Recent reviews by Morbo513

It's more than a worthy successor to the originals. Almost everything good about them is preserved and improved.

There are some big caveats to that:

A-Life is currently dysfunctional, spawning AI frequently and in close proximity to the player, and lacking the emergent element of having various groups of stalkers and mutants happen upon one another. GSC have acknowledged this and are reportedly working on it as a top priority.

There are various other bugs ranging from amusing to game-breaking. Wouldn't be STALKER without them.

Certain mutants are exceedingly tanky bullet-sponges, whilst also being very lethal to the player.

Foliage doesn't properly conceal you from AI - firefights in otherwise open areas feel very one-sided and your only options are to run away, or tank the fire and out-shoot the opponents

I'm not a fan of American VAs with their native accents in a game set in a totally different part of the world, even if otherwise well-done. Fortunately you're able to use Ukrainian VO with subtitles, but it's less ideal than the iconic English voice-acting of the originals.

Some of the controls are pretty awful, and there seem to be a few that you can't change the binds for, or will find overlapping with ones you can't change. Splitting the quick-belt into 2 button-press and 2 button-holds was a mistake and feels very counterintuitive. Once you've used up the items assigned to it, another item from your inventory will replace them - which will often result in you scarfing down some sausage meat mid-combat.

Strongly recommend waiting a week or perhaps longer to see what gets patched - but if you're impatient, it's still a very enjoyable and immersive experience. The gunplay is great, the environments are very pretty, exploration is rewarding, the quest-design is well done.

No More Room In Hell, no more?

I followed NMRiH1's development since around the time it began, and I'm very fond of the original game. It's clear that the direction of this sequel diverges significantly. While I could see this game shaping up to be a good one in and of its self, I feel that's contingent on re-introducing certain mechanics and design philosophies that were present in the original. The EA period is an opportunity to course-correct - and I'm mainly writing this review for the purpose of further feedback to that end.

Before I get into it - even if this is your first time hearing of NMRiH, and you don't care about the original - NMRiH2 is, at the time of this review, rather severely lacking in content, polish, optimisation and server stability - as is to be expected of an Early-Access live-service release, so I won't be going into those things - except to say the connection/lag/ping etc seems particularly bad to the point it's practically unplayable. To make matters worse, as of yet there's no single-player/offline option.

No More Room in Hell 1 is, in many ways, the anti-Left 4 Dead - where L4D's gameplay is fast-paced and action-oriented, NMRiH is tense, methodical and strategic. Engaging the zombies in any manner is always risky, and often costs you something. You had to be patient, aware and conscious of your timing.

Your character is no super-immune, marathon-running prodigy of marksmanship and bashing in zombie skulls. You and your teammates are just average joes trying to survive in the same way everyone else was, before they got turned.

Guns are powerful, but rare - along with ammo and healing supplies. A single bite from a zombie can infect you, they can make you bleed, and you're otherwise quite fragile. You had to be very discerning as to what weapons to use and when - whether to engage in melee, risking infection or inury - or spending some of what little ammo you had between you. To try and kill every zombie in your vicinity, or to be more conservative as you try and find the path of least resistance through the shambling hordes. Using that last bullet on a zombie - or saving it for yourself to avoid your corpse becoming one, and biting a buddy.

Add to that a very gloomy and apocalyptic atmosphere, with maps and scenarios designed to take full advantage of these mechanics, and you have No More Room in Hell. If that sounds appealing, it's free on Steam.

NMRiH2 misses that mark - not by such a degree it's beyond salvation, because in many ways it does preserve the spirit and the strengths of the original - but its core mechanics are lacking in the same depth, and NMRiH1 isn't particularly deep in the first place.

Melee stamina is separate from sprint stamina (which doesn't exist). There is a charged attack, but it automatically releases within a second or so, and clicking whilst in the middle of an attack animation will queue up the next attack to be performed automatically. It doesn't feel great,

In 1, you could make a quick attack which was more draining on your stamina overall - or use a charged heavy attack that did more damage the longer you charged it, with the stamina consumed increasing accordingly - more sustainable and dependable, but slower and clunkier.

