Lone Echo is hands down one of the best vr games. The movement system is incredibly innovative, letting you float and jet around in zero gravity without pulling you out of the experience like teleportation and thumbstick locomotion can. The atmosphere is equally impressive as it captures the cold vastness of space excellently. The story and characters are some of the best in a vr game as well. The developers clearly put a ton of work into making your companion, Liv, feel like a real person. The only real complaint I have is that the game is fairly short for $40.

A beautiful, fun, and immersive experience, that will give back as much time as you're willing to invest. The seamless co-op is great too. NameBrand.

I read reviews for Stormland, but even then, I didn't really understand what I was getting into, so I'm glad to write it out in a way that I hope can influence peoples purchase decisions.

What you've got here is a gameplay loop of: Exploring, collecting materials, getting into firefights and completing objectives, and upgrading your guns and character. Basic RPG stuff. Then, after you complete the main story (more of a tutorialization of how the rest of the game will be), you'll have 7 REAL LIFE calendar days to do it all over again, with scaling difficulty. In this way, It's almost as if this game is a roguelite, but with death and renewal on a fixed timer.

Which is a cool concept right? It takes about 5 hours to go through a run of the game, which you can definitely work in to your "VR" schedule in a 7 day period, so it's not super grindy to play through the game, and even less so if you're doing a playthrough with a friend. But still, it does suck that you lose all of your upgrades and abilities from the previous run (you do get some, minimal kickback as they're converted to currency, kind of, and this mechanic makes the "roguelite" work, but... sucks lol).

The overall gameplay loop I found to be really enjoyable. I like exploring and the shooting and looting feels good. The movement mechanics have been dialed in and feel responsive, and make traversing the different worlds immensely satisfying. But if you're not into any of the core gameplay loops, it might not be for you! I feel like because of the mandatory 7 day reset, you lose a real sense of progression, and it doesn't get that same roguelite kick to make it feel worth it. So satisfaction comes from all the micro loops... keep that in mind. They're fun micro loops, sure, but your enjoyment is almost completely dependent on them.

This game has not been optimized. It's by far the worse running game for a VR headset that I've managed to play. Half Life Alyx, I can get working just find on mid settings, but Stormland makes me feel like my computer is a freakin' toaster. It's really really quite disappointing how poorly it runs. Beyond that, sometimes the game straight up softlocks sometimes (at least the devs put in a "reload" option in the settings to fix the majority of these). I also think that the scopes on some of the weapons weren't thought out... just felt awkward to hold the weapons to try and aim down sights, and sometimes even then, the reticle would completely disappear. I'll chalk it up to optimizations.

I definitely won't be getting the replayability out of this game that I thought I would, but I will be more than happy to revisit it to play through a run with a friend, and I definitely will return when I have a better system so I can actually appreciate the graphics as well, but right now, I can't see myself being pulled back in to complete another loop on my own, I think it's just not the time in my life where I can get immersed into this as much as I'd like paha.

That being said, I really appreciated this game and everything I was able to experience, and think that it does a lot of cool unique VR things that you won't be able to experience anywhere else. Overall, I had an amazing time, and I do recommend it! Especially if you don't have any replayable VR games in your library, this will spice things up for you and give back as much as you're willing to invest.

breath of the wild was a game i adored at launch, but fell out of love with the more i played it. i could see the masterpiece in there, but it really just wasn't for me. knowing this, i wasn't expecting much different going into TOTK, but i was at least hoping that some of the problems i had with BOTW would be fixed. some of the problems i had were indeed fixed, or at least mitigated to some extent, but at the end of the day this game just feels like a glorified BOTW expansion with only about 25% of the problems i had with the game fixed being sold for me for $70. i know this is inevitably gonna be most people's GOTY, and i'm happy that a vast majority of people are enjoying it, but i'm not gonna force myself to play a game just because everyone else loves it.