I’d like to think this as half of a review of the game, and the other half of being able to put my Drex into the game.
So, BONELAB was first talked out on May 2nd of this year by Thrillseeker. The game has been in development since 2020. Though I didn’t really pay attention to what he said back then, all I saw was “this looks like a BONEWORKS successor”. The fact you can do so much more, even change who you are to fit your playstyle. And I don’t mean just physically, but visually. You can become different avatars, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
But possibly the coolest aspect is how well each avatar will fit with your RL body. If you touch your hips IRL, you’ll touch the avatar’s hips in the same way. Games like VRChat never really nailed this down and there was always issues with ruining the immersion. But this dev team wants to fix that.
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Yet even better, and I wasn’t aware of this until 5 days before launch from another video by Thrillseeker.. you can bring in your avatars from VRChat or Chillout INTO the
game, and play as your personal avatar!!
And here’s my attempt of bringing my Drex in.
Cool, huh?! 😁 It feels like NeosVR, the fact I can see my avatar’s snout. It’s wild.
However the process of doing it is unlike uploading an avatar to those aforementioned platforms. It uses a system that matches the game’s lore. Instead of uploading a
traditional avatar/world to a cloud server, you throw your work into a crate instead. And then you send that crate to the Asset Warehouse (which is an actual level in the game). This cuts back on resources, for you and the cloud server.
Except, you’re hosting your own content. Unless, you go here and upload it for others to use. As of now there’s no in-Unity Amazon Cloud based service which to upload your work. And I wonder if that’s also part of the lore. Dunno.
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But here’s the part where I’m forced to be negative. As cool as the aspects above are, the game itself is lackluster. I cannot say this is a ‘VR game changer’ or ‘the best thing for the VR Industry’ (unlike Thrillseeker who has hyped the game to hell and back). No, I don’t share those feelings.
When I review games, I don’t review them of how they’ll help the future of a genre (even though the game itself sucks), I review the game itself. Yet Thrillseeker himself wants you to not see this as a “game”, that if you do that, you won’t fully understand how much this means for the VR industry and the ‘medium’ (whatever the fuck a ‘medium’ is I
dunno. Back in my day we didn’t use that term to describe something that affected the future of a product as a whole).
And I say to that.. pssh. Should I feel bad for saying this? No. Because we all have an opinion. And my opinion, is this game is not. worth. $40! The gameplay, isn’t
worth $40. It’s worth $20-$25 at the most.
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And I only have myself to blame for giving into the hype. I told myself to wait, of ‘what if it doesn’t live up to the hype’.
However I want to shift said blame to the devs, because we were never informed
through Steam how much it would be before release. If I had known, I would had waited for a sale.
And not everyone uses 3rd party gaming news websites like Kotaku to learn this stuff. …So is that my fault for not doing research? No. The devs should had posted it
on Steam, before its release, to make sure players make an informed decision.
Incidentally, there was never a promotional sale for players who owned Boneworks. So it’s fair to say (for a lot of people), that this was “a full-priced DLC”, yet without requiring the base game.
So.. what do I not like about it? Mainly, it’s the same issues I have with Boneworks. The rubber-banding physics when picking up an object, getting yourself stuck in
guardrails, and that annoying ‘slapping’ sound.
Seriously, if they truly wanted to make this game be more immersive, I shouldn’t be allowed to pick up a very heavy looking metal box from the top (as if it’s as light as a feather but also made out of rubber bands). I would be having to bend my knees and lift it from either the sides or the bottom… like IRL. Add realistic weight to shit, SLZ!!
But anyway, here’s what I don’t like about BONELAB;
1. It’s almost required to be playing on Ultra graphics settings, as the mid levels.. I saw walls that had Minecraft-quality textures.. in VR. Wtf. That is unacceptable.
2. The ammo counter is now in your Inventory, instead of close to your ammo belt. And there’s NO option to change this! WHY?!
3. Shotgun ammo shows a cube instead of a shotgun shell. Also the Shotgun ammo crates are hilariously oversized compared to Pistol/Uzi and Rifle ammo.
3a. Shotgun ammo is semi rare, but Rifle ammo is even more rare compared to Boneworks. I used to have over 3,000 Rifle ammo in Boneworks. But in Bonelab it
was 735.
4. There was a section when I was unlocking the avatars, that I gotta get a barrel up on a ledge. And if it rolls off, I got softlocked (as props do not respawn).
5. There’s more puzzles, and some hardly give any explanation if you’re supposed to get to a certain area or not.
6. After I fully unlocked the avatars, the game felt too short. Like, the only avatars I ever needed to switch to were ‘Strong’ and ‘Tall’. There was that one area where you had no choice but to use ‘Fast’. Which really, really kills me and this was the selling point of the game, that you can “play your way”.
6a. You cannot switch back to your main avatar unless you either complete the story and get a new ‘Avatars’ thing, or use the ‘Body-Mall’.
7. Best way to explain the ending (without spoilers), is when the game finally ‘ended’ (if you can even call it an ‘ending’)… it felt similar to ending of Bendy & the Ink
Machine Chapter 5 (to give you a reference).
If you still want to play this game, wait for a sale or try to find it on G2A (or some other 3rd party Steam key website like that). You’d be doing yourself a favor by not spending
the $40.
This is not a bad game, by any means. I just don’t like the feeling I “paid to be a beta tester”: the Minecraft-like textures (in places) when using Low quality
textures (set by my GPU apparently), the Shotgun ammo looking weird, and getting repeatably softlocked on one level… should had been fixed before release. Those are the biggest issues I have against this game.
“But Benie, you could look at the cube as a ‘Special’ ammo type” you could say, but the problem with your statement is this ammo is specifically for Shotguns.
This game definitely has potential, it just needs to be ‘unlocked’ by the devs. One day we’ll be able to make custom weapons, custom NPCs (friendly or enemy, even having an army of me’s I have to defeat), and Vehicles. They claimed “whatever you think of, you can make”.
…Even someone I know who (thankfully gave up on) making.. a dick as an avatar. 🤦♂️
If other game devs in the future decide to be inspired by the technology
from BONELAB for their next VR game, then yeah it’s “good for the VR Industry”. But that’s hard to say at this time.
But yeah, that’s it. I’m hoping one day I’ll feel this $40 was ‘worth it’. But as it currently stands, the only way I would recommend this game is if you find it on sale.
$20-$25 minimum is how much (I personally feel) it’s worth, with how short it is compared to Boneworks.
You know, what might be hilarious is there could be DLC for this game. As there’s a few doors that won’t open. Who knows as to why. I might do a mini-‘Game Theory’ of the story as I see it. As there’s definitely lore to Fantasy Land (and why the intro starts the way it does).