It's a wonderful game with deeply satisfying stealth and combat. I'd recommend the game all day long, BUT the port to PC is sloppy. The control scheme is awkward and unintuitive. Like, instead of having context-aware commands, they just assigned different keyboard buttons to every possible action you can take. For example, getting on your horse is one button, getting off your horse is another. You really don't need two buttons for that, dude. Just make the getting on/off button the same. Most of the control scheme is like that, meaning you have to remember a lot of extra buttons and send your fingers halfway across the keyboard to accomplish some basic and common tasks. Annoying. Still a fun game, but annoying. Probably best played with a controller.

The game is also deeply buggy, especially on AMD cards. Prepare to be flashbanged when new lightsources load in, the buildings at night flicker with a blue glow like cops are parked out front, the game stutters / freezes for a few beats every minute or so even though your framerate is otherwise smooth and you exceed system requirements by a lot, half the time you challenge enemies to a duel the game simply stops accepting mouse input until after you've already been hit, and holding the "run" button while on your house without actually moving makes you rapidly spasm up and down like a broken jack-in-the-box in your saddle.

All in all, it's a fantastic game but a bad and very buggy port. It *did* just come out when I wrote this, so hopefully a few updates will resolve its more glaring bugs at the very least. The control scheme, though? Blech. Better off just playing with a controller.

Unique concept, generally good execution, but low variety. Monotony is the real enemy in this game.

The good news: the robot fights are extremely satisfying. Getting cornered by a couple of tanks and a swarm of hunters is pretty exhilarating with proper cover and enough ammo. Night-time fights are especially beautiful, with the landscape illuminating under heavy machinegun fire, explosions, and general mayhem. Sound design is also pretty dang good. Hearing the clicks, whirs, ominous sirens, and booming thunks of robots moving around you is suspenseful, and the gunfire sounds great too.

The okay news: Much of the content is designed for coop multiplayer. While you *can* play solo, you're going to be missing out on some of the core later game content, as even with plenty of points in your defensive abilities you get rapidly shredded by enemies in base assaults or base defense scenarios. Base defense was especially disappointing as a solo player, as the "tower defense" style gameplay sounded really exciting, but the EXTREMELY limited number of turrets you can place are overwhelmed even on the easiest difficulty and you just lack the proper firepower to take on the bigger swarms without help. With another player or two, however, things get considerably more fun.

The bad news: Monotony. There just isn't a whole hell of a lot to do in this game. There aren't a wide variety of guns, there aren't a wide variety of enemies, and there aren't a wide variety of activities. After you've killed the biggest baddies the game has to offer several times over, it's hard to find the motivation to keep playing. I think this game's best chance at longevity would be investing a lot more into the base building and defense systems. If I could find and rescue survivors, build a proper large scale base, manage the basic needs of the people in my camps, give them jobs, create better defenses, and enable regional bonuses and benefits based on my decisions (think something along the lines of Fallout 4's settlements) it would go a long, long way towards giving me motivation to keep going out and killing robots. You need something to fight FOR and fight TOWARDS. Otherwise, monotony is what kills you in the end.

All in all, I would recommend the game -- especially if you can get it on sale and have a friend or two to play with. While monotony settles in fairly quickly, that first 30 hours or so of gameplay is a ton of fun.

I've had VaM for a year or two through their Patreon. Started with desktop only mode, and later with VR. If you're looking for a customizable porn sandbox, there's nothing better than this. Between the content in the base platform and the stuff added on the hub by community developers, there are a virtually unlimited number of sliders / morphs for changing various aspects of the characters' bodies, countless hairstyles, clothing options, etc.

This massive amount of customization comes with some bonkers complexity and a big, throbbing learning curve, though. While you can make a character with any appearance and body type you can imagine, it's easier by far to make soul-shattering Picassoesque monsters and dead-eyed Lovecraftian nightmares than it is to make anything you'd actually get goin' to. Unless you get goin' to some weird biz, that is.

This customization (and complexity) extends to every other aspect of the platform. Completely customized scenes, assets, sounds, animations, textures, etc. VaM feels more like a development tool than a game, to be honest, but that's also what makes it so great if you take the time to figure it out. If you're not able or willing to sort through the crazy UI and learn all the bits, though, VaM still has a built-in resource hub with thousands of user-made looks, assets, and other plug-ins that can be installed with a single click. Chances are pretty damn good you can find what you're looking for there.

