As much as What the Golf? Had very little to do with Golf (thankfully), What the Bat? has very little to do with Baseball – or any other sport involving a bat for that matter.

A Batter Tomorrow

The game’s protagonist has baseball bats for hands. The game takes you through their life in a series of quick-fire levels. These see you do everything from learning to brush your teeth to playing fetch with your dog and working a till at your day job with these unusual appendages.

There’s much here similar to Job Simulator, not least because you are physically static and the elements of each mini-game are presented in proximity.

There are similarities, too, to Tentacular, as the game’s “physics” are a bit intentionally wonky and unrealistic.

For similar reasons, the game also brings a liberal helping of aim-assist to bear on proceedings. This keeps the player from struggling with trying to get exactly the right angle and power every time they swing their bat hands at a target.

Bat? Stick? Crazy!

The game’s music is generally upbeat and bouncy to match the silly, colourful, cartoon art style, but it comes with a lovely gimmick. When you look at your in-game imaginary friend, who happens to be a big blue elephant, the music changes tone to incorporate more base with a tuba-esque sound. This is the kind of detail that belies the game’s simple presentation to reveal a nicely polished product.

Another nice surprise is the game’s absurd, borderline surreal, sense of humour. Each mini-game starts with a simple task but then iterates it in bizarre and consistently funny ways.

As an example, an early level has you ten-pin bowling which, as you’d imagine, starts with you batting a bowling ball down a lane to knock over skittles. But once that is complete, the next game has rubber skittles, another has a U-shaped lane, and still, another has you holding the skittles as your elephant friend shoots the balls at you.

This approach does a great job of keeping the gameplay fresh and surprising throughout.

Bigger isn’t always Batter!

What the Bat? Has a very specific and deliberate style and tone, and it’s impossible to ignore that some might find this off-putting. There’s no deep story here, no groundbreaking visuals, nor a sweeping cinematic score.

What the Bat? Is coming from a different place with a different intention to those you see from ‘AAA’ games, but in the same way you wouldn’t directly compare Nintendo’s Warioware series to their Zelda games, nor should What the Bat? Be compared to those more cinematic and mainstream products.

Batting for the bleachers?

What the Bat? Is not a room-scale game, and at the other end of the scale, you wouldn’t get the best out of it playing seated. However, it does require a little more space than some standing experiences, as I discovered when I knocked my real-world monitor off my desk while trying to smash an in-game TV!

There’s no getting away from the fact that What the Bat? is a ‘small’ game in every way. There are a hundred levels that will take you 4 hours or so to beat, and even the file size is just half a gig. But it very much proves the old cliché that ‘good things come in small packages’.

The quick-fire style and ridiculous humour won’t be for everybody, but if you’ve previously enjoyed Job Simulator or any of the Warioware games, then you can probably add half a point or more to the score.

So, will Kartoffl entice you to chip away at its puzzles? Or will they have you boiling with rage?

Chip off the old block

Like most games of its kind, Kartoffl places its levels into the VR space as a kind of floating island and allows the player to manipulate them through interactions with the controllers.

You can zoom in and out and move around in all directions as you’d imagine. Despite this being a relatively sedate experience, the developers have provided fully featured comfort options for those of a particularly sensitive disposition.

As you start each level, a puzzle is laid out before you. There’s a starting point, a finish point, and an incomplete pathway between. The player’s task is to guide a set number (not always 100%) of the little potato people, that the game calls Spuds, from start to finish by adding elements to the scene that will allow them to safely navigate the route.

It starts simply: Place a launch pad to jump a gap. insert a corner piece so the potato folk don’t tumble to their doormat at a turn, or simply place a bridge over a gap.

As you would expect, things quickly get more complicated. By the time your level number is in the high teens, you’ll be presented with start and finish points with nothing in between and not enough pieces to traverse the gap – and this is where the game comes into its own.

With limited resources available, and increasingly large or trap-laden levels to guide your Spuds through, recycling of elements becomes essential and adds a welcome urgency to a game where there is no time limit or other overt threat.

Pota-tonally consistent

The blocks that comprise most levels and other elements like trees and stone monoliths are rendered in a bright, blocky, playful style that is mirrored in the upbeat music and cartoonish sound effects.

It would be easy to dismiss these audiovisual design choices as basic or a bit unadventurous, and there’s nothing ground-breaking or exciting here. But Kartoffl brings it all to bear with a rather nice central theme of natural materials – and the Spuds themselves, with their helicopter-leaf hair and cheerful expressions, are completely adorable.

Half-baked?

One small frustration is that with Spuds wandering in all directions and gadgets and gizmos pinging them around the levels, the rules on what constitutes a Spud-on-Spud collision are disappointingly inconsistent.

Other death states are very well-defined: Fall more than two block heights, and it’s mashed potato, spring a potato into a wall or the propeller on the underside of a hovering block: Mashed potato, Bump two Spuds into each other, and it’s mashed potato… Sometimes… and other times they clip through each other harmlessly.

In a game that encourages experimentation and creative problem-solving, it’s not a huge deal – it just feels out of keeping with an otherwise tightly delivered experience.

A crisp challenge

Kartoffl offers 60 levels, with secondary objectives of collecting three stars and guiding every potato to safety in each. I cracked through the first 20 with all potatoes and stars in about an hour, but the challenge steepens at that point and the playtime, not to mention the satisfaction, increases along with it. Getting every stage ticked off with three stars is likely to take 4-6 hours, depending on your skill and stubbornness with those additional goals.

Thankfully, this relatively small amount of content is reflected in the relatively small price tag of $14.99

#Hash-tag: Jack-Pot?

While it’s tempting to assess Kartoffl alongside that ‘other’ game, any amount of time spent with the adorable Spuds exposes this as a lazy comparison that misrepresents the game that developers, Breach, have put together.

Kartoffl’s ace card is that it encourages a creative approach to solving its puzzles.

From only a short way through its 60 levels, there ceases to be a single solution to hunt for. Stages open up and offer an almost infinite number of ways to guide your potato-headed gang to the goal, with the only constraint being how quickly you can move the elements from one point in the stage to another.

Fortunately, the controls are tight, responsive, and simple enough to facilitate this, empowering the player with the tools required to be as inventive or direct as they like with their solutions.

There’s no ignoring that this is a slight offering, with a style and execution that could, uncharitably, compared to something you’d find on the store of your mobile device, but this would be to do Kartoffl a huge disservice.

