Recent reviews by Haggets

Buy it

A botched, buggy, and unfinished game i simply cannot get enough of. This game is my childhood and it is ADDICTING. Banger soundtrack, so satisfying to build cars, tune them and race them, and a lot of mods to play around with

THIS REVIEW IS NOT BASED ON THE ACTUAL EXPERIENCE IN GAME BUT AS A CONTENT CREATOR FOR VRCHAT.

I originally wrote a very negative review about how awful content creation is in VRChat. And well, It's been a few months, and honestly VRChat has been doing a great job at making content creation more friendly for everyone. My original points were:

* Having to rely on a dozen packages to make content creation actually decent.

* Things work, you change something, things stop working, you undo, things still don't work.

* Bad content creation experience for Quest.

* Poor (Or none at all) documentation on problems people can experience.

The VRChat Creator Companion is extremely convenient and streamlines many things including downloading packages, something that was a huge problem for me since having to rely on packages on the internet to make creating content actually bearable was preposterous, but now that the most important ones are easily available inside of the Avatar Companion, it makes that point completely irrelevant now, it's great! As for things not working properly when you do something and undo, it's hard to say it's VRChat's fault and it's Unity's fault rather.

HOWEVER, making content for Quest is still ass, and the amount of restraints it has make me see why most people don't make content for Quest, it is a huge process in itself to make content optimized for it that goes above Medium rating, and documentation is still poor as well so you'll have to scrape through many pages to see if anyone else has experienced major problems and hope someone has figured it out, but thus far it's been great steps towards making a more fun experience for creators to make things in VRChat, great work!

Satisfies my RE4 addiction.

Seriously underrated game with extremely smooth freerunning and a beautiful soundtrack

it's not ready

I played it 3 years ago with my old computer, ran at 15FPS. Gave it a try today with a new computer, runs at 15FPS.

This is truly a horrendous software and i'm amazed at how many people are willing to cope with all of the jank that it constantly throws at you.

There is only 2 pros i can give to SFM, and it's that the Workshop is awesome, i wish other software like Blender had a Workshop as well because it gives you so many assets to work with from the get go. And the fact that you have all of the content from TF2 from around 2012 (Including all of the hats and the like) is super nice to add variety and make stages for animation fairly quick

And now we go onto the cons, the most glaring one being that this is outdated software that is running an engine that is outdated by today's standards that is outdated by its own standards (It's running a fairly old version of the Source engine, so it's not compatible with today's TF2), that plus the fact that it's still a beta after this long and that it hasn't been updated in sooo many years.

Source is a jank engine, it's lovely, but it's jank and it's rather tedious to work with it after a while given how newer engines can give you immediate feedback whereas in Source you're required to reload the game just to update a model. And you're adding the workload of working with a jank engine with working with a trash software, so you have to deal with the shenanigans of an old, rather unfriendly engine (In the sense that you can waste a lot of time trying to get things to work correctly), and the shenanigans of an old, unfriendly software. It is unbeliveable that Garry's Mod looks better than a program made for making movies.

With the time you spend trying to get SFM to work, you're better off learning how to animate in Garry's Mod, which offers sooo much more since the Workshop is massive, plus it's just more comfortable to work on it since you're working on an updated version of Source at least; Or better yet, learn Blender, which is an outstanding free software which can do what SFM can already do and top it 10 times while also offering so much more flexibility since it's working on modern technology that not only makes things fast, but also makes things look really pretty and in real time with Eevee, or fairly slower but mimicking real life with Cycles. While i can't say which one is friendlier to an average user, and while it's true that you'll take more time learning how to use Blender than SFM, i can guarantee you that you'll get more out of Blender than you'll ever get out of SFM.

And better yet, lately there has been quite a lot of advancements when it comes to importing Source engine stuff into Blender and adapting it to be easy to work with. You can rather easily import a map with either Import VMF[github.com] (Which is way slower but i personally prefer) or SourceIO[github.com] which can imports maps quickly, and even better, you can use my own plugin, the Source Armature Toolkit[github.com] to make animating Source characters as well as GoldSource, Titanfall AND S&Box characters a breeze, and giving you many more options in fact on how to move around bones, all the while being able to export that into Source if you like, and even better, you can actually even animate the expressions of the character way more intuitively than in SFM without having to move any sliders ever, all you have to do is get the models from the game files or download addons with Crowbar if you want to work with custom models without the need of having to install the program to get those plugins. The only thing you need (and sometimes, since the plugins tries to automate everything as much as possible) is basic knowledge on Rigify, a Blender plugin that's brought with Blender and only needs to be enabled. So there you go, you have all the tools SFM would offer you but better because it's in Blender. You can modify and animate map geometry in an instant, you can add, remove or modify the characters or models you're working with in an instant, there's nothing you can't change about the map or the characters or the scenery, without ever having to restart anything at all, and with immediate feedback too! The only limitation in Blender is how much your computer can handle, and there's so many worthwhile plugins, both free and paid that can make things even simpler and easier to work with, it's truly an outstanding program.

Overall, SFM is not worth your time, and you're better off learning how to animate in Gmod or learning how to use Blender.

This game is not recommendable at all in 2020 due to the price for the amount of content, specially when the game after this, the one that this game teased, is already out and for the exact same price and has at least 20 times more content without exaggeration. You travel cross only a single map in 6 or so missions which give you a quick set of objectives that can be completed very quickly, and you can finish this game very quickly, in fact, if you're not going for the achievements, the most you'll have is less than 2 hours of content, content that becomes repetitive because you're only in one map through all of it, there isn't even any change in the layout, it's the exact same thing in every single mission. Unlike Phantom Pain which has over 50 missions in 3 or so BIG open environments that have tons of more stuff to do in one outpost than you have in this entire game. Get The Phantom Pain, don't get this game, in this day and age it's simply a cash grab

As a person who has been using this software for a really long time (Hours on record is actually misleading, I used it a lot on offline mode, so multiply it by 2) I can tell you it's one of the best tools you can have at your disposal, and here's some of the reasons to why

1. Blender is completely free, anyone can use it as opposed to Maya or similar which require you to pay a LOT of money every year, going into the 4 digits, Blender offers a really similar experience for nothing

2. It offers anything you need for 3D modeling, and not only that, it gives the user the ability to add plug-ins, which can make the experience a lot smoother and faster, and you can make your own plug-ins as well. With these plug-ins you can do stuff such as importing and exporting Source Engine files (models, maps) or making some stuff more streamlined, it really gets you moving

3. It runs on damn near anything, some months ago my main desktop died and I had to settle with a really underpowered laptop (Intel pentium 2.30ghz, Intel HD Graphics), and it could run, better yet, it runs smoothly even with subdivision surface on 2 (as long as you don't go too overboard), so even with a really crappy setup you can still work in Blender

3. Cycles render mmmmm, truly beautiful, it makes everything look fantastic, at the cost of a lot longer render times that is, can't say the same with internal render tho, it sucks, although with 2.8 it got replaced with Evee, which is like a lite version of Cycles, still looking good with decent render times

4. The layout is extremely customizable, I'm not only talking about colors of the windows, everything you see can be changed to your liking, and there are various presets for multiple tasks which is always nice

The drawback to all of it of course is that it's not user friendly, and it's gonna take you a while to understand many things, but learning about said things will open you many windows. And the best part about it being free is that there are many, many guides about pretty much anything, and the community in the forums can also help you solve problems if you ever get stuck with anything (Which you will, but that's the process of learning)

Overall it's a great tool for beginners and experienced people, I really recommend you to give it a try