I had originally thought this review was gonna be a negative one, mostly because of the crazy price tag this VR experience has. I mean, they are asking 60 bucks for a VR upgrade of a 14 year old game that most of us have already bought multiple times. Just the thought of that made me have a sour taste in the mouth before having even launched the game, and I am someone who considers Skyrim to be one of the best games ever made.

But I bought it on sale for 15 bucks, which is a good deal since VR games are usually priced a bit higher than nonVR titles. It is a hobby for the privileged and the “elite” apparently. But I gotta say, after having been playing through parts of the game now in VR, I have to admit that this is a pretty damn good VR experience and probably the best I have had since I got my own headset, at least for the technology we have now.

First of all, I have been playing Skyrim since it had its first release in 2011 and I have 100%ed the achievements 3 times, once on the Xbox 360 and twice here on Steam, and the VR version will probably be my fourth time. So, I really love this game and therefore I also know there is bias when I talk about this probably being the best VR experience available. I guess I'm trying to say, that if you didn’t like nonVR Skyrim, chances are you also won’t like this, so find something else to play if that is the case, I know that not everyone like this game.

Beside just finally being able to step into this immersive world and feel like you have a presence there, this game plays exactly like its nonVR counterpart. Every single mission, NPC, object and whatever is exactly like how it was in the original game. The only difference being that you can swing your weapons, balance your shield and nock your bow and this is really why you play this. The combat in the nonVR version is really basic and some might call it boring, but in this VR version, it is far from boring. I especially like archery a lot. It is in my opinion by far the most fun class in VR, since it requires minimal movement and has the most interactive combat that isn’t just swing like crazy. And with it being VR, your shooting speed all dependent on your own speed and ability to rearm your bow. That means that you can essentially rapid fire and kill normally “strong” enemies really quickly, as long as you move fast enough. It is super fun.

The input detection is also really good, I haven’t had any issues that I can think of in terms of the game not registering movement or touch correctly. It seems to be pretty spot on, but it is also expected from a product with a 60 euro price tag, so not something to celebrate.

The game isn’t perfect. It does have a few minor issues and bugs. The only two issues I feel are worth covering are the stamina issue while moving and mission triggers.

If you choose jump movement, which most people probably will, then stamina drain will be an issue you will face immediately as you get into the game. Moving around will feel incredibly slow and frustrating, since it essentially is just like throwing a fishing line and waiting for it to charge back up so you can throw again. It would probably have been better to disable stamina for movement entirely and just nerf the distance a bit. Luckily I quickly found a workaround myself while playing. When you crouch/sneak, stamina drain will get disabled, allowing you to move indefinitely, and since there is nothing to keep you from spamming your thumb sticks in a direction, you can essentially move faster than normal Skyrim running speed while sneaking. This gets you to places much faster and it also levels up your sneak pretty fast. Just something I wish I knew before I started.

There is also another issue, which relates to mission triggers. This game seems to break a bit more than I remember the original game did. Just to clarify, I didn’t mod this VR version or change anything at all, it is totally vanilla. But I have had mission triggers fail on me, nothing yet that couldn’t get fixed without the need of the console though. But just in case, I recommend you manually save after every mission. It sucks to go back.

I am overall really satisfied with this game and I highly recommend it when on sale. For the full price though, it is a tough one. I guess it will all depend on your income and how in love you are with this game. I personally wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as I do now if I knew I paid 60 bucks for it though, but I'm not gonna stop you either.
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Help me out by following my Curator, I’d really appreciate it!!

So, it took me a bit to finally play this adult sci-fi adventure game. I must have had it on my wishlist for a few years by now, but decided to get it during autumn sale since the price didn’t seem to come any lower than the 15 bucks I paid. At first, I thought about comparing this game to the likes of Huniepop, but after playing through this, I realized that this game is in its entirely own league!

I haven’t had this much fun in a game like this in a while and I initially set out to 100% this game and I almost did, if it wasn’t because my backlog of games is growing faster than I can keep up with. I did clear half of the entire galaxy though, leveled every single crew member to level 40, did every devotion quest, unlocked every Pandora scene and spent a decent amount of time in the Eldritch Trials, at least enough to form an opinion on them. So, let’s get to it.

I liked the overall story they wrote for this game. It fits really well with the structure and theme of the universe they created. You play as this criminal, sarcastic and very confident anti-hero, a bit like a Deadpool kind of character. He is the main protagonist and is the captain of a stolen ship called the Mary Celeste. The overall plot of the story is that he forms a crew of rebels to take on the Imperium and restore personal will and freedom in the universe. Saying more will end up spoiling things, so I’ll leave it at that.