In VR, Kartoffl benefits hugely from the ability to fully manipulate the game’s elements within the space. More importantly, the game is enjoyable and challenging from the start and is hugely addictive – as demonstrated by it triggering the coveted ‘Low Battery’ accolade on my very first play.

Dangling the bait

Jupiter & Mars puts you in control of a pair of Dolphins in a post-apocalyptic undersea world still recovering from the damage wrought by a now-extinct mankind. From the VR staple first-person perspective, with head tracking providing directional control, you play as Neptune, a dolphin who can emit a sonic burst for environmental interaction and a sonar pulse to help locate objects and objectives.

Nearby swims Jupiter, who has the power to headbutt stuff really hard. He undertakes this duty at your behest to open pathways, destroy rocks, and open clamshells wherein a pointless collectable might lie.

Gameplay is designed to be relaxing, exploratory, and serene and therefore the stakes are usually low and the pace sedate.

You chirp out a sonar to find an objective, swim to it, and complete the task that is often given to you by a fellow sea creature.

Rinse and repeat.

Collectables litter the environment and there are occasionally squids to – I think – eat, but as far as structure goes, it’s so far – so Ecco…

Wail song

It’s when you shine the light of the Dreamcast entry of the Ecco series on Jupiter & Mars that it really starts to fall apart.

Ecco, and many other games from that turn of the century era, proved that you don’t need 4 billion polygons to be a great-looking game.

Art design trumps technological restrictions every time – but despite all the creatures in this marine world having evolved bright patterns in various neon shades, the world remains murky thanks to jagged, low-resolution textures, simplistic design, and endless clipping through the environment.

While the sound effects are similarly rudimentary, the audio does fare slightly better on the musical front, with a small selection of tunes that change as you progress further into the game and deeper into the sea. Unfortunately, even these compositions have rather a basic feel and rarely provide the atmosphere they appear to be striving for.

Oh that blowfish blow

The more fundamental issues with this game come from a wide variety of sources, but front and centre is the complete lack of variation of pace.

While Jupiter darts around freely until you call him to dash off and headbutt a rock, clam, or wall, Neptune, under your control, moves as if she’s suffering from a bad case of fin-rot. Her sub-sea-cucumber pace makes the game both a literal and a figurative slog.

To come back to the Ecco comparison, it was a game criticised at the time for not always making clear where the next objective was. Jupiter & Mars attempts to solve this with the sonar, a gimmick that immediately reveals everything with which you can interact (essentially, headbutt or shout at) in the immediate vicinity.

This might sound like a good idea, but it instantly robs the game of the ‘explorative’ nature that could have both been its biggest asset and added considerably to the 4 or so hours of game time on offer.

This is an 11-quid game, though, so that’s not an offensively small amount of content for the money – and to be fair it does feel like it lasts a lot longer than that… just, not in a good way.

A load of Pollocks

Jupiter & Mars can’t shake the spectre of a game that came out over 20 years ago. Everything about it is too similar to Ecco: Defender of the Future to dodge comparison.

Sega’s Dreamcast effort may not have been in VR, but it was faster, better looking, better sounding, and – ultimately – a lot more fun to play.

Saving the marine world from the damage wrought by man is an admiral set-up for a game, but when all it actually amounts to is controlling the world’s slowest dolphins as you wander about an undersea world dulled by poor textures from a bad PS1 emulator, headbutting rocks for some reason, and accompanied by music made by someone who once heard half of an Enya album…then all the good intentions in the world can’t save it.

I haven’t played their earlier titles, but a little research has shown that they are almost universally well-regarded, albeit in what are perhaps niche markets.

But regardless of the quality of Akash or 2MD, it’s hard to deny that it’s a bit of a leap from visual novel to American Football to arcade driving action – so let’s get stuck in and see if Truant Pixel can pull it off.

On your bike

You start Runner in the alleyway of a neon daubed future cityscape with a tarp-covered motorbike in front of you and a computer terminal to your right. On the terminal, your contact/handler “Vice” tells you that you need to escape the city, and the only way of doing so is by taking on the attack drones of the sinister Caldera Corporation head-on through the city’s main motorway network.

It’s worth noting here that there is a prologue of sorts called <PREAMBLE> available for Runner. This free interactive story is available to download on iOS, Android, and PC and although it’s not necessary to have experienced it before playing Runner, it does set up the world and characters rather well. There is some rather heavy-handed noir-ish writing, but nevertheless, I would definitely recommend giving it a look.

However much (or little) lore you choose to consume beforehand, the game proper starts when you grab a couple of guns, hop onto your motorcycle, and tear off into the perpetual night.

You travel along the 4-lane road automatically, with the game taking care of corners for you, but you do need to use either thumbstick to move left or right across the tarmac, and to accelerate and slow down.

In an early prelude to the deceptive complexity on offer, your weapons are docked into the console of the bike when not in use and serve as steering controls. In the opening levels, dual wield is not possible so when one hand is taking care of the shooting, the other is controlling the bike. Every time you expend a charge of ammo you have to switch hands. It takes some getting used to but is very satisfying when it clicks.

Layered onto this is a slew of other combat options. There’s a front-mounted cannon on your bike for which power-ups are available in the time-honoured collect-an-icon fashion. Upgrades are also available for your sidearms and can be equipped individually. There’s a laser-sabre for deflecting incoming enemy fire, missiles with lock-on capabilities, magnetic grenades, and a chargeable special attack called Flux… and this is just the level one basics.

Upgrades to all these, and to your bike itself, are also provided between each of the game’s 7 levels and help to provide a sense of progression.

The levels are distinguished by small changes to the palette, roadside architecture, evolution of the in-game enemies and, at the end of each, increasingly spectacular boss battles.

With drones high above you, and enemies constantly dropping behind or streaming ahead, Runner does an excellent job of wrapping its world around you in the VR space.

With this in mind Truant Pixel have wisely included some very effective comfort options for Bike Lean and VR Vignette, each with an assignable value from 1 to 10 so you can find your own sweet spot.

Under the influence

It doesn’t take an anime or sci-fi aficionado to pick up the various inspirations for Runner’s visual design and tone. In the depiction of the city and all of the various motorbikes you ride in the game, the influence of Katsuhiro Otomo’s masterpiece ‘Akira’ are front and centre. A broader aesthetic of nineties anime is used for cutscenes and story sections, with the character art, in particular, being a beautiful recreation of Japanese animation from that era, while the fully voiced dialogue echoes the gloomy future-noir of Blade Runner.