In NMRiH2, you just spam click at the zombie's head til it dies or you run out of stamina. Overall the melee combat in 2 feels basic, awkward and dissatisfying.

NMRiH2's inventory is compartmentalised, now using slots and stacks - the items aren't competing so hard for such a limited capacity, and slots equate the size/weight of a whole gun with that of a single bullet or an A battery. Where in 1, every weapon, bullet, tool or medical supply took up a portion of the same, granular inventory space - with a rather intuitive wheel UI (which still had room for improvement, but I digress).

Ammo in NMRiH1 was divided into calibres - this enabled the game to give the players quite a lot of ammo overall, but meant they had to have found and/or held on to the right weapon(s) to take advantage of it - or held on to the ammo til they found the gun - and all the choices and dilemmas around inventory management that involved. Meanwhile, in NMRiH2, each weapon takes one of 5 generic ammo-types; you can have a stack of each in your inventory, as well as all the different guns required to use them, with no negative consequences and still space left-over. Together with the lack of stamina/weight systems, players are naturally encouraged to hoover all the ammo they can, and disincentivised from sharing and coordinating it.

It means the "meta" weapons will be clear-cut, as the more powerful ones can't be balanced out with greater encumbrance, as in the original game - reducing your capacity for other, potentially equally important items. Nor can they be as easily siloed into a rarer ammo type; once you've found the best weapon for its ammo type, there's never going to be an incentive to swap away from it.

You can quite easily zoom across the map, seeing as sprint is unlimited and stuffing your inventory doesn't slow you down. This makes navigating the zombies outside of POIs/buildings quite trivial.

Altogether, this works to undermine the sense of tension, and deprives the player of the challenge, compelling choices and the rewards of coordination - with particular regard to resource management - that you'd hope a grounded survival-horror co-op game would present you with. To the uninitiated, these might all sound like minor grievances, but they are each deliberate choices that profoundly affect the challenge, fun, pacing and tone of gameplay. If you want to see any of that in practice, just play NMRiH1.

Just to throw out something specific - the over-under shotgun (haven't found any others yet) seems to have no spread, and doesn't function the same as in NMRiH1 - where you could quite easily take off several zombie heads with one shot.

Finishing off with a quickfire list of what I do like about the game:

Extraction shooter format. For the zombie genre, it's a no-brainer (pun intended) and I wonder why it hadn't already been done.

The map feels expansive, without being too large or difficult to navigate.

Proximity voice-chat allows player-groups to compartmentalise their voice comms (when it works, anyway). Hope the radios make a return.

Starting off players in separate locations, far away from the main objectives. Has a nice dynamic of slowly building up your group out of the people who've survived long enough, as you each coalesce around the POIs, and then the main objectives.

Overall atmosphere and visuals are pretty damn nice. It's lacking a lot of the ambiance (and music) of NMRiH1 - this is all meant to be occurring as the world's going to ♥♥♥♥, but it doesn't so much feel that way here - it's a good starting point though.

Gunplay feels great - challenging, without being frustrating (currently-shagged servers/netcode/hit-detection notwithstanding) - there seems to be a decent bit of sway and inertia. It feels intuitive and guns feel powerful, but not overly easy.

Despite the generic ammo, at least for the first half of the map it did feel appropriately scarce.

The design of each POI I've seen so far is pretty good, with complex buildings, and mini-games/puzzles that you'll need someone covering your back for - you can place barricades and it's intuitive enough to do it dynamically and buy yourselves some time.

There's a lot of potential here, but even more ironing out to do before it can fulfil it - and I really hope it does, cause beneath all the early-access jank and brokenness, and misguided "streamlining", there is a solid core concept. So for now it's gotta be a no, but keep your eye on it if the idea appeals to you. There's always NMRiH1 to play in the mean-time.

Conceptually, it's great - it feels a lot more modern than ArmA 3, which was essentially still just Operation Flashpoint under the hood. The Conflict gamemode is the best iteration of the "Capture the Island" gamemode BI have come up with so far, with a logistics/supply system, Squad/PR AAS-style capzone locking/unlocking, and player-built bases and fortifications. Player movement, vehicle physics and driving etc. all feel much more refined, with smooth speed and stance adjustments. Fair few QoL features like being able to set your default ADS FOV.

