Currently can't recommend this game, although I'll still keep playing it because there is a compelling kernel beneath all the horrible cruft on top. Fair's fair to the devs, I don't know what their situation is so this is not a slight against Ramen VR. There's a truly great game in here, but it's choking under a layer of truly miserable and unfun problems.

Fair's fair, I think the game does a few things well: the grapple hook is great... when you can use it, and combat is fun despite the horrible balancing issues and poorly performing server software.

So let's talk balance, the first big issue. It's completely broken. As of the writing of this review I have 20h in game, most of which are on Mage Tank. Apparently, long before I started playing, Mage Tank was overpowered and could easily scoop up spawns and burn them down without breaking a sweat; this attracted severe nerfs. However Tank Mage is simply unsuited to the game as it is. Many main story quests in Skyland involve DPS races which are anywhere from very tight and extremely tedious, to outright impossible without grinding out crafted gear. Events which require damaging an object are actually better handled by swinging at it with your multitool than trying to use the Mage Tank's spells (only two of which actually have object damage at all).

Let's get back to the "grind out crafted gear", as this is related to a second major issue. Skyland is the "newbie island", although it covers you for 27 of the game's 50 levels. However, Skyland is also plagued with some truly eyewatering grinds, including hours long slowly-respawning resource loops and farming the same nine or so slowly-respawning world events over and over to complete "pylons", which provide substantial passive boosts for as long as you're in Skyland. Actually, crafting yourself a full set of epics is a fairly short and pleasant process compared to the truly bizarre and ill-conceived amount of grinding required for pylons. The time investment for resource loops isn't necessarily even a problem, it's the fact that they're tied to a motion control minigame and are usually guarded by monsters, including some obnoxious miniboss placement or some rich spawn areas.

The final issue I have encountered with the game is that the servers have exceptionally poor performance and netcode. Even connecting to a local shard with low ping, I have to deal with teleporting enemies, and in some cases with bizarre pathing and leashing issues. If I connect to an actually populated server with bad ping, I can say goodbye to reliable hit detection and being able to avoid attacks at all due to my character freezing in place on the server despite moving on my client.

Here's looking forward to the game this can be. Avoid for now. It's miserable.

As an Australian I enjoy playing this as a fantastical escape to a world significantly less dystopian than my own, yet still comfortingly familiar.

- Every animal can kill you
- Marauding herds of murderous emus leave a decent amount of the world's deserts and savannahs uninhabitable
- The only truly nice people are goats
- Hivers are hucksters, but they're cute so they get a pass
- The Australian Labor Party

Hello I walk into empty

I can't recommend this game enough. Funcom's central product, it seems, is individualistic and memorable experiences, and The Secret World is exactly that. The base game is good quality, with haunting and horrifying settings and strange and memorable characters. The quest structure mixes episodic hubs that introduce you to fleshed out and interesting characters, and an overarching narrative that has you unravelling the designs of some unknown force.

The game also offers something unique to MMOs: the investigation mission. These are augmented reality puzzles, drawing you into some truly challenging and lateral riddles, while using alternate reality to beautifully blur the lines between our world and the secret world.

But it gets better.

The DLC take off and make everything good about the base experience more spectacular. Issue #5, The Vanishing Of Tyler Freeborn, is the first great example of this, with a climax taking place inside a psychedelic nightmare brought on by a cosmic horror called "The Filth", a major antagonistic force running through the game. This sets the stage for what is to come in the remaining DLC, with the lines blurring ever more.

Frogs are people too.

If you find yourself longing for games that present philosophy, psychology, and pure artistic joy and flair in accessible packages, this is absolutely a must have. Truly a rare--almost peerless--experience.

This game is fascinating on several artistic levels. What we have here is another entry in the niche movement of new expressionism. The attention to lighting and level design is painstaking, inviting us to blur the boundary between an inner, intimate, emotional journey; and a grand, mythic outer quest. The music is spectacular in the truest sense of the word, mixing modern orchestral sensibilities with glitch elements, and always working in beautiful synergy with the wonderfully expressive environments.

Yeah it's alright

Possibly the most erotic acid trip it's pharmacologically feasible to have.