Also, don't be fooled by the awkward and clunky looking screenshots and videos on the store page here: VaM has the best graphics of any game of this type by far, but it WILL challenge middling systems and may not be playable in VR at all unless you've got a pretty beefy rig and requires some customized or downloaded looks, plug-ins, post-processing effects, and scenes to really bring out the power of it. If you can run it in VR, however, it's gonna blow your mind. Since everything is customizable, how good a scene looks is totally up to the creator, and some of these horny goofs go all out on creating photo-realistic scenes with great motion-captured animations and a whole stack of custom effects to make the lighting work and blah blah blah.

TLDR; VaM is the most customizable porn game experience on the market by far and has stellar graphics, but it comes with a stiff learning curve and a ton of complexity to move past the out-of-the-box clunkiness. You can make absolutely anything you want to, but it won't come as easily as you do. If you're not a content creator, you can browse thousands of user-made submissions on the in-game download hub to find whatever you want.

PROS
*Endless customization of every aspect of the experience.
*An in-game download hub to browse thousands of user-made looks, clothes, hairstyles, scenes, animations, etc.
*Top-tier graphics.
*Literally any kink you can imagine can be created.
*The VR experience will make you say AWOOOGA.
*The soft-body physics are very good, and can be adjusted as needed to be more realistic with different body types

CONS
*"Out-of-the-box" experience is clunky and awkward and doesn't look especially great.
*The huge amount of complexity and customization that enables the best parts of this platform also come with a big hunka chunka learning curve.
*Literally any kink you can imagine can be created...
*You'll need a pretty darn good system to run it.

My wife and I cancelled our VRC+ subscriptions tonight. We both got into VRchat last month and immediately fell in love with it. We've made good friends, and have been on for several hours damn near every night hanging out, talking, enjoying the vibes, and sucking down the kind of juicy interpersonal drama we don't get anymore now that we're basically prisoners to a toddler and a baby.

If I'd written this review a few days ago, I'd have given it top marks. 5/5 stars. Weird, goofy, clunky, and more than a little broken, but still a pretty damn fun experience for the simple fact that mods enable you to bypass the broken, critically stunted user interface to find content, navigate worlds and environments, and browse avatars at your leisure so you can focus on having fun with your friends.

Then, for reasons that are completely beyond me, the dev team decided to kill every mod overnight. "For security."

This is not a competitive game, and the security concerns they cited for killing mods had MANY better alternatives, such as including an official modding API, whitelisting popular mods, merging the most critically needed features from mods (like avatar searching) into the base game, etc. Instead, they just killed mods, and reassured us with "we've been wanting to add some of those features for years, but it's pretty tough to do" while notably failing to note WHICH features they want to add, and with no sense of irony at making us wait YEARS for features that some unpaid fans of the game managed to hack together in a few weeks. Like, ♥♥♥♥, VRC -- they already did the work for you.

VRC understandbly face massive, immediate backlash to their announcement they were adding the EA Anti-Cheat system to their non-competitive social hangout game to kill modded clients (almost universally, PC VR users flock to a small handful of mods that add features like avatar searching, performance and optimization settings, quality of life improvements, navigation features for small or non-standard avatars. and camera options for resolution, field of view, etc). This ♥♥♥♥ doesn't just make the platform BETTER, it's the difference between it being FUNCTIONAL or not.

Instead of responding to this backlash by listening to their community and delaying or cancelling the adoption of the EAC system until such time as official support could be incorporated for these mods, or for the features of the mods to be incorporated into the game (the work's already been done, VRC...), they doubled down on the decision and effectively told the community to eat shift because modded clients are against the Terms of Service anyway, but that they would "like" to incorporate "some" of these features at some point and have "for years."

Ugh. Yuck. Bought my wife a VR headset specifically so we could play this together, and we both subscribed to VRC+ to support the devs (and unlock additional features from our favorite mods, who also required VRC+ for those features to activate because they supported the devs too), and now we have both cancelled. Our friend group of ~14 people also cancelled VRC+ for the same reason. I doubt any of us will be subscribing again until, at the very least, the features they stole away from us are officially added. What's the point of paying for extra avatar storage if we can't search for avatars anymore?

Single Player: Outstanding. One of the best single-player free roam games I've ever played, with an incredible story to boot.

Online: Gameplay for online is fun, but be aware that Rockstar's monetization practices are terrible for consumers. Basic roles for your online "class" are locked behind steep entry fees at 15-20 gold bars (which can be purchased for real money, OR grinded out over the course of about 100 hours or so of online gameplay -- which is a ludicrous time investment just to START leveling your role.

Worse than that, however, is that the Outlaw Pass, which is essentially a membership upgrade for your account that earns you extra rewards for leveling up, is not actually tied to your account, but to your CHARACTER -- which means if you decide you want to "start fresh" with a new character (you only have ONE character slot and must delete your character and lose all your progress if you want to change things up), you either have to grind out 400+ matchmaking games or spend the $20.00 to get enough "Gold Bards" to upgrade your membership again. That's insane imo. Should be tied to your account, not your character.

