Now Playing: Hubris (VR)

Hubris is a VR sci-fi action game in which you play as a recruit of the ‘Order of Objectivity’ on a mission to locate the mysterious (and missing) Agent Cyana on a hostile alien world. Quite what the ‘OOO’ is or does isn’t entirely clear. In fact, from a story point of view, nothing is entirely clear.

Are the OOR the good guys or the bad guys? They do seem to wear a lot of black and give off Star Wars Imperial vibes. There’s another faction in the game that seems to be at war with them – I assume, given they keep trying to kill you. When you do locate Agent Cyana she seems to have special powers . . . which I think are related to the unique resource mined on the planet?

And her plan is to activate a planetary terraformer to do . . . something. You do learn what the something is but then you wonder if that really was the entire point of her mission. You’re accompanied on your adventure by Lucia, a pilot who talks to you via a drone. You’ll also meet the aforementioned Cyana (who doesn’t talk a whole lot) and a guy named Wack (who talks way too much).

I’m not going to say the story or character stuff is bad – it’s not. It’s . . . fine. I think the problem I have with it is: it’s not dull enough to make me not care. Rather, it’s decent enough to make me wish it was a lot better. And in a way, that kind of applies to the game as a whole.

Hubris is visually impressive, arguably one of the most visually impressive VR games you can play. And it’s undeniably ambitious – pushing hard on visuals, action, voice acting, platforming, swimming (more on that later) alien creatures, explosive shoot outs, upgradable weapons and even a (kind of bad, sadly) vehicle section.

I really do admire it for that. For what was likely a small team with a limited budget, they really wanted to deliver as close to a ‘AAA’ VR experience as possible. And I’d say they weren’t far off succeeding. The problem Hubris has is that nearly every aspect of it just doesn’t quite hit the mark.

The platforming is a little too janky – I actually died a few times glitching through the scenery when trying to climb or jump. The in-game item menu is neat visually (it projects from your wrist) but awkward to use. The shooting is fun enough, but there’s no real feedback to when you take a hit, so you have to continually check your health level to find out if you’ve taken damage.

There were times an enemy was behind me, shooting me out of my field of view, and I wasn’t even aware of it until I noticed my health was going down. And enemy AI is kind of terrible. They mostly just run at you. Sometimes they do take cover. Sometimes they just stare at a wall.

The swimming is . . . the swimming nearly made me want to quit the game at one point because I absolutely hated the swimming controls that require you to physically swing your arms. I found it slow, inaccurate and tiring. The enemy selection isn’t bad for the game length (about 6 hours on Normal difficulty) but there’s nothing particularly exciting here – you get alien squids, bugs, drones, homing mines, guy with gun and bigger guy with bigger gun.

The vehicle section is a nice surprise towards the end of the game but it also handles like ass. The voice acting is fine but . . . stilted, to say the least. You have a single weapon you can upgrade and switch between three modes – pistol, shotgun and a rapid fire ‘burstgun’ although the shotgun is pretty much useless.

Despite all the little (and big – swimming!) irritations, I can’t say I didn’t have a fun time playing through Hubris. Because there is a good game here – a potentially great game, in fact. It’s just a shame that it just falls short in so many areas. Like I said – it’s ambitious, and I admire it for that. And I’d love to play a more refined, more focused, more polished and considered sequel. I do feel there’s a lot of untapped potential here. If you see it on sale, be sure to give it a spin.

6/10

REPLACED (Demo)

REPLACED is a 2.5D cinematic action platformer set in an alternative 1980s cyberpunk style world. You play as R.E.A.C.H or just ‘Reach’, an artificial intelligence inhabiting a human body on a mission to escape and / or take down the sinister Phoenix Corporation that created you.

The demo was only about twenty minutes long and rather light on narrative, hence me somewhat lifting the Steam store page description. I can’t remember exactly when I first saw REPLACED – it must have been during a summer game show because I added it to my Steam Wishlist way back in June 2021. I’d honestly kind of forgotten about it, but then this demo suddenly appeared.

