Video Gamers Podcast - Helldivers 2, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and Steam Next Fest Finds - Video Games Podcast

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

The Video Gamers Podcast is bringing you the very best, can’t miss video game news each and every week and boy do we have some bangers to talk about. The video game world is abuzz about Helldivers 2, but not all of it is praise. Is the criticism warranted? FF7: Rebirth gave us a heck of a demo and we’re hyped for its release. We talk the best video game finds from the recent Steam Next Fest and more in this gaming packed episode.  Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: Gaius214, YayaArizona, Disratory, Jwaf and AceofShame Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With Audio Erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions. And that's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights based on your day schedule so that you're prepared no matter what. Buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra now at Samsung.com. Hello, fellow gamers. Welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. We are three lifelong gamer dads,

and on Thursdays like today, we covered the most important gaming news over the last week. You can find us on socials at Video Gamers Pod, and we would love it if you would rate our show five stars. I am your host, Paul, and joining me, he is running around spreading democracy in the universe and offering all his enemies a cup of liberty it's ryan take that take that oh goodness i can't wait to talk about hell divers and joining ryan and me this week he said that skull and bones is a quadruple a title worth the seventy dollar price tag it's josh is that one a for every three years of development josh oh man more like every yeah yeah what you said every three years of development every three years okay yeah that's about right all right don't worry we're not going

to actually cover uh any skull and bones news again. We just had to do a quick drive-by because that comment coming out of Ubisoft was just way too funny. All right, we have to start out this show by talking about the release of Helldivers 2. Now, we have been so hyped for this game. We have been talking about almost nothing but for the last couple weeks. I believe all three of us said it was our number one most anticipated game of the year. It's here. We've been cracking out on it. We are going to be releasing a deep dive on Monday, so we're not going to get into too many details. But I thought we could focus a little bit more on the actual news of the release itself

and some of the reviews that people have been leaving it. Now, all three of us had shared an article that we all read, and it's from Video Games Chronicle, and I just want to read the headline. Helldivers 2 gets mixed reviews on Steam due to crashes, pay to win, and anti-cheat DRM. The article also mentions that on the day of release, the game had a 52% positive Steam rating. So let's kind of break this down. I wanted to ask you guys first about technical issues. Are you guys getting crashes and issues from the technical standpoint?

I have gotten a few. Yes. The last two days. So most of Sunday, there were some pretty significant server issues where people were having a hard time logging in we server maintenance yeah we quickly realized if you just keep smashing retry that after 20 or 30 clicks it'll let you in yeah and then and then once you were in the game was played pretty okay there was a couple times when like a menu wouldn't load or something like that but if you could just get into the gameplay itself,

it generally ran pretty fine. I think I've had three crashes. I think I've had about four. Yeah, I was going to say, they haven't been super prolific. But I mean, I have had a few. Ask me if any of that matters josh does that matter absolutely not democracy will be spread liberty must be spread throughout the galaxy by force oh i love that this game has a little bit of that bro force dna

with the humor i love nothing more than when a character gets to get on a turret and just start screaming while shooting all the robots or all the bugs oh it's so great yeah the game has technical issues i mean i don't think any of us are gonna say otherwise i've had a few crashes straight to desktop uh matchmaking continues to be an issue you can hit quick join It'll say it's joining and it'll say failed to join lobby. You got to do it 14 times in a row. And if you're lucky, it'll finally connect. And then hopefully you don't have any people griefing on the team. What about the accusations of the game being paid a win? Because I was shocked when I saw that because I would say

categorically this game is not pay to win but some people have levied that against the game yeah I can see where people are coming from but I know people also get real antsy when they uh see those battle passes and see those types of things where they not only come with cosmetics but they come with weapons so I do know one of our friends Andy was on and me and another guy were playing and he's like hey is this is this that gun that you unlocked with your with your battle pass or whatever and he's like yeah we're like this thing's freaking sweet man he's like this thing's awesome so I can understand where some people are coming from but I don't see it I mean you can still unlock all that stuff by playing the game so yeah just might take a little bit more work is all but who don't see it. I mean, you can still unlock all that stuff by playing the game. So yeah, just might take a little bit more work is all,

