Recent reviews by Frooby

Allow me to preface this review with the following: I like this game, and it deserves a thumbs-up from a purely technical standpoint, however it loses this privilege for varying reasons I'll get to in a bit.

THE GOOD:
Grab That Auto 5 is a beautiful game. It looks stunning, the detail goes to a seriously impressive level for such a huge game. The weather affects terrain conditions, car handling, your clothes and hair can get wet. The wide variety of vehicles, weapons, and clothing numbering in the thousands of items to make your in-game character whoever you want them to be. A gangster, a rich businessperson, a military operative, just some average chump in a t-shirt and flip flops, it's all available.

The breadth of events to participate in are astounding. Character-led missions, ambitious multi-stage heists, PVP battles, vehicle races (which are the best, in my opinion, due to lack of people shooting at you and variety of sub-types), even a Mad Max style arena battle zone. There's also a single-player you can jump into, and go through an interesting but forgettable retired-heisters-go-for-one-last-score story without having to deal with the stupidity of the average gamer.

Sound design is on point, with a dozen different radio stations with a dozen songs or talk-show episodes in each. You can hear the distant explosions of somebody in an attack jet rumble over the hills, or hear the wind whipping your character's ears if you're going fast in an open-top vehicle. I like to simply stand outside when it's raining, purely because the thunder and raindrops sound so perfect it gives me chills.

THE BAD:
First off, let me get my main gripe in; This game is paywalled at the highest level. You can look up scores of Youtube videos crunching the numbers, but for the fastest, nicest cars you can get or the pub-stompiest of pub-stomping airborne vehicles, or getting maximum function out of your properties, you simply cannot play the game and save up. Millions of in-game dollars, per item, is ludicrous, especially when many of these items offer direct upgrades to their affordable counterparts - you simply cannot afford the best unless you pay real-world money for shark cards, and this feels incredibly in-your-face. Want to give the guy riding around in a Harrier jump-jet loaded with explosive homing ammo? That'll be a breezy 8 mil. It feels unfair in most situations, and the prices only rise with each update.

You "can" buy properties to unlock extra missions. A motorcycle club to do drug-runs, an underground bunker to do military hijackings, a luxury office to do car-smuggling, a nuclear facility to prevent the world being blown up. Note I put the word can in quotations. This is because while, yes, the purchases are optional and aren't necessary to get loads of enjoyment out of the game's non-purchase modes, the game will shove it down your throat that you didn't. Four or five characters will call your phone incessantly, badgering you to buy these properties because "trust me, you won't regret it..." according to one of them. I'm going out immediately and saying yes, you will regret it. These facilities cost anywhere from a couple hundred grand for the most basic ones, to upwards of ten million for a fully decked-out lair. Even if you do cave to the peer-pressure that the game puts on you (there is nothing you can do to stop the calls except pay up), the missions they offer (except, arguably, the office and nuclear facility) will not give you nearly enough revenue to justify the prices you're having to pay to access them.

Yes, the game actually tries to bully you into making a bad deal. And this is only made further annoying by...

THE UGLY:
Here's where I get less technical and more personal. I either barely tolerate or despise every single character (bar one) in this game. Grand Theft Auto has, historically, used parody of the real world to create humour in their games as far as I've seen, but 5 is the only one of the series I've played personally. The writing is so scathingly satirical and hyper-honest, that every character becomes a one-dimensional caricature except for Michael and Franklin in the main storyline, but even these two characters have little to really draw you into them or genuinely like them, besides the fact they are your avatar as the player.

Almost every NPC in GTA Online is written in a way that makes you dislike them, and they all act in mean spirit to your personal character in every mission, treating you as little more than a disposable asset they can use like toilet paper then discard when you're no longer needed. NPC citizens walking or driving around will over-react and yell slurs at you if you even think about disobeying a traffic law, and in the stereotypical Bible-belt redneck half of the island you'll be shot at if you don't toe an imaginary line. This is a world I genuinely think is an accurate representation of purgatory, because it just depresses the hell out of me.

THE KARA:
I like Kara (or Cara). She's the radio host of the Non-Stop Pop station, which I mostly use purely because she's not a stereotype or caricature or an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and is just a DJ trying to play good music and help everyone have a good day. It upsets me that such a kindly character had to be stuck in a world like Los Santos.

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FINAL SCORE:
8/10 game, I absolutely think you should play it. But be ready for the fact that 2K games will bully you into paying a considerable amount of money if you want the full experience. Please don't give them any more money than you paid for the base game.

I really don't like this game. It isn't fun, isn't rewarding, and in some parts isn't balanced. You play this game to hurt yourself. I won't be playing this again.

This is the greatest VR title ever. It's fun, it's wacky, and it's got... A story. I think it does, anyway.

Mostly though, this game is one of the best tech demos ever - if you want a sandboxy combat game which focuses on mechanics and looks over, say, story or characters a la Half-Life, then buy this game, buy an Index, buy that upgrade to your PC that you always wanted. Because this is the big one, baby.

GOOD THINGS

This game, if you didn't know, has a full physics simulation system. Everything you see can be interacted with, and interacts with everything else. If you see a door, well it may not lead anywhere, but you can grab the handle, smack it, shoot it, whatever. This creates a massive range of choices when facing the puzzles littered throughout the game. You could shoot your way through a warehouse to get to the other side of a high fence, or just pile up boxes and climb straight over. Either option is totally viable, along with a score of others you just need to find.
The Index finger system is brilliant, and really cranks up the immersion. Grab something tight to never let go, or hold a weapon's handle gently to slide your hand up and down it without needing to release. On top of that, it makes it even easier to flip off the headcra-- er, VR headset creature, that just tried to eat your face into the digital world.

