I think I've played something like 10 hours of this. I spent most of my time advancing the story and then doing side missions in one of the city districts.
It's a really fun game! It took me a while to wrap my head around the aiming controls/feel, importance of cover, and so on (too many Destiny-years to undo). But, once I felt comfortable with the game I was able to relax and enjoy the experience.
The game is, like Destiny, a sort-of-MMO shooter - there's lots of social elements (that I did not really explore), but also what seems like a long-grind (levels) that also has an equipment/gear grind attached. Weapons drop with different stats and quality, there are tiers for rarity, items can have special boosts and stuff. All of this is neat - I changed weapons around as new ones dropped just to see how they felt to shoot and so on - but it's also pretty standard.
What I enjoyed most was the progression that exists in the city - it really makes you feel like you're helping to make a difference as you complete side quests, collect resources and donate them, and so on. It's the main reason I didn't mainline as much of the campaign as I could - I wanted to experience the broader parts of the game as well.
That being said, as I played and mentally compared to Destiny I had an insight - this might be unfair and/or incorrect, since after all, I did not complete the campaign or play significant parts of it BUT...after a while I realized that the combat scenarios while fun and interesting were become very familiar... Sure, enemies might have different weapons, more health, or even "special things" like shields BUT, because the game is rooted in (near-now) reality there are lots of things it cannot do. The game isn't fantastic/fantasy the way destiny is - so it's constrained by it's near-now realism. So, the design team doesn't really have opportunities to experiment with crazy opponents that do weird nonsense that is still interesting (like the fallen that split into two enemies in destiny, enemies that fly around, weird weapons that have fantastical effects, etc.). In this sense, for me, this game could not achieve that variety of setting, gameplay and gunplay that Destiny has.
Now, I could be wrong - maybe mechanically it's all there - just dressed different (drones that fly! lasers! dream/nightmare sequences), but I don't think so. Enemies are always the same and there aren't that many interesting gameplay differences between them. EXCEPT, maybe there will be in the weapons? Destiny enemies are always the same in each of their attacks - they don't benefit from the variety of weapons players can equip (pvp is different, obviously), so perhaps The Division 2 gets at that variation with equipped weaponry?
Another thing I was impressed by was the game's onboarding. Destiny currently feels like a mess - it's hard to tell someone completely new to the game where to start, what to do, etc. And here, I felt like I could figure out what to do - what doing a certain activity would result in for me in terms of the game's progression and so on. Most of the map was blocked off for me - which helps with the onboarding for sure - and perhaps it makes more sense because the campaign seems much more central to the overall experience? Destiny having multiple campaign DLC stuff taking place at the same time doesn't help matters either...
Oh, the UI for the game was also really good - a bit small at times for me, but I was surprised by how readable and easy-to-figure out things were. This is in contrast to one of the Ghost Recon games (Wildlands?) I played which was going fine until the game opened up and then... well, that's when I bailed.
So, after discovering the OTHER main menu - the one with the campaign...and starting to play. Well, I've thrown in the towel. Metaphorical.
I was having fun playing the game, I felt like I was slowly getting better and understanding when to do what - BUT, and here's the big one - the game's story/narrative got in the way. Now, I never watched the show or followed it to really care about the characters or have an interest there - but I was enjoying learning about them and so on. The episode I played is basically the team's 3rd championship run and there's back story that they've won twice before (earlier seasons in the show? I have no idea). So, you meet the other teams, characters come around to tell you that THIS time they'll win, they've been training super hard, and so on. It's all super nice and kid friendly - in the "we're also gonna train real hard" and then you play some of the matches in the all-Japan school championship. Cool. THere's story stuff before the matches, in between and so on.
BUT - I got to a match where, all of a sudden the other team scores - there's buildup and cut-scene stuff and all that, BUT, they got to score for free. It was unstoppable (AFAIK) and felt really unfair. NOW, if the game had been framed as "play the 2nd half, you're down by one" or whatever - that's fine. But this felt like a cheap shot. The other team scored because they HAD to and it sort of invalidated everything I had done until that point.
