Virtual Reality has been around for a while, and none of us like it much. There aren’t many games for the virtual reality experience honestly, and if there are they don’t really play any differently than regular aiming shooters. VR games lack the finesse of normal games, and they offer too little in terms of content.
However, Half-Life: Alyx’s arrival to the scene gave us a bit of hope for some experimental work happening behind the scenes in this genre. But before that game came out, there was Boneworks. The game was a massive building block that definitely brought innovation to a dull and dusted experience.
How to Download Boneworks
To download the game, click on the Download button at the end of the review.
The Game Review
Story and Setting
Simply put; Boneworks main basis isn’t really its story or its setting; it’s the gameplay. However, just to give you a general gist of things; in this game, you are the main character. There is no other character or story element, it’s just you stuck in a virtual reality simulation city and you must find a way to escape from this synth-wave hell-scape.
Talking about the setting though, the game has a beautiful retro synth-wavy aesthetic which is a fusion of eighties’ colors and science-fiction with modern-day films like Tron.
Gameplay and Design
Starting off, this is a game with limitless possibilities in its gameplay and sandbox of a world design. This game even has an extensive community modding toolkit and it’s one of the very few VR games that have an incredible amount of replayability.
Boneworks is one of the very few games in existence which completely revolves around physics. Sure there are other whacky ones, but this one does it unlike anything else. It’s actually a revolutionary game in the VR market.
It’s one of the few games where you can reload your weapon while being mid-air in slow motion after jumping onto a guy’s shoulders, breaking their neck, and doing three separate backflips just to land on another enemy and bust their head open with the butt of your gun.
It is a profoundly unique experience, and it being in virtual reality makes it even more enjoyable since it was specifically made for this medium.
The game’s beautiful and ecstatic setting and its fast-paced physics movement do come at a cost of frames though, but the performance isn’t nearly as low enough to make it bad by any means whatsoever. In actuality, the performance is great for a VR game!
The Developers ‘Stress Level Zero’ have designed Boneworks as a puzzle game at its very core. Inspired by the level design and mechanics of games such as Half-Life and Portal, Boneworks was initially pitched to Valve but they rejected the idea; ironically Boneworks later became the inspiration for Half-Life: Alyx.
Verdict
Everything that this game has to offer is a dream come true for a nerd like me. The game has stellar systems created in each and every department of its core gameplay and design. The technical prowess, the physics, the science-fiction setting, the retro-wave aesthetic and the impeccable gunplay which is unlike anything else you will ever find in the industry.
The overall execution of each and every gameplay element is done with such attention to detail, that other VR games will forever be spoiled for you once you’re done playing Boneworks. This is truly a revolutionary game in this genre and it brings so much more to the table than any big triple A title has in the past few years.