The gameplay is where this game is having some issues. I have seen a lot of people talk about this as the reason they didn’t like the game, and while I agree with some of it, I also don’t think it is that bad and I enjoyed it for the most part.

There are two types of combat in this game. A top down shoot em up space combat mode, where you fly around shooting waves of enemies and choose a crewmate as a co-pilot for her special ability. And then a turn based ground combat mode where you choose a crewmate and three alien beasts from a given selection to fight on foot. The ones of you who read my other reviews know that I’m not normally a big fan of turn based combat, but this is one of the exceptions where turn based combat definitely was the best choice.

Enemies come in all varieties, there are 4 or 5 different enemy factions I think, all playing really differently, some way harder than others. There are also a decent number of boss fights, which by far are the hardest fights in the game.

Not much strategy is really needed at any time, I don’t know if that is a bad thing though. There are maybe a few challenging missions, but they are very doable after a few restarts, and even if they aren’t, you can just activate victory protocol after three deaths and cheat win the missions.

There are multiple types of quests and objectives in this game. The first are obviously the main quests, which hold the main campaign and story mode within them. There are a handful of main quests which are each around 40 minutes, assuming you don’t just skip everything.

Side quests in this game are kind of useless. Most of them include a very short attached story that just consists of a short dialogue and some mission briefing text and there are no scenes in the side quests, which makes the really boring. There are also what I call miscellaneous quests, they are just all the leftover planets in the galaxies once you did everything else.

We also have two other types of quests. The first is devotion quests, which are personalized quests for each crew member, excluding Fow-Chan. They are shorter but essentially much higher quality quests than the main quests and each one includes a long spicy scene that is like a full blown movie. The devotion quest scenes serves as like the grand finale to the game.

The last is the Eldritch Trials, which become available in engineering once Fow-Chan has been unlocked at the very end of the main campaign. They are endless waves of either ground or space combat scenarios. They don’t seem to scale in difficulty the further you get up, so it is more like an endurance test than a skill thing. These trials are however a really fast way to level up your crewmates.

I do have two complaints when it comes to mission design. The first is that side missions would have benefitted a lot from including special scenes, at least if just some of them had had hidden scenes or something like that. At least there would have been more of an incentive to go do them all. I think it would have been better to take all those Pandora scenes and scatter them across all the side missions instead of just making them unlockable with points. Having them assigned to missions would also help add a story to them.

The other thing is that when it comes to the missions where I can select a character to do the job for me, like the Demi part upgrade missions, why am I given the option to pick a crewmate if there is only one correct crewmate choice for each mission? It gets really annoying shuffling through each one of them everytime until you find the correct one. And when by accident picking the wrong crew member, why can’t I go back and pick the correct one?

The characters are really well crafted in this game, especially considering what this game is. You’ve got multiple different characters of different species with different personalities and visual features, all coming together really well. When it comes to crewmates, there is a total of 10 that can be unlocked in the game. Demi, Lily, Killi, Ela, Taron, Sova, Fortune, Huntress, Blythe and Fow-Chan. I still can’t believe that Empress Celestina isn’t the last crewmate and gets to keep her purity.

Every character in this game is fully voiced and the voice actors did a good job. It all sounds professional and high quality. The voice acting is actually the thing that brings this game to the top level. It is kind of crazy how much it adds to the immersion and quality of the game.

The Pandora is essentially the gallery. All the scenes from the main campaign will be playable here. There is however also a large amount of none mission scenes that can be unlocked here using “pooter points.” Each crewmate has her own points and they are earned through her leveling. You should be able to unlock all of the “pooter point scenes” with a girl once you hit around level 30 with her.

There is a wardrobe in this game, with unlockable haircuts and outfits you gain through leveling each girl. While this is a cool addition, the changes you make are pretty useless, since pretty much all of the clothing options are unlocked at the very end of the game, when your crewmates are near or at max level, long after you finished the main campaign.

I honestly think the price is fine and I find this game slightly underrated. It is a big game in a genre of games that never sees projects of this size and it seems to have been made by a proper studio. There also are no microtransactions, which is a huge win for this game. Most games in this genre and style are riddled with paywalls in all types of progression and rewards. In the 30 hours I played I had one crash and there was an autosave that saved me, not bad at all.

I did not know anything about this game before hand, so it blew me away how big it actually is and how many scenes of all different kinds were made for this game. It took me 30 hours to complete pretty much everything the game had to offer and I paid 15 bucks for it. To me that is a good deal, especially for a game of this quality. The ending of the game is setting it up for a sequel to be possible, but I don’t know if we ever will get one. If we do though, I will definitely buy it!
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Help me out by following my Curator, I’d really appreciate it!!