So, I bailed.
To be honest, I played the same match a few times, lost all of them, but also that's when I realized it was a scripted goal and that there was nothing I could have done differently. And, that was a real disappointment.
There's a tough balance there to be sure - I thought it was neat when in-game situations cued up cut-scenes...but those felt like the arose naturally from the state of the match (perhaps I'm wrong here?). The scripted "other team will score now" felt very different.
As I "gear up" to start thinking about buying PSVR2 and I'm trying to make my way through my PSVR games. This one being a prime example. I've still got many more...
When I saw this in the store my impression was that this was a VR-version of Wipeout, but probably without the thumping soundtrack and, well..other Wipeout cool stuff. So, I wasn't expecting too much to be honest (WipeOut being a high point in terms of sci-fi racing games)...
The game's novel feature is that you're racing on the outside of a long tube (that twists and winds and forks and such). Thus the name. Weirdly it reminds me of a game some students made when I first taught game design/development all the way back in 2000. The 2000 student-made game was a racer, on a tube BUT you raced around the inside of the tube instead of the outside. Of course the game had fewer features, etc. But still, a very similar concept. That's not to diss the developers of this game - but rather to highlight what this team of students did over 20 years ago when 3D accelerator cards were barely a thing. I don't even remember how they demoed the game (brought in their own computers? laptops?). I mean, laptops were rare/expensive back then too...
ANYWAYS, the game has a overarching meta structure - you get points for participating in different kinds of events, so I played a bunch of them. Maybe for an hour or so..and then got really, really nauseated. So yeah, this was not the game for me unfortunately. As a racing game there wasn't much going on - there are pickup/weapons you can use but they're super rare to find and hard to use effectively. The tracks have lots of boost pads and also red blockers and the game makes use a lot of having these red blockers rotate around the pipe so you have to adjust course to make it through. That part of the racing was kind of fun, you feel like you're weaving between the blockers and such and you have time to sort of sync your approach.
The racing itself was less interesting - all the enemies start of way ahead and you basically have to hit all the boost pads? But then, some races I won easily while others not so much. It didn't feel quite balanced when racing the AI. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't able to play online either - I think it just waited for other players - so, I think servers are still up but no one is playing?
I got this because it was recommended as a couch-co-op game and my plan was to play it with the kids. It is also, curiously, a 3-player game, which I thought was really unusual. Most are either 2 or 4 or greater - but capped at 3 isn't something I recall seeing much. Also, I don't think there was ever a US physical release - so I had to import it. This meant buying it on Amazon, so no big deal there...
ALL of this to say...huh.
As soon as we started playing we realized - oh, it's a MOBA! And oh! There's upgrades and points and stuff (meta-game) that we don't really care about. And oh! 3-player split-screen is TERRIBLE - everything's super small and you can't read anything...and so, we didn't have all that much fun. One of us (not me) really didn't like it, so that sort of put the kibosh on the whole game.
We did play some more in two-player, and it went better in terms of screen readability and I was starting to get the hang of my character's abilities and all that - but...I'm still not that excited by the genres as a whole..there were some neat things I thought were cool though:
(a) When you die/respawn you launch down from orbit or something - as you drop you can maneuver yourself in the sky and collect coins - the more you get the better, so you can upgrade your abilities and such. It's a neat touch that's simple to implement (mostly), makes the waiting/respawn time more interesting, and is gameplay relevant.
(b) The game highlights the difficulty of being effective (my interpretation) for each character in the character selection screen. I really appreciated that - and it's easy to forget that these games (like fighting games) have learning curves for each character and you sort of want to spend time on them, learning their moves, etc. and having a sort-of-roadmap for that is super cool. I don't think this is a novel feature in this game (as in, I'd be surprised if this game invented this idea), but I wish we'd see more of it? (also, I don't often play games where this would make sense - i.e. fighting games, but perhaps could make sense in driving games?)
BTW, my surprise at "it's a MOBA!" is purely my responsibility - I bought the game based on recommendations (top couch-cop games!) and didn't read any of the details. hahaha.