OKAY THINGS

Gunplay and weaponry is alright. You're going to mainly find yourself sticking to one or two weapons throughout (crowbar and rifle) because that's what you'll find the most. The ammunition purchase stations are a brilliant idea, having to sacrifice your ammo to get a gun so you can use said ammo in the first place, is ingenious. However, ammo crates are so plentiful that you'll not really struggle to afford anything, and still have hundreds of shots, maybe even thousands, after you buy them. Not that you need to anyway - weapon crates are equally common, and often have guns inside that you would have gotten in the ammo shops, often better too. So the system is quite defunct if you think about it. And the abundance of ammo really means melee isn't used too often at all, and oftentimes towards the end of the game is discouraged with the over-use of ranged enemies in the final three or four levels.

BAD THINGS

Story? What's a story?
The world of Boneworks is mysterious and vague, despite how beautiful it is. There's not much reason nor explanation of why you're doing anything you're doing, except a few one-sided TV chats that feel like they're missing the other half of the script. TL;DR "thing happen, stop the thing" is most of what you'll get. What are the mysterious plasma people that attack you on sight? Why are there hologram soldiers over robot balls and why do they shoot you? Why do the VR-crabs attack you and try to show you the "MythOS" symbol even though you already work for them apparently? Don't expect any of these to be answered - which is a shame, as it's left me wanting to know more about this strange, grungy VR utopia.
My second gripe is the level design. Sometimes it's incredibly linear, and there's only one obvious way you can go to progress. I find this comforting, but in certain areas it's incredibly labyrinthine. You can go down side route after side route, and they may end up going somewhere, but you have no idea if it's the right somewhere. Other times you'll be stuck in the same area and unable to really find the way forward - for as good a game as it is, it really doesn't have much direction for the player besides some painted arrows.
My third gripe is the Botanics level specifically. JESUS CHRIST, can it run any worse? I had to go around the edges, looking away from the rest of the map because it ran so poorly. I was reaching sub 3 frames per second when looking at the central block of the map's main area, and if you tried to shoot it got even worse. This may not sound too bad but I assure you, it is a literal headache in a VR headset. And I have a seriously beefy computer too. Luckily this subsided once I'd hunted down and killed every single enemy, but even then it ran poorly. I only encountered this issue in this specific area.

And my final Bad Thing - to the developers personally, I say this in the nicest way, screw you for making that ladder sequence so long. I nearly drowned myself in the sweat!


My final verdict: This is THE VR game that is ushering in the revolution. Prior to this, VR games have all been gimmicks - only a shooting game, only a climbing game, only an exploration game. Boneworks is the first full gaming experience designed solely for VR that I've ever seen, and hopefully this positive review will help in showing other developers and companies that there's nothing to fear in VR. We love full games. We want more full games.

Final score: 8.5/10

(I cannot review the extra modes, such as Sandbox or Fantasy Land or any of those other things, because I haven't unlocked them at the time of writing.)

The best.

I'll put it simply, for everyone:
In the 13 minutes I tried this, it crashed and soft-locked more times than Skyrim or Fallout 4 did in the first WEEK.

That's not good, as you can likely imagine.
Though the concept is amazing, I'm certain it's been done better elsewhere. The pieces are there, and it's so tantalizingly nearly-good but the technical issues murdered this.

You try and switch brushes? Crash. You try and save your work? Crash. You even just use the basic brush, in the middle of a stroke? Soft-locks the game with an hourglass over your eyes, leaving you unable to do anything. You change levels? Yep, captain, that's a crash.

If you, like me, are looking to get into 3D modelling through your VR system, please look elsewhere. At least for now.

I love this game. Please don't play it.

Pretty much, it's CS:GO in VR, as I'm sure billions of other players have already attested to. But the people playing it are just as bad. You wanna play TTT? Well don't worry, there's at least one child in every server using their parent's setup and just shooting everyone anyway.

I love VR. I want to love VR games. But there are no single-player games good enough to hold my attention, and there are no multiplayer games I've played that don't suffer directly from their playerbase.

TL;DR I don't like other gamers, especially the young ones, and I wrote this for the grand prix.

This breaks the game and makes it run terribly/disconnect/make my friends I'm playing with not show up. Playing this in VR is fantastic for 30 seconds before something breaks and I have to quit out of frustration.

I know it's VR doing this as I have no such issues in desktop mode. Which sucks because this makes the game actually fun, where desktop version is not for me.

Don't bother.

I love this game to death, but 20 minutes in I hulk-smashed straight into a wall, now my hand is lacerated.

If you love violence, and a very good workout, get this game. If you have a space smaller than 2mx1.5m, do NOT get this game under any circumstance or you will be sorry.

Much as I loved this game, the aesthetic is lovely, the gameplay is somewhat slick, and the missions are of a... Usually reasonable challenge level, one thing killed it for me. Why can't I choose higher than 1440x900 resolution? I put it down on my settings to lower than my native of 1920x1080 and it absolutely killed how the game looked in fullscreen. No amount of help I sought could fix this, not on the forums, not on Steam, and radio silence when I asked the devs directly. Oh, and forget windowed mode, you can't use mouse-to-sides panning in windowed mode. And the middle-mouse button alternative is clunky. So yeah... This killed it for me. A shame really, I loved where the game was going.

It's a piss-take.