but who doesn't want to dispense Liberty throughout, you know, the galaxy. Yeah. I understand why people are commenting about a paid win, because if you are getting weapons that are stronger than your friends who didn't buy the premium edition, that seems a little off on the scales of balance. But listen, I mean,

people like to complain about really stupid things sometimes. And I think people just like to run with a certain narrative. And I just don't get it. I can understand the thought process, but if you have played Hell Divers and you understand what the game is and the fun that is had in that game, you are probably amongst the 99.8% of people that just go, I don't care. This game is fun. I'm having a great time with my friends, and I don't care that somebody has a gun that's slightly better than me. If they paid for it, fine. You can argue the nuance of pay to win and stronger weapons and things like that, but it just doesn't matter at that point. And the thing too is it's not like it's PVP where we're competing against each other.

We're PVE. We're all just shooting monsters or robots you know so it's it's it helps you like why would you be upset it's cooperative gameplay the better your squad mates are the better you are going to do and the more fun you are going to have so again stop it with the nitpicking of tiny little things in games, we saw this with Starfield when some random person discovered that if you run for 15 minutes straight, you'll hit an invisible wall. Nobody's doing that. There's not pay to win in Helldivers 2. This is not ruining the game for anybody. It's a non-issue. It kind of bugs me a little bit i'm not gonna lie again it's one of those things where i get the concept but in reality it doesn't matter to the game itself well and quite honestly a lot of people's favorite weapons don't even come from the premium battle pass and even if you do it's not pay to win you still have to grind out your medals to unlock it it's just a little bit of a shortcut it just makes it quicker but you can give those weapons to anybody. It doesn't mean you're automatically going to start beating all the levels on hard. I mean, you can give really terrible players the best weapon,

the quote best weapons. If you're still dropping Eagle strikes and not calling them out, you're going to fail anyway. So it's not even pay to win. So I don't like them even using that phrase. In regards to the anti-cheat, I mean, look, people get all up in arms. My biggest issue with anti-cheat is when companies are not forthcoming about it. When they add Denuvo four hours before release, that's what I take issue with because it seems like a cover-up. But anti-cheat itself is just needed in games. And people have a lot of heartburn over the fact that Helldivers 2 uses N-Protect GameGuard because it has kernel level access to your games. Well, I actually did a little bit of a deep dive into the history of anti-cheat software.

Long story short, the whole reason this exists is that cheaters started using cheats that appeared as device drivers. And so anti-cheat software couldn't touch it. It was almost like cheats were on God mode because you can't touch the drivers. So the anti-cheat people said, well, either we just have cheaters everywhere or we have to launch anti-cheat as device drivers so we're on an equal battleground so look is it a perfect system do i like giving access you know from the kernel level to anti-cheat no i think it's better than games being ruined i think cheating is the worst thing you can introduce to a game so i don't know all in all i kind of feel like

that stuff doesn't really matter and by the way, the positive rating now on Steam has climbed to 76%. I think it's only going to keep going up. I mean, everyone we know has enjoyed the game, right? I have not heard a single detractor, to be honest with you, on this game at all. I mean, that's pretty crazy. I mean, usually there's the people that go, this game sucks. I tried it. I don't see what everybody's raving about. I've not seen that anywhere. I mean, you know, surely this game is not for everybody. I tried to convince my daughter, you know, I was like, come look at this game. So much fun. And she was like, yeah, that's not my kind of game, dad. And I just went, where have I failed? You know, is this the daughter who only plays arc? Yeah, they're just not enough dinosaurs

yeah exactly so you know so i get it it's not for everybody but for those that have tried it and played it the the appeal seems to be pretty universal yeah the discord server's just been bumping it's non-stop who's playing is anyone on and i just keep seeing people in the voice chat everyone keeps hopping on and asking who's coming when they're playing. It's been super active, at least for everybody I know. We've just been waiting so long for a fun shooter to play together.

I'm just so glad it's here. All right, before we hit our next story, we do want to let our listeners know about how you can support us through Patreon. If you like what we do and want to be a part of keeping our show afloat, you get bonus episodes, you get a shout out on the show.

