Recent reviews by Jakkar

Fun, funny, clever, full of hidden details and possessed of immense potential. I would buy it immediately if it were available.

I just hope they can fix the enemies teleporting and twitching with a bit more work on the procedural animation systems.

The concept is very intriguing but the reality feels like a gamejam prototype. Melee enemies wiggle around inside you jankily, shots don't have impact or stun so being rushed by a group of melee enemies induces that sense of futility and frustration rather than fear or excitement, because even firing high powered rifle rounds into the on-rushing swarm doesn't do anything except make them flash white to indicate damage, moments before you die.

It's just too simple. Too minimalistic. A top-down, pixel-art game can still be complex, and rich, and have good combat feel - with anything from Nuclear Throne to Space Station 13 as prime examples.

Combat, movement, medicine and UI all feel like a first-pass, or like a newgrounds game from 15-20 years ago.

This is the finished product, but it feels more like something I'd say has potential if this were its initial Early Access release state.

With this as a post-1.0 release I'm disappointed, and I'll see if I can get a refund.

This is one of the best things.

Buy it now. Shut up. Buy it now.

... Okay, if you need more;

Imagine if Receiver 2 was FEAR. Imagine STALKER's indoor sections with one of the maps feeling like Demon's Souls' Tower of Latria in terms of dungeony complexity. Intense darkness and light in spooky environments with dynamic, aggressive, unpredictable AI who are veeery satisfying to fight. Picture a game with escalating content and increasingly deep weapon customisations.

Now look at the price.

Now stop reading and buy it.

This game is absolutely wonderful.

I loved their previous game, Paradise Killer, but this feels like a more complete, richer and more confident game with a broader feature-set. Both larger and more densely packed with content and variety of genres.

Exploration, renovation, management, dark comedy visual novel, collecting hidden things for richly written characters, while upgrading your little van to become ever more mighty and fun to drive. I'd like to expand this review when I'm further into the game, but so far it's worth everything I paid at release and more.

Buy this. You will not regret it.

A lovely game but one that, in its current stage of Early Access, starts to lean into 'intentionally annoying challenges' after a while, rather than entertaining and stimulating puzzles.

While the early gameplay loop involved moving medium-large objects around, designing machines to match their shapes, weights and characteristics, and trying to do so with a degree of reliable elegance in the design - eventually it just becomes *fiddly*, with excessive numbers of small items demanding overly meticulous and time-consuming manipulation of tools made of pieces that are themselves larger than the objects you have to interact with - once the scale shrinks for a number of regular mission types, you're no longer sighing and laughing at an accident as your big bulky awkwardly-weighted consignment shoots down a hill and your device is upside down - you're just pissed off and tired trying to design and use a machine that's effectively trying to pick up a contact lens using an industrial crane. Repeatedly. Then then carry it ten kilometres across rough terrain.

Which, again, was really fun until the game switched emphasis to objects much smaller than the tools you need to use to interact with them.

Oh, and roads. The roads are so broken. So very, very broken and annoying, expensive and far more dangerous to use than just driving cross-country. They feel like an unfinished feature in the extreme - they feel out-of-place and lack an apparent design logic, since they don't really make travel faster or safer, being as they're extremely narrow and invariably subtly curved, with no side-rails, meaning that driving on them requires a laser focus of very very gently tapping a directional key to sustain alignment and not tumble into the abyss, while trying not to get bored.

Very chill, fantastic aesthetic, good music (although it can cut in quite suddenly and aggressively, and switch off to total silence just as suddenly, often in a manner that feels at odds with the mood of your activities), but some questionable mid-game design choices that go against the game's strengths or the nature of the toolkit.

I'm keen to see if it leans away from the mid-game propensity for objectives that don't work with its own toolkit/seem designed to cause frustration rather than fun.

Edit: Played a little more, and the problems I'm describing got even worse, with side-jobs continually spawning next to me on my routes offering objectives that feel like jokes, with many tiny components like four coffee cups in a cardboard tray, tuned to 'pop' as soon as they're touched, and spill rolling cylinders everywhere.

