Recent reviews by Girth Control

This game is truly awful, and it blows my mind that anyone believes it's somehow better than the original Dead Rising. Movement is sticky and sluggish due to the transition animations it seems every western game must have by law. Combat is unresponsive and unsatisfying as almost every single melee weapon now has annoying windup animations. The invaluable jump kick ability now reverses momentum when it lands, which makes it basically worthless as you no longer move forward while using it. Every single zombie in this game will grab you from 10 feet away and force you to wiggle the analog stick for 3 seconds to escape. The game is constantly trying to get you to play poker for some reason, and not just a little bit of poker, like an hour of it at a time. Because you can now move while aiming, they added tons of gunfights against humans which turns the game into a really bad third person shooter. Chuck's groan inducing one liners would be a little endearing if he actually said a unique one after each boss fight, but sometimes he doesn't, so they're just cringe. The vast majority of healing items are alcoholic which cause you to puke at random intervals. The vibes are generally juvenile with big jiggling breasts constantly in the camera, strip poker (why is it always poker), dildos and actual real life Playboy ads everywhere. Cutscenes look like garbage and are locked at 30 FPS, likely because the developers thought it was "cinematic" and "epic". The audio mixing is bad, cutscenes are weirdly quiet, and the soundtrack is generally forgettable. Their attempts to remain faithful to the original game seem completely random, missions are still called "cases", there's shortcuts in the bathrooms, and Overtime mode is just a scavenger hunt with a boss fight at the end. They lack understanding of what made Dead Rising a great game, and failed to improve upon its flaws.

I can't believe how much this game sucks. I thought it was awesome back in 2010 when I was 11 but now I know, it's a travesty. This game is simply not fun to play, everything feels like a chore. The original Dead Rising is better in almost every single way. Rest in hell, Capcom Vancouver. You sucked.

(Edit: I already beat the DLC before any patches were released so I can't give a fair assessment on the updated difficulty without playing the entire game over again, and I'm a little too burnt out for that right now. But considering they did actually do some balance patches, it shows they're listening to the community and willing to make compromises, so I'm changing my review to recommend the DLC but leaving the original "not recommended" review text below.)

This is one of those times I wish there was an "it's complicated" review option. While it successfully recaptures the feeling of wonder and discovery that Elden Ring had, it misses the mark elsewhere, and often.

In Elden Ring, runes determine your strength and exploring would reward you with valuable items. If you got stuck, you could go explore, earn a bunch of runes, maybe find a flask upgrade or a cool new weapon! One adventure resulted in multiple benefits. But in Erdtree, exploration determines your strength. Enemies are so powerful you'll likely have to run past them to collect the items that make you stronger, but since the runes those enemies drop no longer contribute to your strength, you have no reason to fight them. So why not run past everything if collecting runes doesn't make you stronger? Because I genuinely don't think the DLC is possible without at least 40 endurance. You simply can't tank the damage the bosses inflict, if you don't have enough stamina to dodge or block their brutally relentless onslaught of wildly acrobatic wombo combos, you're dead.

So in Elden Ring, if you struggled against a boss you could level up your vigor to increase your survivability, or your strength to try and kill them before they kill you, or your mind so you can use more powerful spells, or even just learn the attack pattern of the boss and defeat it without levelling up at all. But in Erdtree, you absolutely must level up your endurance, and you also need to learn the boss patterns because stamina management is of the utmost importance. What once was a system that offered players great freedom in how to overcome obstacles is now incredibly restrictive, demanding you conform to a specific playstyle.

Another problem with the "exploring for strength" formula is the backwards difficulty curve it creates. The game gets progressively easier as it goes on because the further you get, the more you've explored the map, and thus found more of the items that increase your strength. This results in the first boss of the DLC being a major filter as it's considerably harder than expected, which is bound to leave a sour taste in the player's mouth. "If the first boss is this hard, what are the rest gonna be like?" Meanwhile, later bosses can lose the impact they were intended to have because you've grown so strong by the time you reach them.

But anyone who's played the DLC knows there's two bosses which absolutely won't lose their impact no matter how strong you are - Messmer and Radahn. These bosses are designed in a way that is... legitimately unacceptable. I'm actually a little disappointed Erdtree doesn't have achievements because I'd like to see how many people actually beat it. These two bosses are likely responsible for the majority of rage quits. They're incredibly, incredibly difficult.

In the grand scheme of things, a relatively minor complaint I have about Erdtree is with visual clutter and poor visibility. Not just with bosses and their many screen covering effects, but when exploring the world as well. I'm not sure how or why but I was constantly riding past sites of grace because I didn't see them, which literally never happened in Elden Ring.