As you might expect, the art style leans towards the popular cell-shaded low polygon end of things and carries it off with no little panache. There’s a dash of Atari’s S.T.U.N. Runner in some of the vehicle designs and I was often put in mind of Playstation cult classic horizontal shooter Einhander, particularly in the audio design, where police sirens constantly blare and a voice over a loudhailer occasionally breaks through the explosions and gunfire to become almost lyrical alongside a soundtrack that touches on the genres of electro, synth wave, and Industrial dance at various points during the action. 

Police procedural

As much as Runner is a very tight and linear experience, procedural generation has been used to add variety along the way – but it’s not entirely successful.

These random systems are often applied to a type of obstruction that crosses the whole road at various places. The exact style of these changes for different stages, but each is basically a barrier in the road with a switch above it that must be shot to allow safe passage.

Problems occur when the procedural generation places the switch section inside a bridge, wall or tunnel artefact, making the target impossible to hit and the obstacle impossible to pass without damage. This isn’t a common occurrence, it happened only a handful of times in my many, many, game runs, but it is doubtless an area that could use a little polish.

Another niggle that may be more down to personal taste was the death sequence. Whenever your run is unceremoniously ended – and that will happen a lot – the same sequence plays: Everything stops, and a whiteout anime-style explosion envelops the screen.

It’s definitely in keeping with the rest of the game, but I would have preferred something a little more dynamic, or at least relative to the cause 

of death.

Re-run for your life

If I were to tell you that Runner could be finished in 90 minutes you might raise a justifiable eyebrow. But, while it’s true that this is possible, the amount of practice and play time required to do so makes a mockery of any lack of content fears.

Runner is designed to be played multiple times, and its difficulty level is such that after my first 90 minutes of play I’d only just encountered the opening level’s boss.

There are also unlockables and achievements to discover, with nuances of the story that are unlikely to be seen in a single play. All these factors combine to easily over 10 hours of content for players who want to see it all – and that’s a very decent quantity of bang for your fifteen bucks.

Arcade Perfect?

What Runner does brilliantly is take all the elements of classic arcade games and bring them to VR in a way that many others have failed to achieve.

Whether it’s old-fashioned power-up icons, screen-clearing special weapons, giant enemies with glowing weak spots, or riotous sound design; it’s all brought thumping and wailing up to date in a game that oozes style and energy, and is delivered with an extremely challenging, but hugely addictive gameplay loop.

The feeling you get from taking on the constant barrage of enemies with the huge and varied arsenal at hand while weaving through traffic and dodging incoming fire is up there with the most visceral experiences I’ve had in VR.

Runner is a cacophony of high-octane entertainment from the very first moment to the very last. If the straightforward thrills of arcade-style experiences aren’t your thing, then I doubt this will be the game to win you over. But for everyone else, this is a good old-fashioned, all-out, gun-toting, anime-action movie of a game that shouldn’t be missed.

No one will be calling Runner ‘the future of VR’ any time soon, but it’s definitely the future of my Quest 2 for a good while yet.

Originally released on PC in 2019 with console ports following a year later, it’s been a long road to the Quest for this stealthy crime-em-up, but has it been worth the wait?

The Asphalt Bungle

Thief Simulator VR starts with a brief tutorial to help you get to grips with the basics of gameplay and allow the player to adjust other settings to their preference.  

Controls are set to smooth motion by default, but other options are available to suit your comfort needs.

During the training mission, you’re introduced to the concept of breaking into houses to pick up objects and stow them in your backpack or, more often than not, drop them on the floor behind you.

There are other instances, like grabbing a window ledge to climb through or adding and removing items from your tool belt, where the implementation in VR is a bit flakey, but the concept of reaching over your shoulder to drop something in your swag bag is completely broken and a constant frustration. 

Following the simple intro, you’re thrown into the impressively grimey life of a petty criminal. 

Job one is a rudimentary brute force entry and burglary of an empty house. But it’s not long before your handler, Vinnie, is on the phone with a steady stream of increasingly complex tasks; case a joint before entering, don’t be seen by the neighbours, fence the goods, etc., etc.

Executing these tasks forms the bulk of the gameplay, but some variety is offered through the occasional lock-picking mini-game and driving section. 

Once the core gameplay is down, things get more in-depth with new tools and skills to unlock to make your miscreant life a little easier.

Fog Day Afternoon 

Where Thief Simulator on PC and Console was a decent, if unspectacular-looking game, the Quest version doesn’t even deserve to be damned with that same faint praise.

Textures are flat, lighting is basic, the draw distance is the most criminal thing about the whole experience, and the audio is so forgettable that I had to go back and play the game again just so that I could refer to it in this section of the review. In some circumstances, it serves the game well enough. During lock-picking, for example, it adds noticeably to the task’s tactility, and despite Vinnie’s voice actor being lumbered with an incredibly cliche character, he does his best to bring it to life.

Elsewhere the sound just barely offers enough information to get by, and while music wouldn’t align with the ‘realistic’ nature and intent of the game, it would have benefited the atmosphere immensely by offering short incidental pieces at critical moments.

The Usual Upsets

The significant issues with Thief Simulator on the Quest can be summed up with just one word: Jank.

Don’t get me wrong, janky games aren’t always bad, and jank can even add an endearing quality to them. Countless mid-tier games overcome an abundance of roughness around the edges with interesting, original, or just plain fun gameplay – it could even be argued that the PC version of Thief Simulator falls into that category.

Unfortunately, in its translation to VR, the game has accumulated so much additional jank that it becomes a huge barrier to enjoying the core mechanics.

This is perfectly encapsulated in the way that the fun idea of driving between various ib game locations is rendered unplayable by the horrible implementation of the in-car controls.

The Quite Long Good Friday

Despite other shortcomings, the game offers a decent amount of content. If you can get to grips with its idiosyncrasies, you’ll be looking at a good few hours of play for your £15. Although I didn’t enjoy it enough to get to the conclusion myself, it is reported to take most players a good 9 or 10 hours – which is undeniably pretty good value if sheer quantity is your yardstick.

Once Upon a Time in VR

It’s a real shame that here we are in late 2022, and games like Thief Simulator are still abundant not just on Quest but in the eternity of VR.

With prices on the rise and disposable income at a premium, the platform needs a ‘killer app’ more than ever before – and instead, here we are with yet another port from the pre-VR era and, worse still, a port that played better in its original format.

