Recent reviews by Siri

This game is horribly optimised. On my (admittedly ageing but capable) PC:

• Shader compilation took 12 minutes
  
• The settings confirmation dialog wouldn't load anything but the 'confirm' and 'cancel' buttons (not even the scripts on the buttons to allow me to confirm/cancel) and the 'these settings aren't working' automatic timeout - so i was forced to play on high settings.
  
• The tutorial took a whole minute to load (on an SSD)
  
• The models weren't streaming fast enough (again - SSD), so my player character and the enemy models in the tutorial took a few seconds to load in after appearing. In actual gameplay this would be inexcusable
  
• I averaged 30fps on High.
  
• After completing the tutorial, the game crashed, and I gave up,

Netease are a massive studio who have heavy experience optimising games for mobile devices and yet somehow they still really did a ♥♥♥♥ optimisation job. Not really interested in dedicating more time to squeezing out performace.

For context on how poor the optimisation is, my pc can run both mechanically and technically more complex games from just as recently just fine.
For example:

• Satisfactory (UE5) has to simulate conveyor belts with thousands of objects travelling across them per minute by endgame and manages just fine.
  
• The Finals (UE5 - I did have some issues but I was playing that was on a HDD and not the SSD that Rivals is on) had no issues loading player models or letting me use lowest settings for better performance and has never crashed on my system.
  
• Palworld (UE5 - Also on a HDD) had no issues beyond load times.
  
• Multiversus (UE5) had no issues at all.
  
• Payday 3 (UE4) runs at 60FPS most of the time with hundreds of cops and corpses on screen

even Red Dead Redemption 2 (RAGE Engine) and Cyberpunk 2077 (RedEngine) both on High perform better than this third person shooter.

Maybe if you have a better PC I could recommend this.

why so serious?

A fun little distraction - As someone who loved flash games like Motherload, and wishes the Steamworld Dig games were more than they are (I have 100%ed Dig 1 - Dig 2 hasn't appealed to me as much), this is a super fun experience that is over far too soon. The balance is pretty on-point (I never felt under or overpowered when I upgraded like normal), but the game's mediocre story (which isn't helped by the occasional bad English) and short runtime have left me wishing the devs padded things out more than they did - I might come back and find the modules I missed, but I don't really see much incentive to.
I'd love to see a longer game with these mechanics.

I now hate my friends.

I cannot recommend this game. I was legitimately hoping for a neat set of Portal-style levels that required me to think.
I think this game has the potential to do that, but not in it's current state.
Here are a list of the issues I found throughout the game:
- The Menu Music I have heard in other low-budget games and it gives me trauma.
- The Ability to pull a cube from a distance is never tutorialised or explained, and coming from Portal, I had an inverse expectation.
- Cube pulling is incredibly inconsistent as to at what range, and through what surfaces a cube can be pulled.
- The "timing puzzles" with the rotating guns are very tedious and make the fling required to get the orange gun unbearable (as you have to jump into a stationary portal that may be too far or not far enough forward.
- Not being able to see where portals through walls makes it harder to track portals, making mistakes where the wrong portal is replaced more common and frustrating. It also led to a softlock later in the game where I replaced the wrong portal, behind a door I had accidentally closed.
- The camera is difficult, whenever you travel through a portal that isn't at the same angle as the other direction, resetting it's position to be exactly the tangent to the normal of the surface of the exit portal, rather than preserving the camera angle of entry, skewed by some offset.
- The level where you receive the portal gun , and the majority of levels succeeding it are way too large and have a lot of empty space. This is frowned upon, as a puzzle should rely on the complexity of it's components, rather than cheap obfuscation.
- Portal Funneling (where the player is attracted toward portals to make tricky flings easier) doesn't seem to be effective enough, if it even exists at all.
- Backtracking can be an interesting part of a puzzle but in this case backtracking to collect the cubes from the portal-gun room doesn't exercise thinking, particularly with the second cube being no more challenging than the first.
- The laser bots were a terrible design decision. Almost every death to them feels cheap, they are unforgiving, because aimpunch will often prevent the player from leaving their aggro, even when making an active attempt to.
- Blocking the bots' vision is inconsistent and obviously has lethal consequences for failure.
- Throughout the level introducing the bots I hit 2 softlocks and died a stupid amount of times for reasons that weren't my fault, and a couple of times in ways I never figured out how I died.
These issues make the game feel like a chore even with how short it is, though, the mechanics the game brings to the table (like being able to pull cubes from a distance) show that the idea has potential beyond just a "Portal Clone" given enough polish and attention.
However, the game not having been updated since 2021 implies to me that this game may never get the care it needs to reach it's potential.

[Edited 2024-01-30 to fix formatting]

wouldn't detect my controller or my wheel (thrustmaster t80)
looks like ♥♥♥♥
very loud
music kept playing after i closed it (even after i muted it in game)
cars handle awfully
control schemes for keyboard are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
like 5 tracks and 3 cars
most tracks are just generic rings
no multiplayer
average at best AI
couldn't be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ playing more of this game

invest into a finished racing sim from (current year) and not a game glued onto a piss-poor 2007 game engine

Very good, unique mechanic, just not brilliantly executed.
Can't say it's tutorialised very well, the game overstays it's welcome and the jankiness tends to show.
The whole range of mouse sensitivity feels off, as does the movement.
There are lots of slow sections, and the player feels like they were built for a different genre of FPS.
I'm not quite sure how to explain it. The crouch is sluggish, the movement is stiff and the jumping is floaty.
The gun is also difficult. This game isn't a competitive shooter. You have to execute lots of movement, and shoot midair targets with a lot of accuracy. Not too hard with the right sensitivity, I would add some kind of sensor to detect if a target is within a certain distance, and hit it, if it is. Using Middle-Click to trigger platforms beneath you feels similarly oversensitive, and it doesn't give the player the few extra pixels on the edge common in platformers.
The whole game just feels off... I guess.
The Dev semi-recently announced he was working on a sequel. Keep an eye out for that, I feel like this game would be great with a lot more polish, less blinding visuals, and fixes regarding the problems listed above, and probably a few more.

very legs much walk

A classic story of the average 1950's housewife doing normal housewife things, like cooking, cleaning and slaying cthulu. Wait, did I say that out loud?

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