The game for the price is alright. I can not give it the same praise as I would something like Plants vs Zombies in terms of interaction and planning. Yet, it's a good game to play while sort of idling. The reason I say this game is decent, at around the price of 5 USD is for a few reasons. 1) There is a bit of characters to unlock & each level you beat you unlock a higher difficulty. 2) Each level has an indicator of difficulty and what Bee Queen you beat it in. So replayability. 3) It's fairly short, and you can play every level and unlock everything in a few minutes or hours. This depends on how you play the level. If you do every battle, it can take a few hours, but if you rush the boss, a few minutes. 4) The characters in the game can be obtained fairly quickly. As most are obtained by simple tasks or beating a level. So while it has a fair selection of characters, there isn't much of a challenge to complete the roster. 5) Battles are pretty simple, and do not need really any planning. Place turret on left and right side of your Bee Hive and let the battle play itself. You can even increase the speed of the waves attacking you. Instead of waiting it all out in normal speed. 6) Queens define the play style based on their perks. Then towers are limited to the commander you pick. You can not pick and choose which towers you want, but it's locked to the character. 7) Towers and skills are bought with the collection of "Honey" (Unless using the Zombie Queen, which uses Health Points from your Hive). This is all fine and good, but unlike other tower defense style games you can not pick and choose what you want to build per se. The towers and skills are throw into your hand like decks of cards. This could be a pro or con depending on who you are. It adds a level of challenge, but not enough if you ask me. Personally, I think this is a mildly fun game and fairly priced for what it is. Yet, it can be repetitive and lacks a bit of depth. Best bought on sale.
As much as I would love to review this game with flying colors, I just can't. My experience with it has been quiet bad. I will break this review into parts. (Sorry for GOG's Short review) ---- UI ---- None as there is nothing bound to controllers. The only menus in this game are in the game world on a tablet. This tablet has zero graphics settings, audio settings, controller binding, et cetera. There are some control changes but I will explain that below. ---- Controls ---- Pimax Sword - Not usable unless configured. Valve Wands - Not usable unless configured. Index Knuckles - Works out of the box. This developer(s) seem like they've never played a VR game in their lives. The are two control methods that are both equally bad. Out of the box teleportation is on and it's bound to the right joystick clicking, which I highly suggest no one do, as most VR joysticks are smaller and much more fragile. The left joystick moves you up and down in height by pressing up and down. You are expected to turn your body for turning. Selecting on the in-game tablet, the "Right Hand Movement" option, it turns off teleportation and the "Left hand Navigation" option keeps the same settings as above, but it enables snap turning. The snap turning is set to the left joystick when you press left and right. While the right joystick now moves your character left and right and forward and backwards. I can not explain how weird this feels, in words. The best I can say is imagine if your mouse moved your character and your keyboard flew you up and down with W and S, but A and D turned your character. Grabbing objects is horrible in this game. You try and click the object and your hands just grab anything close by. There are even bugs with grabbing drawers. I opened desk drawers and then move to have a draw start flying around the room following me like a ghost. ---- Gameplay ---- The game has a slight story and has some puzzles to solve. Which is good, but not great.
This game can be played both desktop and on VR. I've played it both ways and both have goods and bad points. To get the desktop version of this game working, you do have to use a different executable in the game folder. It can be found in GOG Galaxy as well but you have to go into the "Additional Executables" section. VR mode and desktop mode are both slightly different. There are sections in VR that are not on the desktop and vise-versa. However, the desktop version always feels limiting in many ways. There are tons of times drops like ammo, grenades, et cetera are not accessible. Even hostages in the game you free you can't always get or the time window to shoot them free from a container is so short it's near impossible. The only real perk of the desktop client is co-op mode which is only local co-op. The VR game is the best experience in my opinion. You can get all the ammo drops, hostages, and so on. The sad part though is no co-op period. It would have been nice to see a desktop user and VR user combo for the co-op. As for the game. Well it's not the most amazing game out there. Both desktop and VR, has no real pull to make you want to come back. There are only four main guns and random guns that are sequences in the mission. There isn't much flavor to go around and most of the time it feels you want to use the same gun. The pistol is nice, but against a lot of the vehicles and choppers it's garbage, the shotgun is useless most of the time, the Uzi can just be a bullet waster in most situations. I honestly found myself using the M16 almost all the time as the bullet spread is less, has the distance, and chews up vehicles and heavy enemies. In VR I used Pimax Sword, Vive Wands, and HTC Vive controllers just fine. Desktop I've tested keyboard and mouse and Xbox One controllers. All work fantastic in this game. I got this game on sale and anyone else purchasing this I would suggest the same. It's a fair game, but not a Game of the Year.