If that sounds interesting to you, please consider signing up, even if it's just a month or two on Patreon. Starts at just five bucks a month. It's well worth your time and money. You can check it out at MultiplayerSquad.com. All right, next story of the week, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I mean, this game is a big deal and it's coming out in just a couple weeks it won most anticipated game at the game awards and they have a live demo

that can be played on ps5 josh of course famously you do not have one you were not able to check it out uh ryan and i did both play i know that neither ryan nor i consider ourselves to be final fantasy fanboys ryan even let out a little bit of a sigh when i said can you go check out this demo so i'm very curious to hear your thoughts ryan what did you think about the rebirth demo i thought the world was beautiful and. Yeah, it was just gorgeous. And then it was a Final Fantasy game. That's about it. No, I thought it was good.

I just, just like Josh said with his daughter, I'm just not a Final Fantasy guy. I'm sure it's going to get all the accolades in the world. I'm sure it's going to be absolutely amazing. I'm sure we'll probably have to deep dive it um for all you great listeners out there but it's just from what i played it was really good and i i did enjoy the characters i enjoyed um kind of some of the the world again it was beautiful it's just not my type of game so the funny thing is i was much higher on final fantasy 16 than either of you i enjoyed it quite a bit yeah this game looks just as good if not a little bit better the music is fantastic i will say it was a lot of fun because i was i never liked final fantasy when it was more turn-based

but i do remember having fun playing seven back in the day and swapping out materia and experimenting with all that. You have that in spades right from the get-go. They're throwing materia at you left and right. You can immediately start tinkering. Like, do I want to add another ability or do I want to use this materia that makes the materias next to it more powerful? And you start swapping stuff in and out i will say i wasn't crazy about the flashbacks with tifa in the very skimpy cowboy outfit i don't know how you felt ryan as a 39 year old it felt a little creepy yeah it's yeah well those they always try to i was telling my wife i'm like yeah that's tifa that's a big time cosplay girl that a lot of a lot of people cosplay she's like why i'm like well look what she's wearing so yeah i i i saw it too and um yeah the flashbacks were not my favorite part of the demo well literally the whole demo is flashbacks of cloud talking about

sephiroth and kind of how he goes bad um josh hilariously you played the final fantasy 7 remake and ryan and i did not and here we're playing the demo of part 2 which you didn't play uh do you want to offer any thoughts on the remake or do you have any questions for us i the so we were chatting a little bit about this before we started recording i really enjoyed final fantasy 7 remake now did both of you play the original Final Fantasy VII? I played a little bit of it, but I was never big on turn-based games, so I never really played much. PlayStation 1 days.

Yeah. I mean, for me, Final Fantasy VII back in the day was one of the greatest games ever made. I mean, it still ranks up there in a lot of people's lists. It's a little strange for me because of my fond memories of that game, I was a little hesitant to even want to play the remake because it was like, nothing's going to touch this. This is just going to be a disappointment to me. And I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the remake. And then I just kind of forgot about Rebirth coming out. And then even when it was announced, I just didn't get excited because I was like, well, I don't have a PlayStation. I'm probably not going to wind up playing this. I already know the story and the game. And again, I think it's

that same, like, I don't want to compare it to the Final Fantasy VII of old because that's not really a fair thing to compare. You know what I mean? And so I have not been hyped for it, but that has nothing to do about the game itself. It's my own weird, like I don't want to compare this to one of my favorite games of all times in my memory. But then more news has started coming out, you know? And it's like, there's been more videos, and there's been the hype trains getting rolling and then i just went dude final fantasy 7 remake was great like i had a ton of fun playing that and it seems like rebirth is going to be a huge step forward and that is like

how i can't ignore it anymore man and then when then when Paul was like, guys, we're probably going to have to deep dive this. It was like the switch just flipped in my brain and I went, wait, am I going to get to play it? And it's like, I just instantly, then it's like, oh man, I don't need another game to get all excited about. It's been a wild year already. I can't believe how good 2024 has been.