The graphics look much closer to ArmA 2 but better, with very good lighting, where A3 looks very "plastic" in comparison. Buildings are all populated with furniture - you can even flush the toilets. Seeing Everon remade in such detail is really cool. The sound design is pretty good, with terrain believably obscuring distant sounds, or sounds made inside buildings being muffled from without - foliage rustles in the wind, and your footsteps' sound and volume varies a ton depending on the surface type, and how fast you're moving. It has functional radios and 3d local voice.

It's set during the Cold War, which I feel is the best era for this kind of game - still mostly iron-sights and analogue tech, with a few gadgets here and there.

That's all well and good, but if you play it, it quickly becomes apparent that it needs more time in the oven, which is kinda the whole point - this is essentially a testbed for the engine and features for the eventual ArmA 4.

Netcode sucks dog's arsehole - to you, you might've just hit a helicopter with an RPG, but as far as the server's concerned it was already 20m ahead. This affects everything from driving, to shooting, to flying. Small bumps in terrain can send your car flying when by all appearances and indications, it should've been fine. This is especially egregious in close-quarters combat - you can unload on a guy, and in any other game you'd have killed him, but not here.

The Conflict gamemode has its pitfalls. It's too quick, easy and sustainable for players on either team to rank up and pull attack helicopters and AFVs, with a constant flow of supplies to their main-base. It could do with busting players down rank points when they lose something like a chopper, and/or an actual working (and longer) cool-down - if not other soft limitations. As it is right now, by the end of the first hour you'll be hearing rotors non-stop and half the NATO team will be in the air.

Another frustrating element is how control points and spawns work. You will randomly spawn on any building inside a capzone, whether it's placed by the players or just part of the map. This means that when the capzone is contested, you have a decent chance of spawning up an enemy's arse, or practically in the open - I've killed and been killed in such a fashion way more times than I'd like. Nominally, contesting the capzone delays the ability for defenders to respawn for minutes at a time - but the second the attackers move outside the capzone, the respawn delay is nullified.

At the very least, enemy presence should suppress nearby spawnpoints - but I'd prefer not being able to spawn on a point at all, where the enemy presence in the vicinity - not just within the capzone - is significant (in relative terms). Just feels incredibly gamey otherwise, especially as the attacker in such scenarios.

The content is weird, with each side lacking equivalent equipment and vehicle archetypes - eg. NATO has the M72 LAW, but RU has no RPG-18 - they have the RPG-7, whilst US has no Carl Gustav. Another example is the helicopters - US has the UH-1 and AH-1, whilst RU only have unarmed and armed variants of the Mi-8. The UH-1 is far more nimble, and so far more viable when it comes to risky insertions. The AH-1's profile is very narrow and it has a turreted chin-gun, whilst the Mi-8 is a flying cow with fixed-forward guns. No Mi-24. This is somewhat alleviated by mods run by many servers.

Vehicle damage models are all over the place. Damaging components - engines, rotors, wheels, fuel-tanks etc - has the kinds of effects you'd expect, but actually getting them there is wildly inconsistent. Some vehicles' windows can stand up to far, far too much fire. An RPG to a spot that would realistically write-off a Humvee - if not its occupants - might have no effect. Modded vehicles and AT weapons/warheads are even more suspect.

In ground vehicles, being set on fire means you have about 3 seconds to jump out before you burn to death - where in helicopters, you can keep flying just fine for quite a while - you're not saving the chopper, but it's more than enough time to get back to base, decommission it and just spawn a new one at practically zero cost.

Helicopter flight model leans far too hard into arcade territory - they were already relatively forgiving and simplistic in the rest of the series, but this is a few steps beyond. They practically fly themselves when you get them going in the right direction. They're extremely powerful, yet trivial to use.