As I said, it’s only about twenty minutes but it does give you a sense of how REPLACED plays. You can run, jump and climb to progress your way through some very striking pixel art environments. This is a game going for a very ‘cinematic’ vibe through its visuals and I’d say it achieves its goal.

The demo is clearly from an early area of the game designed to serve as a tutorial with a few simple platform puzzles to ease you in and several small combat segments. Combat operates like a 2D version of the Batman Arkham games, with an alert icon appearing over an enemy about to attack giving you a chance to block and counter. Yellow alerts mean it’s safe to do so, Red alerts mean you need to dodge. Simple, but effective.

You have a basic attack and a gun that charges over time to perform stylish one shot counters. I don’t know if the game will introduce more weapons or different types of counters or attacks, but the basic foundation of the combat system is solid.

I think the most important thing I can say about this demo is that it left me wanting more. I love the gritty, moody look of it, the combat – though rather basic and easy – was still fun, and there’s an appropriating pounding synth-driven soundtrack pushing you on.

Will the game turn out to be more style than substance? Perhaps. I think it will likely live and die on its narrative aspects rather than its gameplay. The world. The characters. The story. If it can nail those, then we might have something pretty special.

Now Playing: No, I’m not a Human

I first played No, I’m not a Human as a demo during a Steam Next Fest last year, attracted to the unique visual style and intriguing concept. The idea is that something has gone ‘wrong’ with the sun, forcing everyone to stay indoors during the day. And at the same time, mysterious ‘Visitors’ have begun to appear, clawing their way out from beneath the ground.

The Visitors are violent and dangerous, seemingly intent purely on killing. They can mimic humans and attempt to persuade you – a hermit living in a small home on the outskirts of a town – to let them in. Every night you’ll hear knocks at your door and you’ll have to decide to let whoever is outside in or not.

You might think – well, why let anyone in at all? But there’s a scripted Visitor who appears regularly across the 13 days and nights of the game and will immediately enter and kill you if you’re alone. In fact, there’s a fair number of scripted interactions within the game. Whilst many of the characters you encounter are randomised, some are always scheduled to appear on exactly the same nights. Some are always human and some are always Visitors.

Most though, as I said, are randomised, so you can never be quite sure who will show up and who will be a Visitor or not. Just because one character was human in one playthrough, doesn’t mean they will be in the next. As you progress you’ll learn different ways to test your new house guests and if you suspect any of them are a Visitor you can immediately pull out a gun and blow them to pieces. But you won’t know for sure until you pull the trigger.

If they’re a Visitor, the game will let you know with a jump-scare style flash. If you made a mistake and they’re human, they just die. In some ways, I feel like it would be more interesting if you didn’t know for sure because at its heart, this is a game about paranoia. It’s a bit like ‘The Thing’ in which you begin to suspect everyone – even yourself.

You have limited ‘energy’ each day so you might not be able to test everyone to your satisfaction, although there are ways to boost and increase this. Visitors will target and kill humans in your home, increasing that sense of paranoia when you think you’ve tested everyone and are sure they’re all human, only to wake up and find someone dead.

Because those tests aren’t always totally accurate and that also plays into the sense of paranoia but also the idea of being manipulated by media and the Government, which is represented by FEMA who send a regular operative to your door to take people away for ‘testing’ and who broadcast televised updates regarding Visitor ‘signs’.

Neighbour turns on neighbour. Society breaks down. Innocent people die. The game doesn’t lean as hard into these angles as I’d like. As I said in my post on the demo, I feel like the game is more interesting in concept than in execution but nevertheless, it remains an engaging and intriguing and certainly a unique experience.

You can ‘complete’ No, I’m not a Human in about an hour or so, maybe shorter if you get killed early on but the game is designed for multiple runs so you can meet and explore the fairly large cast of weird characters who show up at your door. There are also multiple endings to unlock based on your actions and choices throughout the game.