The combat and the cut scenes are so cinematic. It looks so good. And I don't know if this was in the remake or not, but they have all these abilities that are like synergized abilities with two characters or like these limit abilities that are like these ultimates that are just so fun to do. I will say that weirdly,

the biggest criticism i've seen of the game are the outlines of the ledges that you climb like you know how those were all really yellow ryan yeah yeah people are like kind of up in arms about that people hated that in resident evil 4 because you know you could bust open the boxes like with your knife and it might have like a green herb or whatever in the remake they put that like yellow stripe on it so you know it's breakable and people didn't like that and so a lot of people complained about that here and i saw a funny quote where people said gamers want to be handled but they don't want to know that they're being handled and i thought that was funny so some people felt like it's tweaked a little too high to make it obvious where to climb i will say ironically i didn't care about the yellow stripes but the climbing

is very slow i wanted it to be more like assassin's creed let me like pull myself and leap between the jump ledges um really that's my only well i guess my other complaint is what ryan what was the deal with the the mako vacuums where you couldn't activate an elevator until you vacuum the mako gas yeah i don't i didn't understand that at all i don't get it yeah it's it's yeah those things into the the climbing stuff too is like you know unlike god of war you have like the little glyphs up on the walls and stuff so you're like yeah okay but the second you walk to an area you're like wait where do i go where are they at you know and then you start to freak out so yeah like they don't want to know you got to walk that fine line of how you know how to to guide everybody it was the remember

evil west and that was one of my complaints is like the white just glowing glimmering chains and i was like guys i am not blind i can like can see that. I do like how God of War did it. Like the yellow paint on a ledge is another good one where it's subtle, but it's there. That, I think, is a very good compromise in that regard. So how is combat? I mean, I didn't get to play the demo, but I feel like combat is enhanced because now you have the combo skills that you can do with the two characters, which looks really cool. And it's different for each combo of characters which i thought was really neat um and i like that it's not it's like it's kind of live action combat but where you can

pause it's like a hybrid system almost um how did you guys feel about that like what did it feel good was it what are your thoughts on that almost identical to final fantasy 16 yeah and and honestly it's a little hack and slash if we do end up deep deep diving it i'm gonna pump up the difficulty immediately because i didn't even come close to dying once in this demo yeah but i still highly recommend people checking it out i think it's just i'd rather a game be too easy and let me bump up the difficulty than starting out too hard. So that's the only thing I would say. You mean you don't want to fight a boss 30 or 40 times? Yeah, you guys are weird, man.

Preferably not. Then again, I didn't like one-shotting everything in this game either. But yeah, it's still, it was a lot of fun. I think I might be becoming a Final Fantasy fan, which I did not see coming. Well, I will say this. I mean, if there was ever a Final Fantasy that has the DNA to make a fan out of somebody, it's Final Fantasy VII. So I think the idea of

making Ryan play this and then seeing what his thoughts are kind of excites me because it's like, if you don't like this one, you're just like you said, and that's okay. You know, like to just say, hey, I get that it's a great game. It's just not my kind of game and that's totally understandable but i am very curious to see if it can like win him over it it was weird as someone who didn't play i played a little bit because everybody had that game when you know i was a kid um but even though i really didn't put a lot of time into it it was still nostalgic to see like cloud and sephiroth and you see the big sword and tifa and stuff so it was weird it was oddly nostalgic for someone who didn't even play the game because they're so iconic those characters are just everywhere you know and like i said they still get cosplay today and then they're they're obviously remaking the game all these years later

so yeah it's got the pedigree i think the game is going to be a huge hit i i'm i think it's going to be a game of the year nominee and i'm basing that on a very short 90-minute demo. All right, well, let's go and take a break. And then we'll come back and share some of our thoughts on the Steam Next Fest. This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy. We always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships, but it's just as important to focus on the green flags. If you're not quite sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify those qualities so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others.

BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online, and sign-up only takes a few minutes. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H- BetterHelpHELP.com. All right, guys. Steam Next Fest is back. I know that we are big fans of this. They do these, I believe, three times a year. If anyone doesn't know what Next Fest is, it's where you can hop on PC and Steam gives you access to hundreds of demos for all these upcoming games. Devs get to break down upcoming games. You get to watch them play.

