Boneworks: First Impressions (VR)

I hate to say it, but I’m kind of disappointed by what I’ve played of Boneworks. I’m about 4 hours into the game, and I can’t honestly say I’m enjoying it very much. I could probably stop playing it today and I really wouldn’t care. But I won’t. I’ll keep going, keep playing in the hope that the game will improve.

Boneworks is an interesting mixture of puzzle platforming and combat. You play as Arthur Ford, who must enter the virtual city of MythOS to . . . reset the system . . . or something? I don’t really know and I’m not sure it really matters. Your goal is to simply progress through each level from point A to B, solving physics based puzzles and fighting holographic enemies.

In terms of story, style and tone, Boneworks is clearly trying to be evocative of Half-Life – crowbars and (robotic) headcrabs – and Portal – quirky humour (MELONS!) and scrawled warnings /clues on the walls of each level. And that’s fine, even if it’s not entirely original. The problem Boneworks has isn’t really with its style or story. It’s, well, pretty much everything else.

Boneworks has a lengthy tutorial level that talks about ‘advanced VR’ concepts, but there’s really nothing that ‘advanced’ about anything that it’s doing. Free locomotion, physics based combat, a virtual body and climbing mechanics – I’ve seen these done in other VR games and frankly, I’ve seen them all done better. And I guess that’s the heart of the problem here – it’s not as if these things are done badly in Boneworks – they’ve just been done better in other games.

Melee combat, for example, is incredibly fiddly. Simply holding your weapon at the angle or in the kind of grip you want can be a challenge. It should be noted that I’m playing Boneworks using VIVE wands, and not the Index controllers the game was obviously designed for. Nevertheless, I don’t have any issue playing Blade & Sorcery with my VIVE controllers and I don’t know why the developers of Boneworks didn’t utilise a similar system of weapon grip / control as that game.

And then we have ranged combat involving various guns, but aiming with these guns can be (literally) hit and miss. The gun models, animations, sound and feedback from each weapon simply isn’t as good as say, Pavlov VR.

The physics of Boneworks, which is such an integral part of the design, can also be pretty wonky. I really don’t know why they felt that nearly every object in every level needed to be physics based. It’s not nearly as impressive as the developers seem to think it is. For example, you might walk over to a desk to pick up an object upon it, but as soon as your virtual body touches the desk, the whole bloody thing flips over like you’ve crashed into it. Or, even more annoying, the dodgy interaction ‘aim’ results in you grabbing the entire desk and not the object you wanted to.

The challenge for me in Boneworks, at least so far, hasn’t been the puzzles or the rather brain-dead enemies – it’s been the wonky physics and awkward controls. I feel like I’m continually fighting against the game just to do the most simple things like picking up an item or holding an axe in the right direction.

During the first big puzzle in the game, I thought I’d figured out the solution, but when I tried to push a particular object, it didn’t work. After much frustration, I eventually realised that my solution was correct, but I had to move the object by pulling … or rather awkwardly dragging the object behind me, because pushing simply refused to work.

Everything in Boneworks just feels a little rough, awkward and wonky. It’s not that great visually – the environments are big, but pretty empty and lifeless. The music is kind of irritating. The VA isn’t very good and the audio quality is strangely poor. The combat isn’t very satisfying. The puzzles aren’t that challenging in terms of design.

The only real challenge I’ve faced in Boneworks is fighting against the game itself to simply walk, run or climb in a precise way – without my limbs getting stuck or glitching through objects. It’s been pretty frustrating to play but, I’ll keep going. I’m hoping it’ll get better.