Some are rather convoluted to say the least. Some are downright bizarre and silly. But given you can run through the game so quickly, you don’t mind doing so in order to see all the weird and wonderful outcomes it has to offer.

Visually the game has a striking and unique style both for environments and characters. There’s no VA, it’s all text based but it looks and sounds good. I’m still working my way through the game, exploring different options to see how things play out and I’m enjoying my time doing so. It’s a game I’d recommend if you’re looking for something a little out of the ordinary.

7/10

Marathon (BETA)

I can’t say I’m particularly interested in ‘extraction shooters’ and I wasn’t expecting Marathon to change that. But when it had an open beta recently (or ‘Server Slam’ as they called it) I figured it was worth a punt. You play as a ‘Runner’ who travels to the world of Tau Ceti IV to scavenge from the ruins of a derelict colony.

You can play solo (how I played) or with two friends. You choose your ‘shell’ which is essentially your class, each of which has a distinct visual style and a couple of unique special abilities. You then equip your gear and load into the map. Your goal is to loot what you can, complete any contracts you can and then extract from the map alive. If you die, you lose everything you’re carrying.

It’s not a gameplay loop I find particularly exciting and as I said, I didn’t expect Marathon to change that. I played the beta for about an hour and a half, completing several ‘runs’ and successfully extracting alive all but once. I killed a couple of other players I encountered – more on that later – but only died on a single run when I ran out of ammo fighting several robots.

The colony isn’t deserted but full of ‘UESC’ security droids who happily shoot on sight. Engaging them is risky for two reasons – one, it might alert other players to your location and two, it consumes your resources (ammo, health and shields) that might be needed if you encounter said other players.

Although if you do, given that the ‘shells’ themselves kind of look like robots, the first time I killed a player I just thought it was another NPC! I actually felt a little bad about it because I’m not sure they were hostile! The same thing happened with the second, who shot at me first and I assumed it was another security bot. I killed them, took their stuff and extracted. I didn’t feel so bad about that one!

The stuff you collect ranges from gear (weapons, ammo, equipment) to materials needed to trade for items, to currency, to junk that you can sell for more currency. You’ll likely have to spend some time figuring out what each category of item is, how valuable it is, and if it’s worth picking up – because your inventory space is limited, so you won’t be able to keep everything you find.

You have an active inventory that you take into the map with you and a ‘vault’ where you can store whatever you want to keep / are too afraid to lose. Aside from the simple loop of enter, loot and extract, there are ‘contracts’ to accept from the different factions vying for power on Tau Ceti IV. These are somewhat randomised missions along the lines of ‘kill X amount of enemies’ or ‘scan X location’.

There is a ‘story’ of sorts, told via these contracts and within the world itself through item descriptions and the environment. Does it really matter though? Eh, probably not! Visually, I really like the way Marathon looks. I like the style and the architecture but I also feel like it’s a potential weakness for the game going forward.

Even with my limited time with Marathon, every location on the map seemed to blur together. No area felt unique. It felt like I was traversing the same rooms, hallways and walkways no matter where I went and even though I like the way the game looked, I didn’t see the visual variety I’d need to keep me engaged. The enemies also all look very similar – at least the ones I encountered did.

And the UI? The UI is an absolute nightmare. I got the hang of using it fairly quickly, but none of it felt intuitive. It always felt like I was fighting against it. It’s just so . . . busy and muddled. When you have a full backpack of items on a run it looks like a convoluted mess of different colours and weird icons, a lot of which all look the same. The menu system is also pretty terrible.

I don’t see Marathon flopping at release the way other live service games have recently but it’s also hard to see how the long term player engagement will pan out. Even though Marathon isn’t my thing, there’s clearly a solid enough game here for fans of the genre, but I’m not sure there’s enough variety or hook here to keep them coming back. Not yet, at least. I’m curious to see how this one does. I won’t be picking it up, but I never expected to.