The medical system, I feel conflicted about. As it is now, you get shot anywhere but the head - you're probably going to be unconscious and bleeding - but you'll usually just wake back up within 30s or so, with plenty of time to patch yourself up. You need to confirm every kill, and I've got away with some heinous ♥♥♥♥ when people have neglected to do so. Part of me wishes that if you're knocked unconscious, it should be for far longer - practically guaranteed to require assistance from another player - but also for more of an intermediary stage between being on your feet, and total incapacitation.

There isn't any kind of suppression system, scopes (especially in 2d mode) are too easy to use, and the recoil is pretty easy to manage across the board. Means firefights tend to be over a lot quicker than they perhaps ought to be.

The weapon attachment system is pretty rudimentary, lacking proper support for suppressors in particular. There are different optics modes - switching between scope and backup sights; variable zoom levels and night-vision modes where appropriate. There are functional bayonets which is great.

It feels like damage doesn't register against people when they're ragdolling - transitioning between alive & well to unconscious - you have to wait for them to fall on the floor and enter the uncon animation/pose, then finish them off.

There's no 3d mission editor, though there is the Game Master mode that's like a live mission editor - just way, way more limited compared to A3's Zeus. As such, co-op is practically nonexistent with only one official scenario.

Crossplay means a lot of Xbox players, and my prejudices have been reinforced. I'm more afraid of my supposed teammates than the enemy.

I wish local speech could be adjusted for volume (like ACRE & TFAR), so you're not just announcing your presence to any enemy within 75m any time you choose to speak.

In conclusion - as a long-time enjoyer of the series, it's equal parts concerning and promising. I wouldn't recommend it, at least in a general sense. There's certainly fun to be had, but it tends to be exceeded by frustration - and this is coming from someone who was born in the czech-jank - molded by it. I could only really recommend to those who'd have a high tolerance for the game deciding to tell you "no", and/or those who really want to support BI financially.

Somehow SM2 ends up just not being anywhere near as fun as the first game - which was its self, in most respects, pretty mid.

The introductory scenes felt half-hearted. "U primaris now, these ur new frens, go kill bug" - the dialogue is about as bland, generic and boilerplate as you could get for something set in the 40k universe, and they managed to make Titus almost completely uncompelling as a character, at least all the way up til I stopped playing The return of a Deathwatch Blackshield to the ranks of his original chapter is something that could've done with some more time to breathe in the opening sequence.

I played on veteran, which seems to have been a mistake based on what little discourse around the game I've paid attention to. For the most part, ranged weapons feel ineffectual. You're almost always gonna find yourself in melee - granted, it's Tyranids, but firing your gun comes at the opportunity cost of just continuing to fight in melee, which seems far more important - especially when you need repeated hits to kill most targets. Lesser enemies (Termagants in particular) do a ton of chip damage to you, faster than you can ever reliably heal by killing - while you're busy fighting the clunky controls while you're up against the more significant enemy-types - who can tank a lot of damage (especially from ranged weapons) and stun/stagger or disrupt you pretty frequently - if not dish out a ton of damage from range. The amount of dodging you end up having to do, it'd probably be more appropriate if it were Warhammer 40,000: Harlequin. The parry mechanic seems very unreliable and inconsistent. Seems like more than a few of the combat sequences have you holding E to interact with an objective whilst hoping your brain-dead AI teammates can draw enough of the aggro.

I didn't get on to any of the MP content. I'd heard that each class' appearance was tied to a different specific chapter/warband, which I think is pretty crap. SM1's customiser just had a bunch of different generic parts you'd unlock for each side, and then colour however you'd like - with some DLC chapter/legion-specific components.

Performance was terrible the first time I ran the game - when I came back to it later my framerates were fine. Not sure if that's anything to do with the game its self.

Not a fan of having Epic Games ♥♥♥♥ bundled with.

Oh, and £55? Having a laugh

'ate primaris marines - simple as

Leaving a quick one for the algorithm for now, since the dev accidentally triggered the steam release a few weeks early.

The core mechanics are "Mechwarrior meets VTOL VR", with lots of meaningful cockpit interactions - start-up procedures, interactive multi-function display panels, flippy switches and beepy buttons. It actually reminds me of Earthsiege more than anything. The switches and buttons can be a bit finnicky - apparently this is specific to Index, and a known issue - Edit: It's fixed. There's also alternate mode options, letting you flip switches by just... flipping them rather than pinching, or just clicking trigger.