You can test it out yourself. And it's probably best if we start out with Pacific Drive. Because that is a game that we have really hyped in the past. I know all three of us got a chance to try it out. I will say, I was almost a little underwhelmed only because I had already watched video footage of everything you get to play in the demo, but it did still make me laugh because the first time I got out of my car, it started rolling downhill because I didn't put it in park. But I had a total blast playing it anyway, even though I already knew what was coming up. What did you

guys think about Pacific Drive? I did that when I first went into the repair shop. And then it popped up and it was like, kick? I was like, oh, I can kick. I kicked the bumper and my car just rolled all the way out of there. And I was like, oh, no. I love it. I loved just the vibe of the game. It felt almost like our early 2000s, like Half-Life 2 style kind of graphics look to it.

And then just the way the atmosphere, the environment environment the guys yelling at you over the radio and um just yeah i'm honestly i'm really excited to mess around with it and play it some more it was um yeah all the different features the upgrades you can do to your vehicle it was it was really neat and it was more than i actually expected that was kind of my takeaway was there's more to this game than i thought there was gonna be yeah um some of the inventory systems and the crafting systems and like the car upgrades and the the stuff like that i was like dude this is kind of in depth man and then you get into like you're in your garage and then you can make like these attachments for your car but you have to go into a special crafting room.

And I just there was kind of system upon system upon system. And I went, this is not what I expected. I love the driving around on the roads and you're just in this empty world and there's these weird things going on. There's rocks floating in the air and there's some weird alien robot thing that's flying around. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure I don't want to go near that thing because it was called a... What was it called? Not an abductor, but a reclaimer or... I can't remember the name, but it was obviously bad. It was like, okay, well, I don't want that thing to get near me. It was patrolling the road.

Yeah. And it was just like the... I like the idea that you're getting in and out of your car a lot. I thought it was hilarious. At one point, I got in my car in a hurry and then it wouldn't move. And I was like, what is going on? And then I realized you have to manually turn the key. And then I was like, okay, this is cool. Because in a panic, which is going to happen, you have to remember to like get in close the door

turn the key put it in drive like at one point it started raining and i couldn't see and it's like hit your windshield wipers and the wipers go and it like clears your windshield for a second depending on how heavy it's raining and i was like dude these are all super neat touches um i am very excited to see where this game goes. They didn't give you a ton of the supernatural elements. I think this was more to kind of show off, you know, storage and the upgrades that you can make to your car and how you repair your car and the preparations you have to make, like with like bringing a spare tire and extra gas and things like that. So I think it was focusing a little bit more on like the survival elements. So if they really

expand the supernatural part and the story portion of it, I think this could be a legitimately really good game. I mean, I was very pleasantly surprised by what I saw in the demo, and it definitely made me want to see more of this game. Well, and I just love that some of these games are coming out that are so much fun that aren't triple a titles yeah like hell divers 2 is incredible they nail the vibe and the feel of the game and pacific drive is very similar i mean there is some stuff that might drive some people crazy it doesn't bother me at all but i loved just taking a wrench and like smacking a wheel three times then it just poof it's a perfect

wheel yeah and i'm like okay some people are really gonna hate that i don't mind at all because the gameplay seems to be so good it was far more complicated and in-depth than i thought it would be because they tell you like go get all this uh material to build something i don't remember the name it's been a few days since i played the demo and you needed to get like gears, but then it told me I had all the mats I needed, but I had no gears, but that's because I had to go to the back of my car and you can turn scrap into gears. But then sometimes you had to craft stuff back at the garage. And so it was, it was, it was very fun in the demo just to learn the systems. I felt like kind of like you were saying, Josh, it's more to give you the vibe and the idea of the game.

I think it's shaping up to be a lot of fun. I know we're going to be picking that one up here in just a few days. Yeah. I'm excited for it too. We, we had a moment where we were really torn between Nightingale and Pacific Drive. And I think the demo of Pacific Drive really sold us on.

