The Light Brigade (2023)

Bland shooting, bland atmosphere, bland graphics. Loading times that can be measured in minutes for small, samey procedurally-generated levels.

Also, some terrible gameplay design decisions. Before each run you need to grab your weapons and ammo, but instead of just grabbing one sack of ammo and be done with it, the game forces you to get each individual mag and put it in your belt, for the dozen or so you can carry for the two weapons. What?

Then, be sure not to forget to actually load those mags, because by default your gun starts without any ammo. I usually forget, because no other game does this, so I started each fight panicking to load the weapon.

Enemies AI is also terrible, as they basically stay there shooting at you, even detecting you behind walls.

The "immersive light magic" seems to be a wand that shoots orbs, which I almost never used because the game leans HEAVILY towards two-handed weapons, which works in VR as well as this rambling run-on sentence reads.

When you die you turn into a ghost and have to run to your corpse and stay there a few seconds to revive and continue. But every enemy respawns and you can't attack them, so unless you got killed at the entrance, you're basically guaranteed to die again as a ghost or, if you are lucky, right after reviving. So it's basically a total waste of time which puts even more time in between runs.

So, mediocre gameplay and terrible design decisions and technical issues that result in more waiting that actual gameplay. Absolutely horrid game.

VR games are usually pretty light on content, and the standards are unfortunately very low. I was interested in this game because it seemed to be one of the more in depth games in the launch line-up, being a roguelite with actual classes and powers to unlock. Furthermore, you get a lot of other items to make each run feel different. I was hesitating between this and synapse, but I ultimately got The Light Brigade because it seemed to be the meatier game.

The game is a competent shooter, with a nice atmosphere to it, a good variety of classes to unlock. The moment to moment gameplay feels pretty good, with decent enemy AI and a high enough difficulty that the game isn't frustrating, yet feels tense and rewarding. I liked the realistic reload of the weapons. Ducking behind cover and quickly reloading a weapon, only to be surprised by the enemy AI and having to quickly pull out my pistol was a tense, thrilling experience. The game also has three different bosses to fight, each having a different environment to fight them.

What I didn't like so much were the guns themselves. First of all, I really think VR shooters benefit from not relying too much on two handed weapons, because it's kind of immersion breaking. In the game you are holding an assault rifle, but in real life your just kind of weirdly holding your hands in front of your face. One handed weapons, however, feel much better in VR. I had problems aiming the gun here much more than in games like, say, RE7 Village or Superhot in PSVR1. I don't really know how to describe the feeling, but the aiming just kind of feels off, for some reason. The problem is more annoying when sometimes one of my hands would just die off in VR. From what I have read on the internet, a lot of people had the same problem, so I can confirm it doesn't have anything to do with my setup. There is a dual wielding pistol class, but I always seemed to run out of ammo with that one. This leads to another problem, the classes don't all really feel viable, instead they all seem to be an upgrade, at least up to a point. Here's a piece of advice: get the assault class as soon as you can. Up until that point all the weapons just have too much recoil, but the assault class rifle can shoot from long distances and doesn't recoil as much, making runs much easier. Speaking of variety, I don't like the abilities you get during each run that much. I didn't seem to notice much of a difference between having +5% change to ignore damage and instant enemy death when below 5% HP. Story wise, the game is very, very bare bones. You can't really interact with NPC's and I have no idea how I am supposed to understand what's going on. It goes for the Dark Souls cryptic approach, which is fine, but unlike Dark Souls, you don't get much environmental story telling. I am sure there is a way to understand what's going on, but I didn't and I wasn't really intrigued enough to find out more.

In conclusion, I think this is a competent VR Shooter, with much more depth than the average one and with pretty fun moment to moment gameplay, although plagued by a lack of interesting story and aiming problems. Although runs feel fine, they do tend to get repetitive after a while, and I don't think the power ups are as fun as they could have been to mitigate some of the the dullness.