corrupted. They've done extraordinarily well considering that this game is a prequal to the original game, meaning they have little room for making new plotlines without rewriting the history explained in the original game. That said, I really wish there was more. The first game was a prescient literary masterpiece, but Mankind Divided is a lot less ambitious with its writing and predictions.

I recommend you buy this game, but wait for a sale. It's a worthy Deus Ex game, for sure, but there are enough flaws that would make you regret your purchase if you paid full price. There are many little annoyances like bad pacing, unnecessary padding, DLC, etc., but overall this is a game that all fans of conspiracies or cyberpunk dystopias should play.

Looks great, feels great, very quickly runs out of things to do though. After 5 hours I started feeling like I had seen everything the game had to offer.

Development is going surprisingly fast for an Early Access title, so it's definitely worth keeping an eye on - the endgame content could be a patch away.

I'm a huge fan of sci-fi stories about AIs and the fragility of spacefaring civilizations. Rodina is basically an Isaac Asimov novel, but better - it put me in the shoes of a robot given conflicting and illogical orders from humans. It put me in charge of the survival of several species. It made me feel what it's like to be treated like a machine in a way that no book ever did.

Rodina might not be for everyone, but if you have an active imagination or a love of sci-fi, Rodina is a must-have.

CAUTION: May trigger empathy!

Sky Break does so many things right, it's easy to be tricked into thinking there's depth to the game. The graphics are great, the story sounds interesting, there's shooting and pets and crafting and skills to level up and exploration and a sky fortress... but none of these things really extend beyond their superficial appearance.

To elaborate on each of those points:

• Story: There's 8 journals, 2 screenshot & text-based cutscenes, and a few lines of monologue from the character. That's approximately 20 paragraphs of story total.
  
• Shooting: The shooting is alright to begin with, but you only get the one weapon & several advanced ammo types that have to be crafted. It starts to feel repetitive after 10 minutes.
  
• Pets: You can hack downed enemies and keep them as pets. You can even spend points to increase their stats! (though it doesn't feel like the stats do much) The AI pathfinding is awful though, and most of the time the pets will be stuck on something and unable to fight for you, or just unwilling to fight because they can't see the enemy.
  
• Crafting: All but one crafted item is a boring old consumable - ammo, health, etc. The one non-boring item lets you mine crystals to increase the size of your pet army up to 4 slots. I was hoping for a tech tree like Subnautica, but what I got was just several variations on "Plant + Mucus = Ammo"
  
• Skills: More inventory space is nice in the beginning, but about half way through the game there was nothing else worth spending points on
  
• Exploration: Scan environment, identify nearest unknown waypoint, run in that direction for 5 minutes, activate the waypoint, repeat for 5 hours.
  
• Sky Fortress: This really feels like a missed opportunity - it could convey story through distress calls or emails, itcould have a zoo of all the Mechas and plant species you collected, but there's hardly any of that. It's mostly just a chest to dump items in, a free healing station and a station to take you between islands.
  
• Graphics: The graphics are actually quite nice. The environmental detail gets quite repetitive, but that wouldn't be as obvious if there was enough substance to the gameplay to distract from it.

Overall, it was 1 hour of fun, 4 hours of grind, and an unsatisfying ending. I'm not unhappy with the game, just disappointed that it didn't live up to its potential.

It's a reasonably interesting meta-game, 6 hours long. I found it a lot more interesting than A Beginner's Guide. There's not much I can tell you that you can't already see in the trailer - it's a game about picking apart a game from the inside while figuring out how its development went so wrong.

I bought this specifically for the Oculus Rift support, so I'm only going to review that part. The VR stuff is really unpolished:

• It has frequent frame rate jank, seemingly at random (I'm guessing it's loading content or Unity is doing a garbage collect). I've got a GTX 970 GPU and a Core i7 CPU. Other VR experiences like Chronos and BlazeRush run silky smooth, so I'm pretty sure it's not my PC
  
• It doesn't launch from Steam VR - mildly annoying having to take the mask off to launch a game, only to put the mask back on seconds later.
  
• If you have a rift attached, you can't play it in non-VR mode. Even if you close Oculus Home, Glitchspace will relaunch it. Worse - because games don't render if the Rift isn't on your face (theres a proximity sensor on the Rift), you're left staring at a black screen wondering why the game isn't loading. You have to unplug the Rift completely if you want to play in non-VR mode
  
• It has sections of the game where you have to fall. I can stomach non-VR-optimized FPS controls in VR now, but falling still feels awful in VR for me.
  
• Having independent looking and steering directions is great because you can look around without veering off course, but without any visual indication of where your "steering" direction is, it's a constant battle between your mouse, your face and the WASD keys to keep your character moving in the desired direction

Played on Oculus Rift

Pros: This is phototourism at its finest. There were four fully 3D scenes that I really enjoyed exploring. A Church, a courtyard in Barcelona, a small patch of Mars and and the Valve Offices. They're all converted from photos, and while they don't quite give you "presence", they do let you forget your IRL surroundings.

Cons: The Vive-only features weren't clearly indicated. The first scene says "Activate the lever to begin the game", but for a Rift user, there's no indication that I can't actually activate it without the Vive controllers - I'm just left standing there with a lever wondering wtf I have do to do "activate" it - do I mash X on the controller? do I headbutt it? Nope, it is ethereal - there is nothing I can do in this scene and they didn't even bother to tell me I'm not welcome here :(