When it comes to speaking the positives of Erdtree, it's difficult because you don't want to spoil anything. It's definitely best to go in as blind as possible. The environments are beautiful and varied, much of which offer sights never seen in Elden Ring. There's plenty of moments that had me shocked or amazed, especially when they involved stuff you didn't really think about before, like what's inside the warrior jars. Most of the new weapons are super fun and unique. The map is designed in a way that navigating it almost feels like a puzzle... perhaps that could be seen as a bad thing, but it depends on the player I suppose.

So, do I recommend Shadow of the Erdtree? Give it some time. See if they put out a patch or two, some balance tweaks and what not. The problem isn't that it's hard, which it is, but rather the difficulty is very inconsistent.

I've tried to play this game on like 8 different occasions and every time I get fed up with the multitude of amateurish mistakes and quit around the third level.

Right off the bat the game shows HTC Vive controllers in the menus even though I have a Quest 3. Why show controllers at all? Just show the character's hands. You get into the game, grab a gun, and realize the controllers aren't aligned properly. You put your gun away and it seems to switch holsters at random, so when you need it most it isn't where you expect it to be. Even after 10 calibrations your chest holsters will either be inside of your body or blocking your vision. You're told that you can climb metal surfaces but that's not entirely true, you can climb like 70% of the level that isn't metal and which 70% seems to be completely random because one level you can climb concrete walls and in another you can't. It'd honestly be better if you could just climb everything except for special anti-magnetic surfaces or something. Your hands phase through the world which makes it difficult to climb things like ladders because you keep pushing your hand through the surface and grabbing the air on the other side resulting in you falling. The level design assumes you can jump but you can't, there's a part in the second level where it seems like you're supposed to jump from scaffolding to scaffolding to traverse a pit but instead you have to awkwardly drop off the side of each one and climb back up. There's tons of railings and ledges that you have to awkwardly mantle over that a jump button would have made so much easier to traverse. Sprinting doesn't turn off when you stop moving, so if you sprint, come to a complete stop, then try to sneak past an enemy, you just end up sprinting full speed and making a bunch of noise because it doesn't turn off unless you press the sprint button again. I just unbound the damn button because it was so annoying. There doesn't seem to be any checkpoints, so if you're attempting full stealth and get detected you have to start the whole level over. There might be some in later levels but I've never had the patience to reach them. The AI spots you through anything considered glass, even if it's nearly opaque, and should never be engaged with in melee combat as you can punch an unsuspecting soldier 4 times in the back of the head with all your might and they'll just turn around and alert everybody. Use your gun every single time, no exceptions. The AI isn't great and will walk over to your exact position if they spot a pixel of you for even a millisecond. The sound design is poor with your character's footsteps being incredibly loud, giant mechanical metal airlock-esque doors making no noise whatsoever when opened or closed, and music changing volume at seemingly random.

Ugh. I don't want to, I really don't want to, but I think I hate this game. I wish there was a good stealth action game for VR and this one looks like it could really be a winner but every single time I come back to it I'm driven away by a dozen different smaller problems making the game generally annoying to spend time with.

It's like Shadow of the Colossus cross Rayman 2, but with a grapple hook!

Because this was originally a kickstarter bonus similar to Yooka-Laylee's Toybox, it admittedly doesn't make a great demo. It was intended for people who were dying to get the game in their hands early so it's a little rough around the edges, the tutorial isn't great, there's no real indication where you're supposed to go, gravity feels a little too heavy, the controls can be awkward, and performance is a little poor despite the retro aesthetic.

But despite those negatives there's no doubt it's worth your time. First off, it's free. Secondly, it's definitely unique enough to warrant it's existence when compared to other 3D platformers. It's not just another collectathon, they're clearly trying to make something that hasn't been done a hundred times before. The core gameplay loop of exploration, discovery, and precision platforming results in excellent pacing and feels very rewarding. It's not far off from being exceptional, it just needs a little more time in the oven.

This is more of a tech demo for GZDoom than an actual game. Is it technologically impressive? Absolutely. Is it fun? No.

Enemies are too spongy, even on the first level. You're constantly running out of ammo even with perfect accuracy because enemies just take way too many shots to kill. Their attacks aren't interrupted by damage so firefights often feel like a back and forth, shot for shot ordeal. The amount of effects on screen is ridiculous, making it near impossible to actually see what you're shooting at unless you turn the graphics way down, and if the game is basically unplayable with certain graphics effects what's the point in even having them? The levels are fairly maze-like and fail to direct the player, resulting in an unnecessary amount of time spent just wandering around not really doing anything.

But worst of all...

I love sliding in games. I believe almost every game can be improved with sliding, kicking, and grapple hooks. Sliding should be fast, fun, evasive, effective - like sprinting and dodging combined. But in Selaco, it's absolutely butchered by having a half second windup. It feels so stiff, awkward and unwieldy, like I'm getting in a wheelchair before scooting away. It takes what should be the crowning jewel of evasive maneuvers and turns it into a major nuisance.

