Recent reviews by North

I was excited to grab a simple minimalist puzzle game for half a buck - honestly, it wouldn't have needed to do much to be successful. But it made a few really core mistakes that absolutely sunk it for me.

A lot of features you would expect - windowed mode, dark mode, an undo button, any mouse interface, leaderboards - are not in the game unless you download the free DLC. It doesn't do ANY of those above things particularly well, once included, but beyond that, those could've just been built into the game.

The game just generally feels buggy and poorly built. When the game says "ENTER" to select something, they mean enter and only enter, not space, not left click, which is FINE, but inconvenient. The total lack of audio, claimed to be a plus for the game, feels more like an omission (sure, don't have background music, fine - what about click sounds?). With the DLC, leaderboard pop-ups freeze the game for a second (presumably waiting for a network response, but, c'mon, make it async), and frequently glitch out to remain on-screen during the next level, covering the game.

Most egregiously, moving the character lerps their position smoothly over time. This is good! It does not interrupt, instant-complete, or queue moves if you input a move during an active transition, though. This is very bad. No matter how fast you think, you can't move faster than the animation, as all inputs are dropped until the animation completes.

You can find better for fifty cents. On the plus side, it really wouldn't take much to fix most of these issues, so I hope some day this review is outdated. :(

This is an excellent VR game - its store page advertisements are honest, and rather reiterate them, I implore you to trust them, multitude of features, graphics options, index support, and all. It's well worth the price in its current state even being Early Access, and in the short time I've owned it, QOL and optimization features have regularly and reliably come out, with no sign of slowing down. This is more than just "Minecraft but pretty and VR", even if it has technically fewer systems and less block variety than Minecraft or any other voxelcrafting game, because voxelcrafting aside, it's just a straight good VR game, period.

But the quality of the game as a piece of software and entertainment aside, it's essential that I note that you're buying more than just the game - you're buying a game by Stonebrick. The developer's support is genuinely without comparison, and frankly it's so impressive that it should influence your purchase decision. When I bought the game, I was having performance issues, and while considering a refund, I posted my complaint on the Steam discussions for the game. Within ten minutes, the developer sent me a friend request on Steam, followed by a conversation wherein he walked me through several personalized steps to improve my performance and tweak settings, until we got the game running plenty acceptably for my hardware.

And this isn't an isolated story. Look at the other reviews, the Steam discussions and the Discord server for the game, and you'll see a thousand more stories like this. Stonebrick deserves more support and success for this game, and you deserve a developer who'll go so above and beyond to help you.

Buy cyubeVR.

For what this is setting out to be, Nature Treks is a resounding success. It's a series of pretty visual spaces to wander around in VR. It supports teleport, arm-swing, and slide movement, so however you feel like wandering will work for you. It's fairly tweakable in the moment, and each map has a selection of interesting tools (toss an orb to create butterflies, or grow a tree, for example). Plus, most maps have two time-of-day options and two weather options, which is neat. The sounds are high quality and very atmospheric.

I don't think it's great as a meditative aid, despite being advertised as potentially useful that way - it's a bit too hard to forget about the headset strapped to your face, IMO. Also, the graphics aren't, y'know, photorealistic or anything - this isn't photogrammetry at its finest. But it's beautiful and immersive, and that's all I was really asking for. It's incredibly soothing and a great way to introduce the less gamer-inclined of your guests to what VR is like.

Do note that the controls can take some getting used to - there's in-game help to figure out what they are, but some of the buttons are pretty arbitrarily assigned. Not a huge deal, though. If you have a broken Vive wand trackpad, some of the directional buttons are probably gonna be wonky for you.

If you're looking for a variety of pretty visual landscapes to look at in the headset, this is the one you're looking for.

For as long as I've played modern VR, I've been searching tirelessly for an immersive first-person game with novel, VR-specific locomotion and satisfying combat. Many games have come close, but none QUITE featured a movement system that felt truly empowering thanks to VR-specific technology, that fully took advantage of VR to make me feel superpowered. Or, among the ones that do succeed in locomotion, none had combat that was interesting, or rewarding, or satisfying. On the rare occasion that a game scratched both itches, it lacks content or is riddled with bugs. So I've kept looking.

Jet Island is the game.

It's fun for parties and beginners, yet begs for you to practice and master its systems, and is wholly rewarding as you do so. It features a plentiful amount of content, especially for VR games and the price. The developer is active in discussions, replies promptly, and is still adding oft-requested or just goddang cool content and additions. It's got co-op, which I haven't tried yet. Most importantly, it feels absolutely amazing to fly along on a glider using hand-strapped jet rockets and grappling hooks. The other reviews aren't kidding; I'm prone to motion sickness and experienced little to none (some tunnels were a bit queasy), and it's every bit as exhilerating as you'd hope.

If Jet Island were only just the game I'd been searching all this time for, that'd be enough. But it's more. It's remniscient of Shadow of the Colossus, exploring a massive mysterious world to hunt and kill massive behemoths. The same jaw-dropping spectacle happens here, augmented by VR's naturally awe-inspiring presentation. The combat system itself is simple - you have a gun that shoots projectiles with a max range, and the gun requires charging, enemies have weak spots with independent health, damage weak spots to win - but this is good, because it lets you focus on movement, and that's exactly how I want it. I've shot guns in VR, Jet Island doesn't need to be a robust shooter.

In conclusion: If you feel the same itch I did, this is the game that'll finally scratch it.

I'm not surprised that Swarmlake is the new perfect bite-sized game, because the previous holder of that title in my opinion was Refunct, made by the same dev. Swarmlake has tight controls, well balanced enemies, and solid music, but more importantly are two very large aspects.

One: The developer regularly puts out updates including balance changes, settings additions that are often requested, and other small tweaks. He listens to feedback and isn't afraid to change the game for the better. For a $1 game, this is a very pleasant surprise - a level of support expected usually from closer-to-full-price online games.

Two: Swarmlake opens and closes in seconds (usually, a single second). This is the best aspect of Swarmlake. Don't get me wrong, the gameplay itself is fantastic, without which this aspect would be useless, but the fact that I can hop into Swarmlake for incredibly brief amounts of time and hop back out without fuss makes Swarmlake incredibly approachable and accessible. The controls are intuitive, the title screen is also the main game, losses reset into a new round as quickly as you can click. There is nothing getting in between you and the game.

Swarmlake is a ton of fun and feels liberating, not just because of its cool weapon-based movement and massive swarms of enemies, but because it's just so easy to start playing.[/i[ For a dollar (usually on sale for 50 cents), it's a worthy addition to your library.

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