Chandler Wood's Reviews
Dissidia is Final Fantasy through and through, from epic battles to incredible music to deep and obscure mechanics that most players won't fully understand until they are hours into the game.
Cold Iron is a fascinating and unique game that could use a little bit more polish. I'd love to see additional puzzles and worlds added in the future, and maybe some kind of tutorial or power-up that could assist with better aiming for those elusive bullseyes. The test of skill is reason enough to play again and again, with the challenge of a reflex puzzle-based shooter persistently pressing for just one more duel to try and do slightly better than I did before. Textures and difficulty aiming aside, I always wanted to hear that bell one more time and watch my enemy slump into the dirt. Or maybe? Maybe it's just the curse of the gun that won't let go—the grip of Cold Iron on my soul.
It's the perfect remake. It's Shadow of the Colossus exactly as I remember it, yet it's Shadow of the Colossus like it's never been before.
The pitch for Out of Ammo sounds interesting on paper, but the execution is probably the worst PSVR game that I have ever played. Out of Ammo makes far too many critical mistakes as a virtual reality title, mistakes that even launch games managed to avoid. I spent more time fighting with the systems and mechanics than I did actually playing the game, but anytime I did get a fleeting moment of play, it wasn't worth the effort expended to get there. While the blocky Minecraft styling may have been an interesting novelty if the gameplay weren't so broken, uninteresting and unoptimized gameplay make the visual style seem more cheap than anything else. If you want an example of how to endlessly frustrate a VR player, go ahead and play Out of Ammo, but if you're interested in user friendly and entertaining VR experiences, Out of Ammo never even starts out with any ammo.
The Inpatient is one of PSVR's best. It's a shining example of presence and engagement. The visuals impress and it uses a ton of clever tricks to fully immerse the player in the experience of living out Blackwood Sanatorium's final days, making me feel like I was actually there. There are fun Easter eggs for those who have played Until Dawn, but The Inpatient can still be enjoyed without. The overall plot does fall flat in the final act as the scares give way to a less-than-exciting conclusion, but the branching possibilities means that even after two playthroughs, untold stories of the sanatorium still await me.
For those who love hyper-detailed simulators, Kerbal Space Program has that in spades, and for that alone, Kerbal Space Program deserves high marks.
Beholder is an interesting management sim with brilliant morally ambiguous themes taking center stage, however it suffers from imbalanced execution.
Cut Little Red Lie's length in half and dial up the subtlety in the plot, and I think it really could have been a great black mirror into the world today. What it did do was instill a sense that I am better than either of these people that I was forced to spend time with. Little Red Lie is not a good game. There's hardly what one would call a “game” here at all, but the experience could prove to be valuable, if you can stomach rampant pessimism and negativity. I'm having a very hard time parsing exactly how I feel about Little Red Lie. As a game, it's imbalanced, awkward, and boring. I don't think I can recommend it to anyone, but I might have been glad to have gone through it? It's certainly an experience I will never forget, but then again, so was getting run over by a car.
Accounting+ is a novelty, brilliant to experience, but hard to recommend. I was highly entertained by my time with Accounting+, but after this review, I am thoroughly done with it. Repeated playthroughs don't really offer anything new on the gameplay front, and the dialog becomes less funny on repetition. There's also the glaring issue that I still haven't learned anything about accounting. I got yelled at by a guy in a tree. I killed a fat king. I got tried for murder after dying from summoning Satan. I became the Leonardo DiCaprio of VR (GET IT?!? I MADE AN INCEPTION JOKE!), but I never learned a single thing about accounting.
I like the idea of Gang Beasts on paper. Hell, I even like Gang Beasts when I see other players play. The jelly physics of up to eight players smashing into one another and trying to toss each other over the edge is great fun in theory, but becomes more of a frustrating chore and test of patience in practice. If there was a better training ground to at least get a handle on the bizarre physics and controls, that would go a long way to making the game more accessible to newcomers. Even if they had that, Boneloaf needs to get a handle on their connection issues before Gang Beasts can really start to step into its stride and potential as a hilarious party game.
