Espire 1 - VR Gameplay Valve Index
17Yeah, that's going to be a no. That needs to go back in the oven for a few more months to iron out some things.
Unfortunately the games forced full screen bugged out and exited full screen while I was playing. I apologize for not catching that. Kinda hard while recording solo. Normally I would rerecord, but, well, 2 reasons.... I really didn't want to give the game another hour and I do think it's valuable for everyone to see the potential issues they may have even though I know the average player doesn't care about the mirror window. In this case it was causing the game to crash.
It's going to be easier for me to just drop a list of issues I found than go into detail on each one. I may still run out of space here...
2 CTDs before I even loaded in the first level.
Janky mirror window.
Janky options that you can't undo without exiting the game.
Janky physics. Grabbing items by nothing. Broom going through objects and sometimes pushing things and sometimes doing nothing. etc.
Forced comfort blinders that you can't turn off. You can turn off most of the comfort settings but not the blinders.
The incessant demands to heal yourself. I know I got hit. I know I took damage. I don't need it repeated literally every 5 seconds.
Overall lack of polish in the gameplay. Repair tool interactions, gunplay, enemy behavior... Pretty much every aspect of the gameplay needed more attention.
Voice commands do not work more often than they do work. This was just broken and unusable.
Inconsistent interactions with things like the climbing wires hanging at the start of the game.
Random bullet time? When, why, how? What?
The UI was mediocre at best with some rather confusing options. For example, what's the difference between Espire Agent and VR Operative? I assume this is difficulty but it's not clearly conveyed to the user.
This is by no means the full list of issues with the game, just what stood out the most in my mind after my session. It's increadibly disappointing for a game I've been looking forward to for so long, that looks so good in the trailers. Perhaps some of that marketing budget should have gone to dev talent?
All of this adds up to my primary cardinal sin. The one question that is very heavily weighted when I make a decision on recommending a game. Did I have fun? I just didn't have fun with all these little issues piling up. Espire 1 isn't bad because of one major feature like Asguards Wrath and Runic Armor. It's more of a war of attrition where it swarms you with lesser problems until you just don't care enough to keep playing.
Espire 1 needed a few more months of development to have a really solid launch. This game has/had a decent amount of potential but it feels like corners were cut with quality. Maybe this opinion is partly due to just playing Stormland right before this game and Espire 1 just can't match the level of polish and design there. But... That should be the standard, not the exception.
I can't recommend this game in its current state. Give it a few months of updates and/or maybe get it on sale.
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At present, Shadow's Thoughts has 1,078 views spread across 2 videos for Espire 1: VR Operative, with the game making up 1 hour of published video on his channel. This is less than 0.12% of Espire 1: VR Operative video content that Shadow's Thoughts has uploaded to YouTube.