Recent reviews by whipee

Similar to the first Spiderman, but with more powers (with less gadgets) and of course focused on Miles Morales. The open world activity resources have been significantly consolidated for the better - there are now just two resources instead of the many different tokens that the first had. The game is much shorter than the first, but still just as good as the first and a great buy.

The port of course is still just as great as the first and the game looks absolutely gorgeous if you have the hardware to push it.

Really hoping we see a Spiderman 2 PC port soon.

Great game and incredible port.

I was obsessed with the 2000 Spiderman game as a kid and this is basically everything I could want from a Spiderman game. The web swinging is intuitive and feels phenomenal, and the combat makes really good use of Spiderman's powers. While the open world activities can get a bit repetitive, the base mechanics of the game are so well done that I had no problems doing the open world activities (even when I didn't need the crafting resources) and even swinging around instead of just fast traveling. The main plotline and characters are also of course well done.

The game looks gorgeous with all settings and ray tracing set to max on an OLED ultrawide with HDR on. The PS5 DualSense controller also supports the enhanced haptics and trigger effects when plugged in with USB. I'm glad that I decided to wait for the PC port rather than play it on my PS5, as if you have the high end hardware to push this game it really shines.

It's hard to pick a yes/no on a recommendation since I have very mixed feelings about this game, but ultimately I think I wouldn't really recommend this game to most people. I did end up completing the main story and probably about half the side missions as well as finding some of the collectibles. I'd only recommend the game if the story and environment seems compelling enough to slog through the gameplay and tedium.

I thought the main story was compelling enough to see through the end despite the negatives, and the main characters were written well enough. If you've watched certain animes about human spirits then the overarching main plot line shouldn't exactly be a new concept, but the main characters and their emotions written into the story made it interesting. The map isn't terribly exciting, but there were some really well made environments that support the main story and I wish the game could have made more use of these types of environments elsewhere.

The biggest problems this game has are the rather lackluster combat, side content, and tedium.

The beginning of the game was extraordinarily slow and dragged on, with lot of cutscenes and handholding. If I hadn't bought this long ago and was still in the return period, I may have ended up just returning the game because of how awful of an experience it was.

The combat mostly revolves around supernatural powers that you shoot out of your hand, but you do get a bow and some other consumables to assist you. The combat in the beginning of the game feels absolutely terrible, with a simple single chargeable shot. It really lacks weight and variety, and ends up feeling like you're shooting a pea shooter and can't do much else. Later on in the skill tree you do unlock nice movement skills and alternate ways to use your powers which do help make the combat more exciting, but overall it isn't super great.

Most of the side content in this game is terrible. For open world games, I always really enjoy deviating from the main missions, exploring the map, and completing a lot of side quests. However, most of the side missions here are poorly written with unnamed NPCs that you quite frankly can't care about, and generally consist of something like "Unnamed office manager can't move onto the afterlife because his employees were unhappy. Go into the office, find three things, and tell the office manager about what his employees were saying" (this is an actual side mission). There is only one side questline that was actually memorable, but even this was basically glorified escort missions. Another example of the lackluster exploration content is the yokai, which give you skill tree material. For example, one of the yokai consists of placing food as a bait, waiting a while for it take the bait, then catching it. There are various other cute collectables across the map you can find, but I personally didn't find much motivation to hunt them down.

And this brings me to the tedium. There is *a lot* of waiting and forced animations that don't contribute to the game at all. The first example of this is the yokai bait above, but biggest tedious gameplay loop is the spirits. These are basically a plentiful resource strewn about the map that you gather up and return to specific points, and reward you with XP and money. Collecting spirits is the most unnecessarily tedious process filled with unnecessary animations and steps. Collecting a spirit consists of holding a button near them. Some of them may be trapped and you need to go through another tedious minigame/animation to unlock them, after which you can then do the collecting animation. And then to return them, you have to head to certain points on the map and enter ANOTHER animation to deposit them and collect your reward. There is a skill to speed up the initial collection, but I really feel like lot of the side gameplay loops was tedium for the sake of tedium.

Overall, I did find the story just enjoyable enough to complete the game, but it would be difficult to recommend to most people.