Thief Simulator VR is an OK game if you can look past the jank, and it isn’t the developers‘ fault that so many lacklustre games have preceded it. Nevertheless, I find it incredibly hard to recommend a game so lacking in polish that its regular failings far outweigh its inconsistent qualities.

Wand-ering around

The game is split broadly into two sections. An overworld where you, as the titular newbie Magus, wander around tiny, invisible-walled areas talking to excitable, wide-eyed characters – and the dungeons, where you wander through endless grey corridors filled with identikit baddies, the majority of which look not unlike placeholder assets.

The overworld has nothing that could even broadly be described as ‘gameplay’ that (such as it is) is reserved for the dungeons. Here the player must make their way through a series of near-identical rooms, occasionally battling low-level enemies until they reach the goal where a damage-sponge boss of some description invariably awaits.

The combat system requires plenty of movement; when mastered, the limited number of skills and attacks can be fun to unleash. There’s a shield with a timing-based parry ability that’s pretty satisfying, and this is paired with standard, special, and super-level offensive spells. Of course, this wouldn’t be an RPG without levelling up, and there’s a decent amount to be tinkered with here, albeit tucked away behind some very clunky menus.

Button assignments and gestures are also somewhat lacking in grace, with several attacks tethered to an ill-conceived throwing mechanic and others that are totally unintuitive in the heat of battle. The main attack is point and shoot, which is at least consistent in its execution – something that can’t be said of any other offensive abilities.

Going through the potions

The character and background art in the overworld story elements of RuinsMagus are rendered in a soft, painterly style, never less than charming and often genuinely beautiful. With that said, like much of the game, it feels like something we’ve seen a million times before.

From the cobbled streets to the doe-eyed waifu companion, the game is remorseless in its drive to tick every cliche box on the JRPG done-to-death checklist.

In the dungeons, things are even worse, with every level built from a limited array of grey blocks arranged in such a way as to make it as awkward as possible to move from one point to the next. Enemies, as I’ve mentioned, are so dull that it’s hard to describe them… There’s a flying one, a fast one, a heavy one. They are all, predictably, grey and utterly devoid of anything approaching AI.

For scrying out loud

The tedium sadly extends to the game’s music and sound effects, with instrumental tunes that could have been lifted directly from hundreds of similarly set games over the decades and sound effects that could at best be described as perfunctory.

Voice work is all Japanese with subtitles, which I know will delight a lot of people, but, personally, if I want to read, I’ll grab a book. Repeatedly clicking ‘A’ to rush through overlong and melodramatic exposition is not my idea of a fun videogame.

Lacking i-magic-nation

Fundamentally there’s not a lot ‘wrong’ with RuinsMagus. It’s not broken or offensively bad; it’s just that the entire project is so terminally average. And while there’s a degree of quality in the overworld, it’s impossible not to crawl the dungeons that form the meat of the game and not become overwhelmed by all the literal and figurative greyness.

Just a short spell

Lack of variety is an enemy that the half-decent combat system cannot overcome, and sadly, though the average game-time to completion is reportedly 6-7 hours, I lost interest after just 2.

I know some believe this makes me ill-equipped to review the entirety of the game. But my perspective is that it’s the game’s job to keep me engaged from beginning to end, and should any game fail to do so, then abandoning it unfinished is just as valid a judgement as anything I could write about the final two-thirds of the game.

Spelling it out

With so little competition in this genre, RuinsMagus feels like a missed opportunity. It only needed to be a reasonable amount of fun to garner a massive fanbase in VR. Alas, it fails at clearing even that low bar with an approach so safe, familiar, and unoriginal that it renders itself utterly forgettable.

Budget games from the eighties were £1.99 each, whereas Rogue Ascent retails at a pretty standard £15 (or $19.99 if you’re paying in USD). This is a good chunk less than you might pay for a top tier Quest game, but it’s still a step outside the impulse-purchase territory.

So, rather than taking a blind punt based on screenshots and marketing, let me help you decide whether Rogue Ascent is worth your pocket money.

Kiss Kiss Finger Bang

Rogue Ascent‘s unique selling point is that you can play it without controllers. 

Using the Quest’s Hand Tracking, this rogue-like shooter has you blasting at bad guys by making your fingers into a gun and navigating using various other gestures. You can play with controllers if you prefer, but it seems a little reductive to jump into an experience like this without the central gimmick, so I’ve chosen not to for this review.

That word – ‘gimmick’ – has become unfairly synonymous with pointlessness, and this is both linguistically incorrect and completely unfair. There was a time when stereo sound, analogue thumbsticks, and even video games were all considered ‘gimmicks’. Let’s not forget that many would happily throw VR into that category.

Hand Tracking has the potential for endless possibilities if people are open to giving it a try. It’s exciting when developers attempt to make the technology work with games even though the underlying tech is obviously still a work in progress. On that point, although the Hand Tracking 2.0 update is rolling out currently, it’s worth noting that I’ve yet to receive it – so this review was conducted entirely using the original version.

These caveats aside, this central gameplay gimmick makes for a unique and interesting experience.

The game recognises your finger guns and materialises any equipped weapon in place of the hand. Since there’s no trigger with this setup, your guns automatically fire when aimed at an adversary. While I think there was a missed opportunity to implement voice commands that shoot when you shout Pew! Pew! Pew! into the mic, this autofire work-around is a slick solution. 

Reloading is done by pointing your fingers straight up, causing the in-game weapons to twirl flamboyantly as the ammo is replenished. A shield can be generated by holding both fists up, a scanner can be accessed on the back of your left wrist, and info about weapons can be brought up by looking at their sides for a second.

With no thumbstick, another solution had to be found for movement. Each procedurally generated floor is arranged in a grid with a node at the centre of each square. Reaching out with an open palm covering the node teleports you to it. The same gesture is used to activate switches and pick up objects.

I must admit I’ve lost track of all the various subcategories of the Rogue genre, but I’m pretty sure we’re in ‘Rogue-lite’ territory here as although it won’t be long before you come across some more impressive firepower and pick up enough cash to buy some helpful perks from in-game vending machines (both of which put me in mind of the Borderlands franchise) these are all lost when you die. However, your efforts will permanently level up whichever of the four classes you choose at the outset, making them stronger from the get-go next time around. These classes are impressively varied and serve as a great way to get extra mileage from what is, essentially, the same game structure.