I played earlier versions on mouse + keyboard (which is supported and pending improvement) and enjoyed it. Now I have VR, and the game is much more feature-complete - with a campaign, multiple chassis, a mission editor and random mission generator, and much nicer-looking cockpits, amongst other features and fixes.

Learning to pilot the mechs and use them effectively is a fun challenge - torso rotation is separated from the legs, much like a tank and its turret - which is a first in the very niche genre of VR mech games. It takes some getting used to, but I think that's down to there being some issues with the controls that make it more disorienting than it needs to be - probably easy fixes on the scale of things. For now, the dials to control joystick sensitivity and deadzone help a lot - I'd recommend setting them to ~30% and ~60%, respectively.

Edit: I think the default deadzone/sensitivity were changed? If not, then I just got used to it - either way, I've been able to jump right in without having to adjust them from defaults and it feels just fine.

You fight a variety of more contemporary AFVs and aircraft, as well as enemy mechs. The damage model for the mechs is pretty detailed, and there are a lot of different weapon systems that work quite differently from one another, amongst your more typical archetypes. Especially novel is the artillery-piece you can target via a drone, that you launch and control from your cockpit. Your weapons and locomotors generate heat which must be managed - you can flush coolant to manage spikes in heat at the cost of overall performance. Weapons can be aimed via HMD, with gun-cam overlay if you choose - by default, the centre-bottom MFD is a picture-in-picture gun-cam, and there's a third-person drone-cam you can watch as well. You can issue some simple orders to your squadmates, and call a resupply chopper to your position.

Some elements of the graphics are a bit basic - if not nostalgic, depending on where you're standing. There are some nice weather effects and the designs of the mechs are cool. I think the biggest area for improvement visually would be environment textures and maybe lighting.

The mission editor means a whole lot of potential replayability through user-generated content. In its current form, it can be a bit difficult to decipher, but they're the same tools used to make the campaign missions.

In addition to the campaigns and editor/custom scenario, there's also a random mission generator, right now with 4 scenario types available.

At present, many of the missions (especially the random scenarios) leave you too little time to get your mech started before you're taking fire, even if you know what you're doing. Some of them can be a bit inconsistent - I lost the air defence(?) mission before I even got moving, and won a random holdout mission on the first enemy death. I imagine the former would be relatively simple to resolve by delaying enemy spawns, and/or moving the player or enemy start positions further away.

Weapons are a bit unbalanced, with missiles being especially lethal to the player with little counterplay (except the I-Beam, which feels clunky to switch to, target and fire) - meanwhile, ballistics can feel inconsistent and generally inadequate.

All that said - the (solo) dev has been busting his arse fixing bugs and responding to feedback non-stop since the game's release, even resolving issues with VR controllers he doesn't have access to. So I find it pretty easy to trust that the most glaring issues will be addressed in due time.

Bottom line - if you like big stompy robots it's certainly worth a go, especially if you have VR.

Tried this game on two separate occasions, and bounced off it again for the same reasons. It has cool ideas - CoH or MoW-scale RTS against zombies, with base-building, dynamic infection, civilian evacuation and management, diplomacy with survivor groups, unit customisation etc etc.

My #1 complaint is UI. It feels very loose and clunky just to play, and is missing QoL features that have been standard in RTS for a long time. Your units' and structures' locations, statuses, what you have selected etc are often unclear and difficult to read - often literally, with UI elements that are too small and lack tooltips. You can't queue up a lot of different types of orders. The interface lacks feedback and sound cues for when you've done anything, when your units are doing anything or when anything you might want to know about is going on.

Night in the game is truly dark, forcing you to use an NVG mode to see anything, through that green phosphorous filter - which just makes everything blend into the terrain even more.

The game does a poor job of explaining how you actually play it and win. There is a tutorial, but it only explains the very basics of camera movement, ordering units and building structures - and in way too much detail at that. The word-count for one of them was about equal to this review.