One of the best stories in any medium I've ever experienced. I still keep thinking about it...

The blink tracking didn't work too well for me - I wear glasses and my room's light is behind me. I ended up going with the mouse option and trying to track my blinks myself which ended up working just fine without hurting the gameplay/story.

Absolutely worth the price whether it is on sale or not.

Heck, I even bought the deluxe edition with the artbook + soundtrack after I finished the game which I generally always avoid buying.

This review represents the game's state on September 29, 2021. If lots of time time has passed since this review, then the game may have received major updates and this review may no longer be relevant.

I purchased Eden World Builder many years ago in the earlier days of the iPhone/iPod Touch and it was one of my favorite mobile games of that era (the game still runs on modern iOS hardware btw!). Some of the updates later in its life seemed interesting, but eventually it ended up being an abandoned project. So of course when I heard they were working on a new Eden game, I had to wishlist it on Steam and buy it on launch. From viewing this page I had already figured this wasn't exactly going to be a Eden World Builder type game, but I always wanted a proper survival mode so why not.

But honestly the state of the game right now is terrible and not worth the purchase. I've played my fair share of early access games on Steam and know what to expect, but this is one of the earliest early access games I've ever played.

First off, there does not seem to be a single player option. You have to play on multiplayer servers (which I assume are hosted by the devs), with one creative and one survival server. On both I experienced multiple seconds of desync every minute or so. The chat is broken and you can only type one word at a time, so using underscores instead of spaces is the only way to talk to people in sentences.

Second, the survival/adventure game mechanics are not explained at all and there isn't much content to speak of. You start with some kind of pickaxe, gun, and a sword + shield. It appears you can gather and craft, and there are varied tiers of biomes. The game doesn't actually tell you anything about the biomes - you can only see this in console output or in your Steam friends status. I picked a straight direction and killed some mobs on the way, and the biomes were pretty cool to look at but unfortunately devoid of anything to explore, such as caves or dungeons. I assume the mobs get stronger with each higher tier of biome. I died in the one survival server and was not able to respawn even after relogging, so I wasn't able to get past some kind of tier 3 biome. I don't remember if I got any loot drops from the mobs I did kill. I wasn't able to explore any crafting mechanics due to this no respawn bug. I remember seeing a vehicle but I opted to not use it because I wanted to explore on foot. Of course since I wasn't able to respawn I'll also never get to try the vehicle.

Third, the settings are pretty barebones and/or broken. The graphics settings have standard low - ultra presets, resolution, windowing, couple postprocessing checkboxes, and unlabeled sliders. My 9900k + 3080 gets ~40 FPS on 1440p ultra, but not the biggest deal to me as optimized performance isn't something I expect from an early access game. The bigger issue is the controls settings. The keyboard + mouse keybinds aren't really explained anywhere, and trying to rebind them is straight up broken. If I click one and then press a key, nothing happens. I tried clicking all of them and they basically were all stuck on "press a key to bind". I did some experimenting in the game and figured out these controls:

Also creative seems to be fairly lackluster as well. I couldn't figure out if I could fly, and trying to tower up too fast causes me to clip into the tower and fall off. The hotbar didn't seem to have block icons so I had no idea what I was placing until I actually placed it.

I think the idea of this game has potential and I have a lot of nostalgia from the Eden World Builder days, so I really hope later updates of the game really address these issues. But for now I cannot recommend this game due to the lack of content and myriad of issues that make it difficult to simply explore the current content.

By far the best VR experience I have ever had. I've had a blast with pretty much all the various VR games I've played, but Alyx is on an entirely different level.

The game nails an absolutely amazing interaction system, incredible sense of scale, excellent level design, great narrative, and more. Sure, there are some small issues I had with the game, such as no melee or the hacking puzzles being finicky at times. However, these downsides aren't much compared to what this game achieves. Valve has set the bar very high for future VR content, and I imagine many will look back at Alyx as a reference on how to make amazing and immersive VR experiences.

Easy 10/10.

Power through the frustration and you'll play one of the best games to have ever been made.

The remastered definitely should have been free for owners of the original though.