It looks like a shitpost with how often it uses colors and textures that seem to want to hurt the player with how godawful they look, but if you can get past that, the core gameplay is really good.
Well you can already fast travel between planets. I’d be okay with the happy medium of intersystem travel if it meant I could actually land on a planet. The problem is the way Bethesda has set it up, the planets themselves aren’t real, there’s just a handful of zones around POIs.
I mean, that’s still pretty much the case, it’s just emulated very well, with lots of polish. It’s a lot like Minecraft in that you have to make your own fun, but once you find it it’s a very nice flow. It’s definitely better with friends, and fights with real players especially are fun, and make you realize just how bad you are.
I would give My Friendly Neighborhood a try - it’s very much in the vein of Resident Evil 4 with just-different-enough Sesame Street puppets that give you a jumpscare and damage when they make contact. Put together by John and Evan Szymanski (brothers to and collaborators with David Szymanski, of several New Blood titles fame,) it’s made explicitly to be horrifying without relying on gore and excessive violence.
Weren’t they floating codename Deckard a while back? If they can make a handheld that plays modern titles reliably, a standalone headset on par with the Quest seems about the right speed as far as next steps goes.
The you’re addressing here is The four-point scale, which exists primarily because rating a low score on a big developer’s game is a good way to ensure you don’t receive review copies ahead of release, something reviewers live and die on because their fans want to know ahead of time whether the game is any good. In that sense, it’s a bit of a paradox - you can’t be sure at face value whether the 4 out of 5/8 out of 10/83% was something that the reviewer genuinely levied against the game as a fair criticism of flaws and/or commendation of positive experiences, or if they give it a high number because they’re afraid of biting the hand that feeds.
I have a friend who says it needs to go one of two ways - either encumbrance matters hard and is super realistic, where you can reliably carry 30-60 lbs of gear for long distances, and that’s it, or it just doesn’t exist and you can lug around as much shit as you want and abstract out the rest, because the middle ground where PCs can carry like 250 lbs of shit leads to a game where you’re constantly just sorting through your inventory about the best vendor trash you think you can packrat to sell while moving through a dungeon, and that’s slow and unfun. The low carry weight turns every interaction into “is it better than my current gear?” which is really easy to answer in the moment, and when weight doesn’t matter, you just hoover it up and sell it when you get a chance.
Granted, I’m only like five of the twelve hours in I’m supposed to be before the game starts getting good, but my god they made some baffling design choices here. Possibly the most egregious is the fact that every skill comes with leveling requirements - for example, the worst offender I’ve seen is the oxygen (stamina) skill requiring you to completely exhaust your meter 20 times before you can put a second point in. (Worth noting, ‘completely exhaust’ in this context means deplete both the regular O2 meter and max out the CO2 meter, which depletes more slowly than the O2 refills) The only way to reliably and safely do this, considering you only really need stamina in short bursts when playing normally, is to literally just run fucking laps. Bad and boring, to the point that I will say, without a hint of sarcasm, that the person responsible for making it this way should be moved off the team. I cannot fathom how that person arrived at the conclusion that doing chores was somehow the most exciting and innovative way to spice up FO4’s perk system, because that’s all it is underneath, and it is an aggressive waste of time.
Yeah, that always came across as “I’m trying to neg you but I ran out of my best insults like an hour ago so I’m throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.” Same with the adopted joke.
The best case scenario is that it releases in whatever broken mess it ends up being, with good bones and the same kind of thoughtful worldbuilding B1 had, and the community picks it up similarly and makes it into a cult classic.
I’m not holding my breath though, people are still scratching their heads on the developer announcement.
I love it for the most part, the only thing I wish they’d change is the cleanliness tols for smaller or larger objects. It’s not fun to try and pixel hunt the last bit of rust on the inside of a wheel, and it’s a little disappointing to get almost done with a big flat panel only for the game to decide you’re done before you can spray off that last little chunk.