TLDR; This is a great game, but Rockstar is not at all consumer-friendly. If you're planning to play online, be prepared to have to "pay to play" or grind for hundreds of hours for basic content.

As a note, this package is split into two modules. If you find yourself scratching your head wondering where the racial data is for player characters, it's in a module by itself. Otherwise, you get you pay for with this. It's pretty painful that I had to buy all this stuff again, but FGs is just such a useful tool that it's hard not to.

This is a very different game from the first Sanctum. It places a MUCH heavier focus on the FPS elements of the game, and actual tower defense takes a disappointing back seat. Going into a map, you can only bring a maximum of up to four different types of tower with you. Once in, you can place a maximum of 15 before hitting the hard tower cap. However, because you're constantly starved for resources, your towers will never be able to do much more than soften up the enemy-- you are expected to do most of the actual killing.

Furthermore, the game seems to have been explicitly designed with multiplayer in mind. Because the bulk of attention is shifted towards the FPS elements, without having another player to help you, you will struggle to keep up with the waves, especially on the maps with multiple pathways (which are most maps).

Sanctum 2 might be a pretty fun game to play with a friend or two, but if you're a solo player, and if you're expecting an actual tower defense game, and if you were hoping for gameplay actually reminiscent of the first Sanctum, then I would not recommend Sanctum 2.

I am a brand new player of MtG, and I found this game very helpful in learning the rules and tactics of the game. I'm glad to say that it isn't as complicated as I had thought it would be, and I'm really looking forward to diving in to the world of tabeltop MtG now that I understand a bit more about how certain themes and decks operate, and that is largely thanks to Magic 2014 - Duels of the Planeswalkers.

However, I'm sad to report that this game only gave me the briefest taste of the action, and fell well short of leaving me satisfied. As a brand new player feeling this way, I can only imagine that veteran MtG fans will be left disappointed. Once I had beaten the shot campaign (which is comprised of a series of duels against static enemies who always draw the same cards, in the same order), and felt I had a pretty good grasp of how certain cards could synergize with each other, I was disappointed to see that there wasn't much of an option to build my own deck and experiment. The only exception to this is the sealed deck mode, where you are given a small number of random cards, and can earn up to three booster decks to craft your own deck. However, this feels almost completely pointless, as once you have unlocked the three booster packs (For a total of 9 packs, I believe), there is no way to unlock any more. You're stuck with what you have. Like it or not. Your only options after that point are to continue fighting the same battles you already fought, but without the rewards.

Overall, I'd say that Magic 2014 is a decent purchase if you're brand new to the game, and just looking for a stage to learn the rules of the game, and have a chance to play around with premade decks to learn a few possible tactics. If you were hoping for the possibility of actually building your own decks, though, then you should probably stable your expectations.

It's a cool concept that has the potential to be a lot of fun, but it's totally unplayable right now. It's clumsy, glitchy as heck, poorly optimized, etc, etc. But it's really early in the development cycle, so maybe it'll be better down the line when they've ironed it out!

HAWKEN is a very fun, arcadey robot shoot-em-up. There are a surprising number of interesting game modes (though not as many maps as I'd like to see, at this point in development), and a fair number of neat robots, weaponry, and abilities. Gameplay is simple arena-style for the most part, with plenty of explosions and bullets whizzing about, and with the unique abilities of different mechs adding a bit of variety for different playstyles. Overall, it's fun and engaging, if a bit simple.

I do have some pretty noteable criticisms, though. The grind is extreme, if you haven't bought the starter bundle (which is a pretty fair value, all in all). Unlocking new weapons and robots takes a very long time, and cosmetics are cash-only. There's also not much in the way of non-cosmetic customization. Each mech has one special ability, one non-unique secondary weapon that can't be changed, and a choice of three non-unique primary weapons (that need to be unlocked through grinding or real-money). This feels a bit arbitrary. It makes me wonder why they didn't actually let you BUILD your mech, by choosing from a wide variety of parts, abilities, and weaponry. The only customization to speak of is choosing which of your selected robot's three primary weapons you'd like to roll out with, after grinding to unlock one of a rather uninspired collection of cookie-cutter prebuilds.

I'd recommend the game, because it really is fun. The core gameplay is there! But it's not a very high recommendation, because of the huge amount of missed potential with the gimpy customization system. I'd give Hawken a 3/5 in its current state, but changing simply changing the customization system to one that let you actually assemble your very own mech would make me reconsider that rating in a big way.