For that, I wouldn't forgive this game if it gave me head. The desecration of schmovement is something I cannot stand.

Edit: This review was written when the game originally came out, and updated recently to fix some grammatical errors. Not wanting to mislead your potential consumers after a developer responded, I went and downloaded the original release of Selaco and the most recent version (which I believe is 0.8.5) to see if my review no longer represents the game accurately.

In the original release enemies can definitely shoot you in between shots with the starter assault rifle, which is what my "back and forth" comment is referring to. This seems to be resolved in the latest version, however enemies are very quick to recover from stagger so missing even one shot usually results in taking damage, and ammo is still annoyingly scarce.

In both versions on first startup the game doesn't ask how flashy or distracting you want the effects to be, it asks how powerful your computer is. I have a powerful computer so I selected the powerful computer option, you can't then pretend it's my fault I can barely see what's happening due to all the smoke and particles. If those effects negatively affect visibility and are supposed to be optional, maybe they shouldn't be enabled by default?

Regarding level design, I never said there was no effort put into guiding the player, I said you failed to guide the player. I can tell you tried and I understand what you were going for, but it's clearly not enough considering I'm not the only person who has complained about not knowing where to go. One example of poor level design is the dark vent on the first level that requires a flare; having it start illuminated then go dark after the player enters does nothing but punish them for not bringing the flare into the already illuminated tunnel. If the vent was always dark, the player wouldn't progress into the darkness at all before finding a source of light, which naturally teaches them how to pick up environmental objects.

The "half second windup" when sliding is still a problem and originates from the lowering into slide animation along with the field of view change being too slow. If you disable the field of view change in accessibility options it actually ends up feeling faster. Also the slide being locked in one direction with no ability to adjust the angle at all along with the pretty long cooldown afterwards makes it generally unsatisfying to use.

You may see 30 minutes as not enough time to give the game a fair chance, but the reality is 30 minutes was all it took to turn me away. I gave the game more than a fair second chance by comparing the original release to the most recent version, therefore I stand by my review.

Great concept, but mind-numbingly tedious execution. It's about as fun as mopping the floor, going back and forth, back and forth, over and over. The visual style is a gimmick and very quickly begins to hurt your eyes and give you a headache.

Go read a book instead.

I bought this game after hearing stories that it searches your computer for data to determine who you are, where you live, and other information you wouldn't expect it to have. That doesn't happen. It just asks for your information and repeats exactly what you tell it. It called me "Fakename" the whole game. All the "meta scares" it attempted failed. It failed to load any of my Steam friends, it failed to activate my webcam, and it failed to look up my location. At best it's cliche, at worst it's incredibly boring.

This game's only scary if you're the kind of person who answers those "What _____ Character Are You" quizzes on Facebook.

It really sucks to have to say I don't recommend this game, but it's just not very good. The campaign is a complete mess with what feels like the majority of it being a series of forgettable mini-games. What little that has actual care and effort put into it is surprisingly good, but those moments are few and far between. The first hour of this game sets expectations very high but the rest simply does not deliver.

The developer's excuse is that Bonelab is supposed to be more of a modding platform or pseudo-engine like Garry's Mod or Little Big Planet, but those games give players full access to the ultimate tools for creating anything and everything. They can be excused for having a lack of built-in content because the ease in which players can create their own has resulted in an overflowing cornucopia of free to download addons. Bonelab lacks built-in content and its mod tools suck, as they lack functionality and are not intuitive or fun to mess around with. This has caused a content drought, which is a death sentence for any game attempting to survive off community creations.

At the end of the day what we have here is a game without enough valuable content to warrant the price tag, and that's pretty much the end of it.

At launch this game was in pretty rough shape - well, that's putting it lightly. The game was basically unplayable. But in such a short time they've already turned the project around and what we have now is an excellent starting point for what could easily become another one of VR's must own action games.

Don't get it twisted, this game is still EARLY ACCESS. It's very messy and doesn't have much content, but the developers have clearly been listening to feedback and working hard on fixing problems sooner rather than later, so I have faith things are only going to get better from here on out.

It's not fun for a level 1 enemy to kill you in 3 hits while they take 9. It's not fun to have your movement speed reduced to a snail's pace when you're aiming so you can't dodge incoming fire without teleporting away. It's not fun when you fail to reload because moving with the analog stick causes your weapon to jiggle around. It's not fun to miss 99% of your magic attacks because they seem to launch in random directions.

Perhaps some of these would be alleviated by not playing on the "realistic" preset, but considering the "arcade" preset sounded like it had anti-VR features like automatic reloads, can you really blame me for not trying it? I'll have to give it another shot at some point, but as of right now I just wasn't having any fun.