This is the game that we're going to cover. Maybe we'll get to Nightingale down the road sometime. But I mean, the demo was good enough that it really kind of solidified the deal for us. So Josh, I saw you played like six or seven demos from the Next Fest. What else stood out to you other than Pacific Drive? Next Fest for me is like just a kid in a candy store. I mean, I get to try so many different things. You guys were funny because you're like, well, I tried this demo and this one. And I'm like, I listed like eight that I tried. Yeah. I mean, we don't have enough time for me to really get deep into them.

I will say there is a roguelike card game called Bellatro that is based on poker. So you are playing poker with a lot of modifiers and stuff. One of our real life friends, Steve, was the one that had introduced me to this at least and was raving about it. I looked at a video and I went, you're crazy. And then I was like, you know what, let me give it a try. And I will say there is something to it. It sounds goofy, but the fact that it has Texas Hold'em as its heart of the game really does make it interesting. Stormgate, we've talked about this one. This is for all you Warcraft, Starcraft fans out there. It's made by the devs that initially made those games. It felt very, very similar.

I mean, almost so much so that it really felt like I was just playing those games, but with a different skin on some of the characters and stuff. The weird part to me on that is the only mode you could play is a 1v1, where you're facing off against somebody else. I am admittedly terrible at RTS games. And so while I'm poking around the map and trying to build, you know, a building or something like that, all of a sudden within the first four minutes of the game, here come nine soldiers

from the enemy and just absolutely obliterated my base. And I was like, okay, okay, come on now. So I played another round and guess what happened? I'm poking around. I managed to make like a second building and then here comes 10 guys. And I'm like, Oh, come on. You're getting Zerg rush. Yeah. Like just instantly. And I was like,

okay, well this is why I don't play real time strategy games, but it seemed very good. It was very polished. I think that's going to be a great game when it comes out. Dungeon born, which is a, like a first person dungeon crawler crawler PvE VP extraction game. I don't know how many genres

we can throw at something. That one was quite interesting to me. It felt a little rough around the edges, but it was very neat to go crawling through this dungeon. Of course, I played a rogue, so I had my two daggers and I could backstab stuff and I could stealth, but there's other people in the dungeon at the same time. Now I didn't come across anybody alive, but there was a good variety of monsters and you're trying to find gear and then you have to extract through a portal kind of thing. I think it needs some polish, but the idea is sound and it, it really harkens to my love of like D&D. So there's definitely some potential there as well.

Can I say one thing about that real quick? Yeah, of course. Can we just stop naming insert thing born here? Yes. Everything is... How many born? Dragon born. Dragon born.

Starborn. Starborn, yeah. Dungeon born. Yeah, that one's weird, but don't know i guess it just it's familiar to people maybe but i'm with you it's kind of overdone at this point um so this next game is called gate born no i'm just kidding it's called gatekeeper uh this felt a hundred percent like a 2d risk of rain i mean almost exactly down risk of rain one yeah basically i mean almost exactly down to like the character models um the art style is you would swear it was made by the exact same

people like honestly it was that close this one was actually a little underwhelming to me because the combat was a little bit slower paced um and it just felt like i i just like, I just wish I was playing Risk of Rain in this case. Like it seemed polished and it seemed good. So if that's your kind of game, like it might be well worth checking out. I mean, I didn't hate anything about it by any means, other than that the combat just felt a little slow. But again, for me, it was like,

I just would want to play Risk of Rain instead at that point. Or even waiting for Hyper Light Breaker, whatever that's called. Hyper Light Breaker. Yep, exactly. The only game I wanted to bring up that I had tested out that I thought was a lot of fun is Children of the Sun. So I ran across an article that called it a puzzle sniper game, which i said say no more i love puzzle games i love sniper rifles sign me up i i stopped reading the article and i instantly downloaded the demo

very cool idea pretty simplistic game basically you're just someone who is trying to snipe and kill everyone who is in a cult called children of the Sun. And what happens is they're at these little encampments and you can run around the outside edge and you mark where all the enemies are. And then you have to pick them all off with one bullet. But kind of the thing is when you shoot someone, it's kind of like a magic bullet. If I shoot it and kill someone, now the bullet stops right there and the game slows down into bullet time now i can aim and look around and shoot someone else i can aim shoot someone else but it's one bullet so as long as you never miss you try to kill everybody but then they start throwing all these extra little mechanics

at you like well now you can control the bullet kind of like the movie wanted with angelina jolie yeah the curve bullets. And then you can like blow up cars. So that doesn't count as a miss, you know, cause it'll blow up people nearby. And then when you beat it, there's a worldwide leader for the number of points.