There are solutions to this, but they involve brute force, crude and heavy machines that just scrape all the junk into a large container - which misses out on so much of the fun you could be having building unique, clever machines, if the game only offered interesting or at least simple and less troll-ish challenges in the day-to-day side-content. I could ignore all the side-content but that breaks the game down to a very lifeless long-distance travel sim without cargo, between distant main objectives.

You could also cut down on the tedium, if you're ignoring all the side-content, by using fast-travel - but if you cut out the side-missions *and* the journey, why even play?

It's still a very impressive physics engine and building system and I enjoyed my first five or so long sessions with it a lot, certainly worth the money, but it's a real pity the design emphasis stumbles into what feels like trolling the player past a certain point. Moving huge, weird objects between building sites was fun, but making money and participating in the sandbox is drastically less entertaining when every second mission feels like a prank designed to waste a lot of time.

Play it :>

Among epic cRPGs, vast big-budget open-world adventures and classic horror games... X-Morph is one of my favourite games, despite being... Tower Defense?

How did that happen?

... They just made the best tower defense. By such a great degree there's no real competition.

It's beautiful, deadpan funny, has an incredible dedication to a 90s aesthetic that never was - brighter, more vibrant, more detailed and richly animated. It has some of the best physics simulation in the industry for flexible complex structures collapsing dynamically in response to accidental or intentional damage with great tactical and strategic effect.

The boss battles keep escalating into the absurd, turning the tower defense into outright bullet-hell (that you can avoid at any time by engaging Ghost Mode, to return to the building system and escape combat to heal), and the game never gets boring, despite some missions being technically optional, allowing you to play a shorter or longer campaign.

It's just so well designed, and so satisfying. I'd need to write an essay to break down the psychology of how they nailed tower defense's best qualities as a genre while removing or ameliorating its many flaws. It's a deeply satisfying casual spaceship shooter, the peak tower defense game strategically, and an epic spectacle.

You should play it and make everyone else you know play it.

May I one day be awake enough to rewrite this a little more persuasively instead of just insisting it's incredible... but it is.

It's a very pretty attempt to follow the popularity of other, aesthetically similar games - but one that has either no internal logic at all, or that logic is so complicated and grossly misrepresented by the ingame tutorial that I, and a lot of other reviewers, don't have a clue how it works.

It's a very strict but randomly generated puzzle game with arbitrary and unpredictable failure states, rules apply one minute and not the next, and the basic gameplay loop feels... like an idea that should have been shot down early in prototyping, creating ugly networks of unfinished rivers and walls.

The default gameplay mode has a hard time limit that ends the game before anything interesting can happen, so you play the secondary unlimited mode until you realise that by design, the world can only be ugly chaos, without the tantalising possibility of creating something aesthetically pleasing unless you master the mystery of the game's rules around rising water/rising land.

I can't recommend it. At best, it's an overly complex puzzle game with no explanations in its tutorial, no intuitive visual indication of its rules, and a frustrating objective that makes it hard to enjoy or create something aesthetically pleasing.

More likely it's just an unfinished concept running on immediate aesthetic appeal and comparison to better-designed games.

This game was a delight.

It ran flawlessly.

It's well-designed (except ladders, and sometimes getting stuck on things, but it resets you to a safe place nearby).

It's clever, warm, comfortable to play, feels deeply cosy and is satisfying, while leaving plenty of room for creative problem-solving and feeling like you're solving problems in a way somewhat unique to you.

Don't wait as long as I did to play this, it's wonderful.

If I have a criticism, it's that the game is short. This is much better than being too long, but I did still want more come the end.

Have fun =)

It is the finest single-player shooter in VR, in combined terms of the quality of the enemy AI and player-stealth, the quality of the gunplay, and the detailed environments and variety of enemy spawns and behaviours.



It's a large game, and extremely satisfying - my play-through took 72 hours across several months, and I was still enjoying it as much as ever by the end despite generally suffering extreme problems with attention span and commitment to videogames - yet the ending also came at a welcome time, when I still wanted more but felt satisfied to finish rather than burn out or get bored. It was well-paced, as a sandbox game with plot you approach in your own time, and never felt like too much of a grind or like it was rushing me.

