Yore VR (Update 3.9.2) -VR Gameplay HTC Vive
19This is going to be a long one...
Lets tackle the elephant in the room first off. Save games were reset again. This game requires a considerable amount of effort to achieve even small things. There's a trade off on work vs sense of accomplishment. Not complaining about that. I like that sense of accomplishment. What I'm upset about is the loss of save data.
It's an EA title. Wipes will happen. They suck but are sometimes necessary. I will say that it does impact the review of the current state of the game. It's hard to recommend a game like this when their gameplay will be reset every month or so.
Ok, on to locomotion. There are a lot of options here but it ends up being somewhat complicated to get things set up the way you want. Eventually I can get Onward style locomotion on the left controller but it takes a minute or two of finagling it.
A simpler interface would be appreciated. Something to select left or right hand for locomotion as well as a brief explanation of what the locomotion labels mean. D-Pad vs Joystick vs etc...
The FOV reduction settings seem to have been fixed and I no longer have half my vision removed when walking. Thank you!
The basket seemed a bit quirky. My guess is that it was getting stuck on my hand and that was causing me to think that I didn't have to keep the trigger held down and was doping it as I walked.
Grabing it from the bottom was a bit difficult and I ended up just flipping it upside down by it's handle. With the physics in the game, that makes for a very awkward real world motion where you have to twist your wrist awkwardly while squatting down a bit. Even then, there's a good chance you're going to spill resources outside of the box. It would be nice if the box lids were open some more and angled backwards instead of forwards.
I do like the change to the basket so that it can carry 7 of each type of resource as opposed to just 7 items as I think it was originally. (may be wrong on that one, memory is a bit fuzzy.)
The winter update has brought new textures to the resources. They're now snow covered. While this is pretty cool it does mean that it's very hard to tell stone from ore now.
The tutorial is well done for the most part. There were two issues. One where Mr. Bones expected me to push Build without actually telling me to do so. He just said to come over here and then stopped talking. Another time he seemed to trigger voice lines before the previous one was finished. Not the end of the world but could use some attention.
Smelting the ore into an ingot. This was the worst experience yet. Specifically the tongs. The tongs are pretty ridiculous at the moment. For some reason they seriously trigger the existing hand tracking issues: https://youtu.be/-GTMDvihOwo?t=1478
From start to finish it's going to take about 20 - 30 minutes to craft one ingot. That seems on the high side to me.
Speaking of the hand tracking. I have more problems with the hands desyncing from the controller in this game, especially when lower to the ground. I have to think it's something about the games code for the hands themselves as there are times that the locomotion icon is still correctly tracking the position of the controller while the hands are going crazy. Again it's something unique to Yore VR that I don't experience with the same frequency in other games.
The update to the Pub is a welcome change where we gradually upgrade the building rather than having an up front cost of 300 wood/stone and 50 ingots or whatever the original cost was. It was a pretty hefty price tag. Breaking it up to see your progress works much better.
The wolves are pretty easy to take down solo but when they group up, all standing on the same spot, they get pretty deadly. I did get the chance to confirm that you can die in the current version of Yore VR. You simply teleport back to your shack and start over.
The cave system was actually pretty large. I wasn't expecting it to be that big. It looks like there are several key rooms where important encounters might take place. I'm interested in seeing what they have planned for filling it up with stuff to slaughter.
TL;DR: The game shows promise and the devs are actively fixing and releasing updates but in its current state there are a number of issues that prevent me from recommending the game. If you are ok with or enjoy being a part of the dev process and working around bugs then you may want to support the devs and pick up a copy. If you want a fully fleshed out experience. Keep this one on your radar and wait for now.