Boneworks is one of those games you've heard about if you look into VR. You'll hear things like "immersive" and how it is "one of the best vr games ever made" and you probably have heard it a lot considering this is one of the first VR games of its kind.

I will give credit where credit is due: it is extremely ambitious for it's time and is very unique. I love the music (ESPECIALLY the museum tune) and somewhat love the theme, but let me explain my gripes.

Boneworks feels like somebody went knee deep into the process of making one of the best games, but then got ripped out halfway through. Music, sounds, physics, and environments for the time in VR was a HUGE leap forward at the time but overall there is so much jank that occurs and essentially has this game be obliterated by the passage of time.

First off, physics. Some of this is fun, like when you shoot enemies (probably the most satisfying killing of NPCs with guns in VR to date.), but that is essentially it. For a VR game with both physics-based exploration and physics-based puzzles, it horrendously flops at both of those.
Movement is by far some of the worst in any VR game with the player almost sliding when walking which leads to super infuriating moments. Walking is way too inconsistent and you feel like you can't really stop in time and running practically makes you drift like a car going 90 MPH. Another stupid piece of the movement system is climbing. I love climbing in VR, but this is horrible at it in every sense. Your hands somehow feel like they suddenly gain 20 pounds each when you try to climb, and pushing yourself onto platforms you are on is HORRIBLE. No attempt at an explanation is even MADE at pulling yourself up and you basically have to figure out it exists on your own, and to top it all off, it is so janky that you assume that it is impossible at first. You have to push your hands INTO the surface you are trying to get on and put your hands down near your legs which makes you look like a total jackass.

Meanwhile, the physics also fuck up with the puzzles by taking those controls and weird physics quirks and making them front stage with moving big ass boxes that you cannot carry because they added way too much weight on like 80% of every interactable object in the game. They are so infuriating that they have made me drop the game on multiple occasions.

Melee combat is abysmal. Enemies can put their hand forward and do like 30 damage to you while you throwing a full on rear hook but instead your hand hits nothing and then lightly taps the enemies head and other completely random inconsistencies.

The guns are not satisfying to use at all. The pistols do fucking nothing and feel weird. The MP5K is maybe one of the worst controlling VR weapons ever. Imagine this: MP5K with a vertical foregrip that you can grab, right? Well when you hold the back of the gun AND the foregrip at the same time and point it somewhere like you would with any gun, the front end of the gun faces LEFT and you have to essentially move the entire front end right just to hold the gun straight. It's a joke how this made it into the game.

All the "recoil" in the game is the gun playing a really over the top animation just to literally go right back into place. It is super hollow and once you notice it, it makes the game that much more not immersive.

The story is so sad because if this game was truly finished, it may be one of the coolest combined with the environments. You play as some dude who wants to be immortal in game I think so you lock yourself in your office and cause a security breach and random YouTube looking people don't know it's you and give you tips on how to fix the breach not knowing it is you causing it. You fight super shitty hologram enemies in the same encounters over and over just in new locations until you find a big sphere and, for the first time in this game, do something cool with loading, positioning , and firing cannons while fighting zombies and then you get put into a place with weird NPCs that are basically just you and then fight zombies in a gladiator pit and then get challenged by the king so you go into his castle and fight him yourself and become king. You go into the back room and get the first cool item, a gravity gun, and then open a door by lifting it with a chain that you position using said gravity gun and then leave the chamber and fight some enemies with the cool new weapon when in reality you can just skip it entirely. Like climbing? No? Cool, climb a super long ass ladder and open another chamber where a screen shows a cinematic of you in your office getting raided while you have the VR headset still on and then you shot in the back of the head by some dude, but apparently you won cause you get to be immortal in game.....

Notice how I just jump from one thing to the other? That is not me omitting parts of the story, it's me literally explaining it. It sets itself up to have a super cool dynamic where you play as a dude playing in VR but it's so far from feeling like that, I forget that it is even the story. The story's pacing is so bad that it feels like parts of it just got cut out entirely. It is so disengaging and half baked that I'd just rather stick to sandbox from the get go.

Unfortunately, you can't just hop into the sandbox, which is arguably the best part of this game. You have to play the campaign and do dumb shit to unlock it, and then to even get ITEMS and NPCS you have to play the campaign and either throw your weapons into a pot or go OUT OF YOUR WAY to search for hidden NPCs to unlock them.

The best part of this game literally is only accessible if you play the worst part of this game, and with all the technical blunders of this game, I'd say if you want to play a good sandbox play B&S or H3VR. Should you want a good story game play Half Life: Alyx. These games are more developed and are part of the reason why this game should be slid under the rug of "cool games in theory, time to move on."