With the sole exceptions of players who are uncomfortable with realistically dark night-time in a survival-horror experience, or players who wouldn't enjoy an undirected experience in which you learn for yourself how to survive the zone (after some helpful tutorials), you should absolutely buy it. All VR gamers owe themselves this experience. And push the difficulty as high as you dare, it remains a tense, challenging but deeply satisfying experience with minimal frustration at its highest difficulty level.

Buy it! Then come play the co-op sequel with me one day!

_____

Extra details and explanation below for those who want them:

Obviously H3VR has better gun interactivity - of course there are dedicated games about indoor stealth - and there are games with higher fidelity assets and lighting, like Alyx - but Into The Radius has managed to combine excellent tactical gunplay, the best AI we've seen in VR yet (and, frankly, AI pretty much on par with the classic flatscreen examples like Halo, STALKER, FEAR etc), fantastic audio atmosphere, good visuals, and compelling open-world survival-horror... into a complete package far more rewarding than anything else in VR so far.

It brought all of that together into a medium-scale open-world game of multiple interconnected zones in which your tactical planning will decide how challenging, frightening and rewarding the day-to-day experience will be, timing your excursions with the tidal activity of the Radius (Souls-esque resets on a timer rather than upon death), and with the threat of nightfall on a constant day/night cycle. It offers one of the most detailed depictions of equipment maintenance, ammunition management and inventory/weight management of any game yet made, with solid performance (until you fill your personal quarters with too many guns and artifacts like me and tank your framerate) and a nicely paced progression curve that incentivises careful planning of missions and thoughtful investments balancing the costs of ammunition versus what you can salvage from the zone.

I've never played an action RPG with an economy this well-balanced - you can genuinely ruin yourself financially by making bad decisions at high difficulty, expending more on ammunition and medical supplies than you make back on missions if you're incautious. Yet you can also make a large and very satisfying profit if you get lucky with loot and manage your expenditures well. There's a huge variety in cost vs performance between different weapons, ammunition calibres, and quality of ammunition. Balancing your survival needs against the firepower you can afford to purchase, the weight you can afford to carry into the zone, and the profit you hope to extract with is an incredibly satisfyingly learning curve to move along.

I'm in awe of just how well tuned the game is in terms of natural player-learning of how the tools work, how the Radius and its mysteries and dangers work, and how the game sustains the escalation of risks, rewards and the unlocks of new toys that meaningfully change how you can engage with the game, from an ignorant and terrified runner with an empty pack, hungry but fast, gripping a rusty and unreliable Makarov handgun - to a heavily armoured specialist with a carefully balanced inventory full to the brim with specialised ammunition types, tools, rations and explosives, trading their usage of ammunition for their ability to still carry the best loot home to fund the next excursion.

Despite the game being noticeably 'sub-Alyx' visually, it has much more detailed environments than most other VR games and sustains extremely reliable performance on my 2020-era i9-9900k and 2080 Super rig. Its environments are vastly larger and more open than Alyx's linear corridors and contain a great number of interactive containers and hidden secrets.

I cannot overstate how good the lighting system is, ITR being one of the rare modern games to depict true darkness - deep inside a building, or outdoors in the middle of the night you are simply blind - you *need* tools to help you see at night to have any chance of navigating safely, avoiding enemies, or engaging in combat successfully, and this has a huge impact on your tactical decision-making and on the game's stealth system.

Winding down, I think the last thing I want to emphasise is that I played at the maximum difficulty setting and found it tremendously rewarding without being frustrating. You will get killed, you will get unlucky, but you will learn from it and make better decisions in future - such as acknowledging that in a horror setting, a fully automatic rifle with a full magazine is sometimes a survival necessity when multiple nightmarish entities hear your distant gunfire in the middle of the night and rush you without warning. It's the kind of game that offers you such a huge variety of tools and options and approaches to combat that it gives you room to make intelligent mistakes and pay the price for them. I love it.

Thanks for reading, I hope this review helped you make the right decision - I think very few VR gamers wouldn't get something out of Into The Radius if they have a taste for firearms combat, exploration and sci-fi mystery =)