The Android class, for example, has a massive shield and weapons with a large capacity that reload almost instantly. Medics add toxicity to their firepower, leech health from enemies, and can generate a health zone as their ‘special power’. ‘Travellers’ use silenced weapons and are therefore less often set upon by hordes of baddies. As you might imagine, the standard Rogue class sits somewhere in the middle ground of all the others.

Whatever class you choose, your objective is simple: “Ascend. Save your homeworld!”

For better or worse, these 4 words and the opening image of a planet-sized spacecraft attacking the earth are all the story you get.

Vapour-wave goodbye to your eardrums

Rogue Ascent lavishes in the kind of vaporwave aesthetic that has shown up all over the videogame landscape in the past few years. Usually reserved for arcade racers or similar experiences, the bright palette of blues, pinks, and glowing neon is an excellent fit for the game’s broadly cell-shaded and low polygon stylings. Although falling into just a handful of basic types, there are several versions of enemies, and they’re distinguished by effects and colours that make them easily identifiable in a crowded firefight.

There’s a very subtle brilliance to the soundscape created in the game. Each level is preceded by a short elevator ride, complete with lounge jazz muzak until you arrive with a ping and the doors open to near silence. You might pick out some footsteps, the hum of a sentry turret, or the buzz of a nearby hover drone… but step out into the corridor, and it won’t be long until the peace of the elevator is a distant memory. When the action kicks off, Rogue Ascent becomes a beautiful cacophony of laser blasts, sirens, ricochets, and gunfire – all punctuated by the maraca-rattle of your weapons as they reload.  

All the sound effects have more than the usual amount of legwork to do in Rogue Ascent. Without haptics or even the simple physicality of pulling a trigger to provide feedback, it’s down to the game’s audio to pick up the slack – and generally, it does a really great job.

The music that accompanies your efforts is fantastic throughout. It’s a great listen, from that catchy ditty that plays in the lift between levels to the bombastic power-synth tunes spurring you on during the frantic action. The sound really does wonders for the frenetic atmosphere of the game while never drowning out those all-important audio cues.

Everything in the audio, visual, and gameplay package combines into a heady mix. It’s the kind of experience where a quick 5-minute game will have you blinking back to reality an hour later.

It’s a shame then, that due to inconsistencies with the Hand Tracking, you’ll often remove your headset at the end of a session, feeling like that last death really wasn’t your fault.

The tracking of my tears

As much as the graphics and sound are confidently delivered in their style, there’s no hiding that Rogue Ascent has room to improve on the performance and polish front.

The Hand Tracking in Rogue Ascent is successful about 70 per cent of the time, and while it can be improved by more clearly defined actions on the part of the player, there are other problems, such as inconsistency when picking up weapons, or the game incorrectly registering a movement request, that are outside your control and cause regular frustration.

I’m also not sure that the animation is as smooth as possible. This isn’t a framerate issue but rather a choppiness that’s clearly noticeable in the movement of humanoid foes. This could be a design choice, but I don’t think so, as it’s at odds with the rest of the design.

Fail better

The game is currently just one mode. There is a greyed-out option on the menu that promises more, but for now, ‘Ascend’ is all there is to offer.

Furthermore, I can’t tell you how long it takes to ‘ascend’ to the top of whatever you’re ascending because Rogue Ascent constantly kicked my arse back to the ground floor on every occasion in the four or five hours I was playing it. But I should be clear, without meaning to get kinky, that I genuinely enjoyed it and will certainly be going back for more.

Rogueish charm

Rogue Ascent is a scruffy little underdog of a thing. It has a central concept that many will write off before they ever play it. It’s launched into the App Lab, where only a fraction of consumers ever go, and both it and its foundation technology are, unashamedly, works in progress.

There are fundamental issues caused by the game’s USP and graphical and performance areas that could use more than a little extra polish. When it works, however, when the stars align and you put together a run unfettered by technical issues – Good Lord is Rogue Ascent ever a great time!

It’s frustrating that the root cause of many of Rogue Ascent‘s irritants is that Hand Tracking (1.0) loses contact when one hand passes even partially in front of the other. When you’re doing your best Chow Yun Fat impersonation, barrelling around corners dual-wielding shotguns and gunning down wave upon wave of bad guys, this glitch crops up far too regularly for what is an in-game life or death issue. It’s further exacerbated because, on top of your weapon disappearing, it can also cause those unintentional movements when the tracking is regained. 

The developers of Rogue Ascent have promised that specific Hand Tracking 2.0 updates are on the way along with many other tweaks, bug fixes, and additions. If you have the 2.0 upgrade already or have seen videos of it in action (it’s been added to Cubism to great benefit), you’ll know that the issues mentioned above should soon be a thing of the past. Unfortunately, I can’t evaluate a game on what it might become, only what it is right now. In short, Rogue Ascent is a lot of fun when it works and quite frustrating when it doesn’t.

Not the last one, huh? Well, hustle, new kid, because that’s not the only disaster that awaits you on your first day at Cosmonious High, as you begin to investigate how exactly that asteroid got through the school’s defences and why so much is suddenly going wrong with the school.

A GOON-iverse of possibilities

In this latest game from Job Simulator devs Owlchemy Labs, the player, usually referred to by some variation of ‘New kid’, is the first enrollee from the ‘Prismi’ species at the eponymous intergalactic institution. These aliens are blessed with the ability to adapt when placed in a difficult situation. This is achieved by spontaneously developing a new power. The first of these evolutions is the water power granted in the very first moments of the game. It’s used to escape the burning school bus and then put out residual fires around a campus that has suffered a meteor strike. That’s not all, though. You can use the new ability to water plants, wash paint away, and refill fountains. Other powers include Ice, Fire, and Telepathy. The powers you develop during the game evolve for a specific purpose, but none are ever restricted to being used for only that purpose. There are eight in total, selected from an intuitive menu that appears on the back of each hand.

As you progress past the first few fiery moments of Cosmonious High, you start getting introduced to the game’s cast of NPCs, who give you tips on how to play. But very little instruction is actually needed because the controls are incredibly intuitive, even if you missed out on the developer’s previous games.

If you are familiar with Owlchemy’s previous titles, however, you’ll know that getting ‘hands-on’ with anything and everything in a game world is a crucial pillar of their creative ethos. With the experience of ‘Job Simulator‘ and ‘Vacation Simulator‘ behind them, they bring such immersion to the environmental interactions in Cosmonious High that these gestures have begun to bleed into my everyday life. You can summon any in-game item into your hand by simply pointing at it and flicking your wrist towards you. It wasn’t long after playing for a few hours that I believed for a tiny moment that I could achieve this feat with my real-world TV remote. A few hours later, I wondered what my desk lamp might be thinking. It’s pretty incredible that a game that’s so visually unrealistic can still seep into one’s consciousness in this way.