Building walls is awkward - the game doesn't really do anything to indicate when you've successfully walled off an area using terrain. Sometimes the unbuilt walls will be positioned such that your engineer can't get to them. Sometimes, sloped terrain is buildable and sometimes it isn't, with no clear, obvious indication. I think you're just meant to make a square around your whole base.

It seems to take a long time before there's anything to actually do, beyond expanding your bases and control of the map - so I didn't even get to the core gameplay loops.

I like the game on paper, but it needs the fundamentals nailing down a fair bit better before I'd consider engaging with it again.

Lots of really cool ideas in this game, chief amongst them being how the maps are generated - straight from real-world map data. You can load up your hometown, your ideal holiday destination or somewhere you're just curious about, and survive the zombie apocalypse in a facsimile good enough to suspend disbelief.

It will often get the height of buildings wrong, and terraces often show up as a single, long building; it foregoes details like walls, paths, traffic lights, car-parks and roundabouts, and terrain elevation isn't accounted for (yet - this is on roadmap) - but it accurately portrays the layout of the area - street names, buildings and their purposes (for the most part) and their shapes from the top-down, and it's more than enough to suspend disbelief. And all that said - there is a map editor, so you can touch it up to better reflect reality if you like, or use it as a basis for a more interesting gameplay area.

The core gameplay loop is similar to any colony-builder, but with a more RTS/RTT bent to it. Your citizen population is completely autonomous, building buildings, gathering resources, carrying out jobs with no micromanagement needed. You need to loot and later harvest food to keep them fed and alive, build facilities for research, production and to meet the colony's needs. The day is for looting and building, the night is where most of the combat takes place. You'll also receive radio transmissions, advancing the story and prompting you to search certain buildings, advance your tech, go on certain expeditions or give you some choices to make. You'll encounter neutral groups you can recruit, as well as raiders.

You mainly interact with the game through your squads - you can have up to six of them, 4 people each. Each squad member can gain experience as they kill and loot, boosting their stats. They can also find and equip armour and weapons (the former of which degrades with damage), and their ammo and health must be managed. Zombie hordes not killed during the night will often take cover in nearby buildings, and you can send your squads to clear them out with little risk, as long as they have decent equipment.

The UI for all this can be quite clunky - buildings' rotations will reset each time you place one, and it will cancel build-mode if you attempt to place something illegally. Walls can snap to buildings - both player-built and environmental - but this is often finnicky. You can't rebuild map structures you've demolished, or replace them with any player-built variety - you can only build farms/greenhouses, towers/gates/walls and the radio tower. As you establish a perimeter, you'll be tempted to knock some buildings down in order to clear your lines of sight.

You'll often have your squads spread out through the map - you have to click them in the 3d space or via the squads tab - to my knowledge, there's no hotkey for selecting an individual squad, so quickly reacting to one you weren't actually watching can be awkward.
When you chain a bunch of scavenge orders together whilst they're in a vehicle, they will only return for the car and move it up once their inventory is full. Sometimes this can mean leaving their vehicle much farther away from them than you'd like.
They'll automatically dump their (non-equipped) inventory in their vehicle or HQ/warehouse if they're inside one - so it can be awkward if you want to bring spare ammo, meds or fuel - could do with a function to "pin" inventory items to the squad or vehicle.

The combat feels pretty barebones at the moment - it feels like microing SC2 Marines vs Zerglings - squads can't shoot whilst moving, even from vehicles, and the infected hordes can't really threaten them for as long as you have fuel and you're keeping them out of range. There's very little depth to fighting either zombies or raiders beyond making sure your troops are as best equipped as they can be. Could do with more things like traps, obstacles, distractions and grenades.

The map area is 9km2, with the surrounding area being essentially non-playable "expeditions", in which combat is kinda auto-resolved (and it really doesn't favour you). It'd be really cool if it'd just load up the new maps for these areas you send your squads to, though I imagine there's technical limitations there and I could see it potentially being awkward to manage.

