Zanshin Reviews

GREAT GAME

I really enjoyed this. Good choice of 1 and 2 handed weapons with a realistic feel to them, adjustable difficulty and pretty immersive with the new maps.

Right now i cant say it's worth it. It does have some potential though for sure. In the future i hope they add better animations and an arcade mode or something to that effect.

I got this on sale for a dollar and it's honestly something I get more play time out of them most things I pay way more for. it's for sure an early release but it is fun to play for a few min here or there.

I'll recommend because I don't think the game should be downvoted into oblivion before the devs even have a chance to develop it more. There is a decent concept and framework in here. It's fun to dice enemies and block/slice arrows. That said, there are a lot of things which need work. 1. Enemy AI. This is basically the make or break of a game about swordfighting. Enemies react (sort of) appropriately when you parry them, but that's about the only good thing here. They don't pay attention to distance, or the range of your weapon. They ignore the threat of a point in their face. Where they attack and when they keep attacking or pause has no real logic to it. You have a long way to go here. 2. Thrusts. They seemed to be possible, but did little damage, and detection was dodgy. Thrusts are very important -_- 3. Same issue every melee game but GORN has right now - the quiver from tracking the very light vive controllers 1:1. Not only does this make it hard for impacts to feel good, but it enables bullshit tactics like just wiggling your wrist back and forth quickly to just blender enemies. Amusing, but anyone will quickly realize that this is the dominant strategy to kill things quickly, versus performing actual cuts. Not great for replayability. 4. Cut detection. Your blade just clips through everything except when a "cut" is detected, and it just acts like a perfect plane instead of considering edge alignment. Cuts are all or nothing, which is not how cutting works. Also, hard to feel like your blade is a physical object when it doesn't interact with anything except enemy swords and bodies. The game might be fun just to cut tatami if the cutting was actually done well. Tl;dr try to be like GORN but with actual AI and less goofiness. That's still an unfilled niche in the market. Otherwise you're going to fall by the wayside as another VR "tech demo" which is amusing for 30m then never played again.

update: game is dead. don't buy this. This is really barebones. i can't recommend this until some more work is put into this. However, i'm not going to return this because I want to support the development of this game, and it appears that they are making some effort to improving this title, so until then i'd suggest something else.

A very promising first person slasher that has been abandoned. Avoid.

Fun game. Hit detection feels a little off, but mostly sound. It's fun to limit yourself to one sword on hard and see how far you can get. Would be nice to have a campaign in the future!

[h1] Experienced on the Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers [/h1] This is probably the steal of the 2018 Steam Summer sale (VR). For $2.49 you're getting an awesome game. Just understand what it is you're getting before hitting that Add to Cart button. This is a sword / axe / twin staff with sharp edges combat simulator. Is it realistic? Well, no, you're not actually carrying around a sword and the weight is not anything you'll feel unless you're going mixed reality. Even then, you couldn't feel the weight of force from your enemy. You won't feel the cuts either. So yeah, of course it isn't realistic. Is it fun? Oh hell yeah. And no, you can't just swing crazily away. I mean you can, but you won't get very far if you do. See, you fight endless waves of enemies. They wield all types of swords / axes / twin staffs and yeah a bow too (you can't use a bow). You will hate every single bowman in the field of battle. Yes, they will try to gank you. Yes, it is unfair. But you know what else is unfair? Life. So yeah, you have to be smart. You have to block to avoid damage and the blocking is easy to do. It's making an effective and efficient counterattack that can be difficult. Knowing when to strike, whether to be aggressive or block. Guess what else? You can slow down time. When you slice your enemies you get life steal (although you can turn this option off). So you're going for proper swings. I had a hard time getting slices so that I could get life steals. They were easy when you slowed down time, but otherwise, difficult. You see your life meter and your slow down time meter. Watch them closely. This game was made for the Vive and all the controls are made for the HTC Vive wands. Luckily, they almost all translated seamlessly. The default locomotion is teleportation and dash. However, you can go full locomotion and I recommend that, especially on the Oculus Touch. There was only one function that I couldn't figure out, but it did not effect gameplay. There's several different environments and many weapons to test out. They all look good and they are varied. However, there's really only 2 enemy types, melee and bow. But as I mentioned, the enemy can have all kinds of melee weapons and they come with varying numbers. I do wish that the game had more variety, such as bosses or environmental hazards. That would make this game a 9/10. It's still very good and I highly recommend it. But unfortunately, it is as of the moment, just a test to see how long you can last against increasing number of enemies. Avoiding damage is key to survival, as well as connecting on perfect slices to get life steals. Sale Price Rating 8/10. Normal Price 7/10.