The game builds its more structured activities based on total but straightforward interactivity. These are built around various subjects taught at the school – all of which must be passed with sufficient credits.

Immediately available classes are Visualetics and Chemosophy. The former is where you can combine your water power with pigments and then paint… well, everything and anything really. The latter is closer to ‘Job/Vacation Simulator’ territory as you stand behind a counter combining and stirring coloured liquids to make new compounds and materials. These, again, can be applied to all the beakers, books, hats, balls, and literally anything else you can find lying around the school. Want to cover an ‘Among Us’ plushy with Stickium and throw it at the ceiling? Fill your boots, newbie!

Later on, you open Astralgebra, where you can study planets. Well, I say ‘study’; it’s more like ‘create’ planets… albeit small ones. Other classes include Socionic Arts and Auditoriology, with activities like treating a sick pet alien and singing small creatures into existence.

Each class offers a unique new way to interact with the world, and the results are rarely confined to the room you learnt them in.

With almost everything in the game able to be picked up, thrown, kept, or eaten, you could be forgiven for thinking that this would be the core of the world’s believability. But it’s actually almost everything else that makes Cosmonious High feel like a living environment. Characters chat with each other naturally until you get their attention with a wave or by selecting an emoji from the speech bubble you pull from your mouth, the malfunctioning intercom provides the signature Owlchemy tone, and despite only having a dozen other students and a handful of teachers, the whole school feels genuinely alive.

This is helped in no small measure by the game’s open-world nature. The map is relatively small, with just around twenty rooms and corridors. There is a ‘hub’ of sorts in the central ‘Grand Hall’, but there are pathways and secret passages that link areas without revisiting the hall. Like all the best open-world games, it’s sometimes difficult to complete an objective without getting distracted by something else.

Outside of gaining classroom credit, each of the dozen other characters has their own story for you to get involved with. There are also broken devices to fix and debris to clean up everywhere you look. There are even faint echoes of a Metroidvania in the way you need particular abilities to access locked-out areas and routes to progress.

Genre GOO-Idity

One of the best aspects of Cosmonious High may initially put some players off. Set in a high school, with a kinetic art style, day-glow palette and excitable voice work, people might pre-judge this as a ‘childish’ game or, at least, one aimed at a younger demographic.

While it’s true that there’s nothing in the game that you couldn’t show even the youngest VR enthusiast, the developer’s reason for the primary colours and lack of any real threat or peril is that the game was born from the idea of an ‘optimistic future’.

What feels like a carefree and easy environment has clearly been put together with fantastic attention to detail. The school and everything in it has a bulbous, cartoony look that leans heavily towards secondary colours and rounded edges. It really helps it feel like a cohesive and organically constructed facility. The 12 students all have an individual look and personality, revealed through the art and voice-work. Despite coming from three easily identified species of aliens, their individuality isn’t constrained by the things that set that species apart from the others.

Pronouns in the game are also varied but handled so naturally that I didn’t even pick up on them at first. A particular early game quest sees you aid one character in the romantic pursuit of another a la ‘Cyrano De Bergerac’. As I completed this task, I did so in the casual belief that the characters were both male and gay. As I composed this review, however, I realised that I wasn’t sure that either character ever identified as male or gay. It’s a great credit to the developers and their flair for natural dialogue that this was the case, and shame on me for not paying better attention.

In the beautiful, inclusive world of Cosmonious High, there are no judgements and definitely no pre-judgements. As a result, it looks and feels like a fantastic place to go to school.

Cosmonious High also sounds excellent. You may have gathered that the character voices are exceptional, conveying personality with a sense of humour and individuality that perfectly aligns with the rest of the game. The music is similarly cohesive, being largely ambient and often overheard, in a brilliantly organic way, from nearby speakers or another student’s headphones. There are school anthems, fanfares, and hilarious in-world pop songs with full vocals; “Can’t Stop Me From Stretchin’ my Goo” was my personal favourite, but they’re all total bangers.

Too GOO-d to be true?

WIth a gameworld constructed to be a giant toy box, it seems nit-picky to complain that there’s little challenge in the game. The vibe is geared towards letting the player have fun, and it nails this completely. Still, it wouldn’t have hurt to have a few more complex puzzles, even if they were optional, to provide some extra satisfaction along the way. 

However, a more serious concern is the nature of movement in the game. It’s become the norm in 3rd wave VR to be able to teleport by pushing a stick forward and then rotating it to choose the direction you face when you ‘land’. Cosmonious High employs only half of this, the first part; the rotation aspect is absent and sorely missed.

Hopping to a new location and then turning in increments (if you’re playing seated) is clunky and incredibly jarring in a game world where everything else feels natural and fluid. Perhaps it was a bug in my review copy or something that can be changed with a patch. I hope so because otherwise, it’s a bizarre and counter-intuitive creative choice.

Stretching my Goo

Even with the clumsy teleportation throwing a tack in my path, I finished the main story in 4 to 5 hours – but I reached that end-game with only half of the possible 100 Credits collected. 

You’d have to pay me an enormous amount of real-world money to convince me to go back to my real-world high school, but you wouldn’t be able to stop me from clocking at least a few more hours at Cosmonious high. I’ll be heading back to find those last few Blebs, open those space-ball hoops, and collect the missing cards from my Pirates of the Gooniverse set.

GOO-ing for the hat-trick

Owlchemy Labs have already shown us they’re masters of the micro-sandbox with the’ Job’ and’ Vacation’ Simulator games. While it’s by no means huge, Cosmonious High brings a much larger sense of scale than its two predecessors in every way. The deceptively multi-layered characters are more numerous and better realised. The game’s world is elevated beyond anything we’ve seen from the developer. Its design is wonderfully consistent and vibrant and brought together with so much class that it makes the game a brilliantly fun experience.

The control issue is a small fly in a delicious soup, but even that can’t get in the way of a great experience that, unlike too many recent games, completely embodies what VR is, or should be, about. More than once, as I ended a session, I tried to place my controllers on a surface that only existed in the game – and I really don’t think there’s any higher praise.

The Devil You Know

The titular Onogoro is an island floating in the sky of an alternate Japan where magic is real and steam-powered machines litter the landscape. The player’s task is to help High Priestess Haru Kose track down five ‘Incensed Kami’ that have been set upon the region by the evil Masatake Arakida. The angry Kaiju-style monsters must be quelled.