Late game lacks development so far and feels quite unbalanced - by the time you reach ~300 population, you'll have completely desertified the local area with your only real options for loot being these expeditions, expending a lot of time and fuel - whilst also needing to produce/loot even more to keep your citizens fed, towers and squads armed and supplied, and your vehicles running. There's no way to manufacture protective gear, so once it's worn out it's gone except for the odd find in whatever "?" buildings and expedition tiles remain.
The hordes will come in huge numbers, which means greater ammo expenditure, more repairs and (and fuel/metal to manufacture it) - your options for dealing with them (or in general) are very, very limited, as is your economic ability to deal with it. You can use cars to try and kite at least some of them away - otherwise, your outer walls better be the fortified kind, and multi-layered at that.

It could also do with more QoL features - being able to box-select squads or buildings, or select all walls, towers and gates, so you can repair them all at once or change their armament or worker levels would be really helpful. Same if you could mark a job as priority for the resources and labour - If you're metal-starved from starting construction on fortified walls/gates, it can take days for anything to get done - sometimes you need that car repaired much sooner than you need that extra one out of a hundred incomplete sections of wall. As it is now, it seems to distribute those resources as equally as possible.

This is a lot of critique - the game has a lot of rough edges, but I'm still enjoying it, and I could see it being really good with some refinement and more content. As it is now, the novelty of turning my local area into a fortress is keeping me entertained enough on its own.

Nah. Runs terribly, awful controls on index and has close enough to zero manual interactions as you can get in a VR game. Feels even more janky than regular Fo4.

Easily the best tenner I've spent on a game. It's a real-time-tactics game with pause, that almost feels like a puzzle game. You're trying to conquer the map or complete specific objectives, whilst holding off a continuously encroaching and evolving alien horde. Different scenarios can reward the use of multiple different strategies, whilst those same strategies applied elsewhere will just get you wiped out - at the same time, your execution and timing counts for a lot. Your attention's never split too many different ways, you'll probably use at most 2 different groups of troops at the same time.

I never completed the main campaign because I found the dynamic one a lot more appealing - it gives you a limited selection from all the possible units, buildings and abilities, and enables you to unlock others through crates and conquering hives, and likewise the aliens will mutate throughout, presenting different challenges and forcing you to use different tools to try and overcome them. Of course you can always just restart to re-roll the tech tree until you get the things you want.

Visuals and sound effects are good, I'm not a huge fan of the overall aesthetic but it's very easy to read what's going on. Units are responsive, pathfinding is good.

You can spend around 10-40 minutes in a given mission or dynamic campaign battle, depending on difficulty and other factors.

Helicopter flight-model is functional but rudimentary, with some weird quirks like losing almost all attitude control when you have collective at minimum, making certain maneuvers practically impossible. Your tailrotor goes from functioning normally to doing next to nothing once you cross an arbitrary threshold of speed, it's incredibly jarring when you're accelerating or decelerating while yawing.

Generally, it lacks a sense of weight or aerodynamics - eg you don't pick up speed very much from gravity, which feels almost non-existent. There's not much of a sense that your wings or rotors are generating lift to counteract it either. In helicopters, you can point your nose straight down at the ground and throttle up, and you'll travel straight forwards without losing altitude - and it just happens to be the fastest way to fly, so you end up looking straight up a lot.

The issues with the flight-model are even more pronounced with the AH-1 and Mi-28. The controls just start to lock up if you go below ~50% collective. It seems worse at high speeds - but even <70km/h, you can't pitch forwards when at low collective, and roll and yaw impulses are tiny. Presumably gonna be a similar story for the other 2 helicopters.

You can still have overall arcadey and accessible flight mechanics whilst still lending it a sense of realism and authenticity.

Desperately needs a recenter button. (Ed: Per developer response below, it already existed - press & hold left analog - just wasn't communicated in-game IIRC)

In the starter helicopter (an MD500) the controls feel too low, I have to hunch down when seated to be able to reach them and keep my hands where they need to be.

The missions spam a fair few MD500s at you, and they will rip your own helicopter to shreds in short order. They're easier to deal with once you get upgrades or into one of the other helicopters.

All that said, if you enjoy battlefield (up to ~BF4)-style helicopter (or plane) semi-arcade flight mechanics enough to play a single-player focused game about it, you'll probably still enjoy it. I don't think I'll refund this, just hope it gets worked on some more.