That's exactly what Shooty Fruity is. It's an exciting shooting gallery in virtual reality wearing one of the most bizarre and unique skins of any game that I've seen. It's more fun than it has any right being with its strange premise, but that's part of what makes it shine. It could lean in the direction of providing more information to players for optimum weapon loadouts, and I wish it didn't try to artificially increase play time with ridiculous challenges, ultimately burning itself out. The dichotomy of mundane tasks and taking on the role of gunslinging action hero against waves of mutant fruit is an intriguing premise. Along with the satisfyingly juicy explosions that come from blasting them apart with shotguns, revolvers, and SMGs, these features help Shooty Fruity to be a game that's more gratifying than it has any business being.
Destiny 2 and its expansions are all tough to review for this very reason. I've got some frustrations with Curse of Osiris–mostly with the lackluster campaign and unvaried patrol space—but it has largely pulled me back in to my traditional weekly ritual of completing various milestones in Destiny 2. How long that will last remains to be seen, but the immediate future looks promising.
A Hat in Time is a highly polished throwback that brings classic 64-bit platforming gameplay into the modern era. There are a couple of mechanical oddities, and the opening hours of the game could do a better job at telegraphing where to go or when new abilities are required, though by the time my Platinum trophy popped, I was enamored. Hat Girl may not go down in history as an iconic character, and the story is nonsensical, but often it's this very bizarre nature that lends this cap much of its credence. A Hat in Time is delightfully charming and always manages to take a left turn, surprising and challenging even a storied gamer like myself.
It's hard to reconcile the great game that is Doom VFR with the clumsy Move controls that are hardly player friendly. If you have an Aim controller, that's the best way to play, but I would have liked for the Moves to have been a viable option. Doom VFR highlights that allowing for player customization of control and comfort is imperative to making VR games accessible and more mainstream. Despite this, Bethesda has brought yet another title that proves virtual reality support is alive and well with impressive and full-featured titles that few thought would be possible at the outset of the platform. At the end of the blood soaked and demon infested day, Doom VFR is Doom in virtual fucking reality, and there's not much more you can ask for.
Every time I put on the VR headset, I'm reminded of just how incredible virtual reality is. A similar awe catches hold of me with games like Skyrim. It's still hard to comprehend that Skyrim, a game from 2011 not originally designed for virtual reality, is now PlayStation VR's killer app. Marrying these two ideas seemed like an impossible feat, but Bethesda pulled it off. Skyrim VR is anything but a simple port to virtual reality. It is lovingly crafted with care and attention to make one of the biggest and most memorable VR experiences since the platform first launched. Skyrim VR isn't just a must-experience for PSVR owners; it's a reason to buy the headset.
Defiant Development is a Dungeon Master getting better at their craft, taking us through a series of campaign filled with new mysteries, twists, turns, and mechanics. Not content with jut polishing up the formula of the original game, Hand of Fate 2 takes a step forward and defines what a sequel should be. Improvements abound, challenges await, and every single failure begets the promise of a bigger success, if you'd chance your fate in the cards.
VR experiences don't need to be complex or lengthy, but the depth of League of War: VR Arena is virtually non-existent. It tries to espouse a sense of strategy, but the execution is so simplistic that it becomes all too easy to win (or sometimes lose) completely by accident by spamming the field with units. League of War is literally just a game of spawning units onto a bland tabletop battlefield. It's designed well and the VR works, but more than a year on from the PSVR launch, a game needs to do something more than simply work to impress as a virtual reality experience.
The Star Wars authenticity can be felt throughout, but blatantly predatory microtransactions are a blight, force choking the life out of what is otherwise one of my favorite games this year.
There's a really fun time management cooking game here, but without environment changes, kitchen upgrades, or additional toppings, Dead Hungry's creative and frenetic gameplay quickly grows as stale as the flesh of those it seeks to feed. It seems like it would have been easy to add some kind of economy and progression system to the game, in addition to communicating what the actual requirements are, but instead we're left with the value meal. The VR integration is fantastic, and the idea is sound, but the execution of this hectic time management experience hits the bare minimum requirements, rather than creating a compelling progression that begs for repeat play.
Stifled is an exercise in taking a great idea and applying it to a worn out genre. The indie horror tropes bleed through, despite a unique initial premise. Mumbling under my breath to be able to see barely plays into the narrative, and no scare ever got me to scream out loud, so it didn't quite have the intended effect, seeming more like a gimmick by the end. The tired horror ideas became quickly obvious when VR and mic audio are not used. Gimmicks are the only legs that Stifled has to stand on, and when the novelty of them wears out, there's only a tried and dull horror experience underneath.