The player arrives on the scene via a nice ‘meta’ moment in which Haru describes you as a spectral form that, for a moment, she thinks is wearing some kind of goggles. This is sadly the first and last clever thing that Onogoro does with its narrative, as from this point on, Haru uses every spare breath to witter on about various insignificances designed to build lore and character.

It transpires that Masatake has shackled Haru to a quelling stone so he can go about his nefarious ways. In order for Haru to move more than a foot from this magical boulder, you must wield the Celestial Weapons. These are ornate pistol-style devices that project a tractor beam you can use to move the stone and Haru around. Controls are the standard VR fare, with the grip buttons used to brandish or holster the weapons and the trigger used to activate them.

The B and Y buttons extend the magical beam, and the A and X will retract it. I’ve not seen this particular aspect of the control method before, and it’s surprisingly intuitive. 

As a matter of fact, the animation and feel of moving Haru around the environment are possibly The Tale of Onogoro’s biggest successes. There’s an excellent sense of weight and inertia, and the way Haru jumps onto the stone and hangs on for dear life as soon as you latch onto it gives her a lot of character.

Almost all of the game’s puzzles start by moving the quelling stone, with Haru aboard, to a glowing blue ring somewhere in the level. She’ll then press a button to begin a sequence of events that must be ‘solved’ to advance to the next area.

The puzzles are generally pretty simple. Ostensibly, they are elemental in nature, but many simply boil down to ‘shoot the green baddy with the green magic’. A layer of complexity is added by the inability of weapons to retain more than one magical charge, so magic must first be absorbed from particular glowing rocks. This is a clever way of preventing the game from devolving into a shooter. Still, it doesn’t really add much except the addition of another step to the entirely linear process of completing a puzzle.

By the halfway point, Onogoro adds elements such as paper spheres that can be burnt or blown around the level, rotating chutes that guide objects, and machines that Haru can interact with to manipulate puzzles and damage bosses. Unfortunately, these are all slotted into the same puzzle structure as other elements. Much like a Domino Rally set, no matter how fancy it may at first appear, in the end, all you’ve really achieved is knocking over the next piece.

Kami Chameleon

Through Haru’s often lengthy exposition or the game’s marketing material, you will be told that the alternate world of The Tale of Onogoro is of the steampunk variety. The game’s bosses, the ‘Incensed Kami’ terrorising Onogoro Island, have mechanical appendages, and many of the game’s levels occur in purportedly industrial areas. Haru herself has ‘absorbed steam powered’ parts to repair herself after apparently being tortured by Masatake.

However, the cell-shaded art, usually a personal favourite style, completely fails to convey a steampunk atmosphere. This is mainly due to the primary colours of its palette, which makes buildings and machines look more like toys from a giant wooden play-set than retro-futuristic pneumatic behemoths.

The Incensed Kami are the exception to this. They are massive and each more spectacular than the last. The battles themselves offer a little more creativity than the rest of the game, which is welcome, but there are only five such battles in the whole experience.

The sound effects, too,  are pretty basic and fail to add any weight or atmosphere to proceedings. Still, the music, albeit predictably traditional pan-pipes and percussion, is charming.

Don’t Speak

The VR gamespace is fairly cluttered with puzzle games looking for a way to stand out. Onogoro’s USP is Haru herself, a character you are supposed to build a bond with as you progress through The Tale of Onogoro.

In this endeavour, Takahashi-san has obviously been influenced by the PS2 classic Ico, and it shows in parts of the puzzle design too. In fact, various members of AMATA K.K. have been involved in the making of Ico, The Last Guardian, and even Shadow of the Colossus. Unfortunately, Onogoro and its characters fall a long way short of their inspiration. AMATA are also the studio responsible for Last Labyrinth, a game that Doc Neale also had issues with when he reviewed it.

To come back to my opening remarks about ‘Show, don’t tell’, Haru launches into lengthy exposition at the start – and end – of every section in the game. She tells you how she’s feeling, tells you what the area ahead represents, tells you about her history and that of the island. She often repeats herself and is never given even the slightest visual aid. She stands in front of you, hoping to build life into the game’s environments and characters by waving her arms around woodenly and… speaking… very… slooooowly. It’s disastrous for the pacing of the game and fails in its attempt to make up for the dearth of atmosphere in the lacklustre visuals.

Money for nothing

By far and away, the biggest problem with The Tale of Onogoro is the price. At $29.99, it’s priced near the top end for a Quest game – and it falls a long way short of offering much value for that cost.

You’ll clock in about five hours of play (and what feels like 50 hours listening to Haru). The Tale of Onogoro does have time targets and optional objectives to encourage replay, something of which I am usually a huge fan, but they do not provide enough motivation to replay a game that offers so little satisfaction the first time around.

Neverending Story

If you’re looking for an original, straightforward, and narrative-heavy puzzle game, there are worse options available on the Quest (Rhythm of the Universe – Ionia, I’m looking at you), but this really is damning with faint praise.

The Tale of Onogoro is far from the first game to suffer from a disparity between gameplay and story. In fact, it’s a constant challenge in the medium that only the very best games even come close to getting right. Still, here it’s taken to a whole new level by offering its narrator nothing through audio or visual assistance to convey its story. As a result, you’re left staring into Haru’s lifeless eyes as she delivers a lifeless story about a lifeless world.

Were the puzzles challenging or creative, this may have mitigated the damage, but they’re rarely better than average in both regards.

In the end, Onogoro is so overburdened with spoken exposition that it completely destroys any goodwill a player may have towards its better elements.

At its best, Onogoro feels like Portal 2 at its worst. This may seem like high praise but think back to those times in Valve’s sequel when you were looking for one single panel to shoot with that one specific colour to reach that one particular goal, and you’ll remember that this is nothing to be proud of.

Having grown up loving games like StarStrike II on the ZX Spectrum and Star Voyager on the NES, I’ve sorely missed the genre. Therefore I was pretty excited to see if Anshar 2: Hyperdrive could rekindle my love affair with the space combat genre.

Vomit Comet

Everything in Anshar 2: Hyperdrive will, on the surface, be familiar to anyone who has played Anshar Wars 2. The story appears unchanged, and the visuals, while undoubtedly a little shinier in terms of texture resolution and lighting effects, are similar. You may be wondering what there is to get excited about in this ‘Hyperdrive’ edition of a 4-year-old game. The answer is simple: Anshar Wars 2 was a three-degrees-of-freedom experience, whereas Hyperdrive uses all six.