I want to give this five stars. It has a nice atmosphere like many adventure games. However, it being a VR title if the controls are bad it makes the whole experience lackluster. Then top off some of the annoyances in-game on this and I just have to mark it down two stars. I will keep this brief on some things due to GOG's review character limit, sorry for the short parts. Anyway, let's start with controllers. | I own three different controllers. Here is my experience with each. 1) Index Knuckles - Everything works as expected, menus open, close, et cetera, However switching between view and grab is done with the controller grip. This doesn't always go well, it sometimes refuses to switch. 2) Pimax Sword - Can't open inventory, easy to switch between view and grab, movement starts out slow but you can change movement speed in-game, and teleportation movement options do not work. 3) HTC Vive Wands - Similar to the Pimax Sword controllers. My overall best experience is mixing controllers. One Pimax Sword and one Index controller. This isn't an option for most. This game has no mapping of controllers so you would have to plug this game into steam and then use SteamVR to configure application specific controls. Which is sad since, I want to not use Steam when the VR client can run without Steam. | The game provides three movement options. Locomotion, teleport, and the standard joystick movement. As mentioned before some controllers can't use teleport even when the standard movement is tied to there trackpads. | Videos in game that explain things can randomly restart when you open a menu. This was rather annoying when it was explaining things in the long intro videos. I opened my menu to change settings as it showed and had the video restart at the documentary style video of how the game was created. At least there is a fast-forward on this one, but still annoying. | The game is a nice VR title, but it's rough around the edges to use. I would grabbing on a sale.
This game is a turn-based RPG that is a lot like Paper Mario. It is no voice acting. However, insect sounds do play, when text appears similar to Banjo-Kazooie. The story has seven chapters and many side-quests. Along with collecting medals, cooking, & other extra content. I put 57+ hours into this game using the "Hard Mode Medal" from start to finish. Without this medal you would likely still get around 30-40 hours if collecting everything and doing all the side-quests or as the game calls them, "requests". -Controls & Gameplay- The keyboard has key remapping in the menu. Though I highly recommend playing this game with a controller due to the massive amounts of button mashing and there is no mouse. When battling you will find the combat has a few moves the enemy or your characters use that require you to bash a button repeatedly to achieve the move or block. Moves like "Dash Through", "Fly Drop", et cetera have you bashing a single button at least ten to fifteen times to accomplish the move. While other moves can be like quick time events or some of Vi's moves can be pressing two keys or on a controller moving the joystick back and forth. -Medals- These are buffs & debuffs that you can use to make the game easier or harder. Which could make the game take 80 hours due to planning you moves correctly. -Cooking- I suggest you use the Bug Fables Wiki for this. As there are 70 recipes out of one item or two combined. You will find that cooking is quiet vital to ones strategy when facing some mini/bosses. -Summary- This game has a lot to offer. Though I must only give it four stars due to some of the problems both in the UI and game bugs. Things like cooking have menus which are very slow due to dialog, as you can't just check off two items and hit yes. I've had the pause menu freeze over the game and lose of control of my characters entering a door. While it doesn't happen often, it's still annoying when you lose control and the background is still moving.