The difference this makes is revolutionary. Bringing current-gen 6DoF to Hyperdrive makes this the first time Anshar, an IP born and raised in the medium, has actually been a ‘proper’ VR experience.

The game begins with a potted history of the Anshar/Nergal war in which you, an unnamed pilot, are a new recruit. A brief tutorial level then introduces you to the fundamentals before it’s straight into the action.

The control options in Hyperdrive are vast. Each axis can be mapped to either stick or full accelerometer controls with either controller. Various degrees of snap-turning are available. Aiming for both your primary and secondary weapons can be similarly configured or linked to your head movement. Triggers for these weapons can also be assigned independently.

The individual elements may not sound much in isolation, but together they offer the ability to combine buttons, sticks, head tracking, and accelerometer controls in ways that will enable any player to find a set-up that suits them perfectly – and that’s before we’ve even gone into the choice of third or first-person view.

Which of these two perspectives you chose will be down to personal preference. The third-person view appears to be the more popular option, but I found the craft’s position on screen both distracting and awkward to manoeuvre when navigating insta-death asteroid fields. The first-person option offers a lot more immersion at the possible price of what is politely called ‘comfort’ and less politely called ‘vomiting on your shoes.’

Despite the science of ‘VR Discomfort’ being relatively well understood, my experience was somewhat less predictable. I once deposited my lunch into a bin while 10 pin bowling in Rec Room. Yet, somehow, skimming the hull of an enemy mothership, gunning down highly manoeuvrable fighters, spinning around to defend myself from artillery, and then pulling a loop back to finish off a turret whilst playing Hyperdrive inflicted upon me no ill effects whatsoever. You may not be so lucky, and that would be a shame because as good as the third-person mode is, playing this game in first-person using motion-controls as the flight stick is some of the best fun I’ve had in VR yet. 

Starry-eyed surprise

Fun, I think, is the perfect yardstick by which to measure Hyperdrive.

Star Wars Squadrons is clearly the big show in VR when it comes to Space Combat Simulators, and there’s little doubt that the EA & Lucasarts’ product has bigger, more realistic visuals and benefits from a vast fanbase and an equally vast budget. But OZWE, a Swiss developer consisting of 12 people and a dog called Basil, have produced a game that is simply more fun to play.

The visuals may render everything in a slightly chunky toy box style that threatens to expose the series origins in mobile VR, but the levels bring creativity and a consistent style that can’t be ignored. Even with the ostensibly low polygon count on offer, these developers often pull together scenes and vistas that are much more than the sum of their parts, and the multiple spacecraft you have to control throughout the game are unique and very well designed. Especially in first-person, the interstellar dogfights and large scale battles are vividly brought into (virtual) reality in a way that I could only imagine as a child.

Audio too is delivered with no small amount of class. 

Music is as bombastic as it needs to be given the dramatic context, and the spatial audio used for the sound effects is a real treat. It serves as a great assist in the heat of battle and plays no small part in the immersion of the first-person mode.

Urgent, in-game radio chatter is supplemented by further exposition between levels. While the comic book style is simple, and quite a few phrases are repeated, it serves its purpose well. The voice acting is exactly the kind of slightly melodramatic nonsense I want in a game about gunning down alien baddies from inside my brightly coloured space jet. 

Why so Sirius?

All this fun makes it difficult to be objective about the game’s flaws because it feels a bit like kicking an excitable puppy. Still, you will encounter a few issues that impact the experience.

The biggest of these is the game’s inconsistent checkpoint system. Sometimes there are plentiful waypoints in a mission, and other times there are none at all. As early as the third mission, you’re tasked with taking down an enormous enemy command ship. This task is quite clearly delineated into 4 sections – and yet offers not a single checkpoint.

When you’ve figured out how to beat them, most of the game’s missions are fairly short and can be beaten in around 5 minutes. But it’s very rare to achieve this on the first try. Usually, it’ll take quite a few attempts to work out the correct approach to a level. 

Another issue is that there are occasions when progression objectives aren’t entirely clear. You quickly learn to pay close attention to the instructions imparted over the radio. The instructions aren’t usually repeated, and there isn’t a log to refer to if you miss something.

Bang for your Star-buck

The single-player story mode is divided into thirteen levels. There’s no escaping that this alone doesn’t offer space opera longevity, but each mission has an optional time goal and sub-objective that, together, provide a good amount of replayability. A lot of the missions you’ll want to enjoy again anyway, so having these extra targets to aim for while you do is very welcome. I think that a short game you’ll play many times is better than a long one you’ll play once, and Anshar 2: Hyperdrive falls very much into the former category.

There are also three multiplayer modes to explore. Somewhat predictably for a less than high profile game on the Quest, each of the Battle Royale, Death Match and Co-op modes are pretty sparsely populated. Matchmaking is either non-existent or rendered useless by the low player counts on the servers. When I have found games to join, it’s been a fun time, and the atmosphere has been notably good-humoured. 

There’s a small dedicated community attached to Anshar Wars that is very welcoming but, through no fault of their own, its members are very good at the game. This can prove intimidating for newcomers in the competitive modes. Death Match plays out as you would imagine, as does the Battle Royale mode. Still, the issue of low player numbers (at least in my experience) is a bigger problem here than elsewhere. 

Co-op is currently a single one-off mission where those highly skilled players are very welcome, but as much as the addition of some new features such as special icons to collect and explosive enemy defence tactics are great in theory, they’re never really explained and in some cases their effect isn’t apparent. New maps and other updates are planned for all multiplayer modes, but I think uptake will need to increase by a fair amount if they are ever to see the light of day.

My god, it’s full of stars!

There’s no hiding from the fact that Anshar 2: Hyperdrive is definitely not a mega-budget Space Combat game pushing the limits of VR. However, it’s ridiculous to judge things based on what they’re not instead of what they are – and what this game is, is terrific fun.

Each potential technical negative is mitigated through personality and character: The graphics are simple, but the art direction is elegant. The story is mired in tropes, but the delivery is endearing. The number of levels is small, but they offer enormous variety. The duration of the missions may be short, but the urge to replay them is strong and well rewarded.

Because of the sparsely populated multiplayer servers, I would broach caution if random multiplayer is a priority for you, but the single-player campaign alone is worth every penny of the fifteen quid asking price.