So like how fast you killed everybody, if you got any multi kills, stuff like that. I thought it was actually really clever and a lot of fun. I mean, it's, it's it's gonna have to be like a 10 15 game um but i thought that was really cool to check out interesting

something for change of pace yeah i like the idea of like yeah who's ever who in the world has ever heard of a sniper puzzle game not me yeah that's why i got excited pa Paul's like, say less, baby. Paul loves these really obscure, like odd games, but I actually did see a trailer for that. And I, and I could have sworn I heard some people talking about it too. So apparently there's something there or it's just some creativity of like, you know,

the fact that somebody was able to mesh these two things together and actually make it fun, you know, is, is a cool thing to experience. Yeah. It's a pretty cool idea. I'll be on and I'm, make it fun you know is is a cool thing to experience yeah it's a pretty cool idea i'll be on and i'm you know doing some work or something and it pops up paul's playing blah blah blah and i'm like what i don't even heard of this game what is he playing oh that was like before it even got popular um cult simulator i remember josh and i

talking about that you know a couple years ago oh i'll pick up the weird ones and check them out for sure. All right. And then our last story of the week, we'll do this one relatively quickly. Assassin's Creed Nexus VR. Now, this one came out a few months back, released in November. We did talk about it on one of our This Week in Gaming episodes. We all agreed it seemed like it had a lot of really cool stuff. Now, both of you famously

get really bad motion sickness with vr so the idea of running around as seo or the other characters uh doing parkour on roofs and jumping hundreds of feet in the air probably was never going to be in the cards for you guys no I did not pick it up because there's just too many games on our list. Like I've got a bunch of games waiting for me. This one's just not exactly at the top. Well, the game actually got fairly decent ratings, especially as far as VR goes. It's a 78 on Metacritic. User scores are very high, 8.9 out of 10, but the game did not sell particularly well. Ubisoft even came out and said that the numbers were so disappointing that they are not looking into increasing their

investment into vr at this time so i kind of wanted to ask you guys like why do you think this game didn't do well because we all agreed that it looked great do you think it's just too many people get motion sickness is this assassin's Creed fatigue? Are people just not as hyped about VR these days? Like, what's going on? Probably it's a combination of, you know, all of it. It's, you know, the market's going to dictate what's going to happen. So, obviously, as the technology progresses and it becomes a cheaper one and then more readily available and easier to use easier to uh set up and for people who are you know maybe a little have a little trouble setting those types of things up

but i i think those making that transition to get people to go from what they've done for 20 30 years as far as sitting on a couch and playing a game to doing the VR. It's just going to take time. So maybe they're just kind of, let's just backpedal, not dump a bunch of money in this, let the technology catch up, maybe the market catches up to this, and then we can really heavily invest into it. Yeah, I think some of it is definitely related to VR. Even us, you know, I mean, we game all the time. We have all just said, I play my VR for like a week and then it sits on a shelf for six months at a time. VR can feel like work sometimes.

Like I think it's incredible at times, but there's definitely times where it's like, I don't want to stand up and have to play a game and flail around. And like, I just want to sit in my comfy chair at my desk, kick back and just relaxing and playing something. And so I think there's times when VR just doesn't sound like that. I'll be honest, I'm not sure that they did a great job marketing this game either. Yeah, I agree.

I think honestly, we are very obviously up to date with news and we're digging into gaming news and releases and stuff like that. But I don't think I saw any kind of advertisement for this game at all. And the one that I did was directly tied to like the meta quest three, which, you know, none of us have. So it's kind of like, oh, well, I can't even play this game because I don't have a meta quest three. So I think they didn't really do themselves any favors in marketing this game. And honestly, Paul, I mean, you kind of touched on this earlier before we started recording is I think there's just some fatigue with Ubisoft games and. Assassin's Creed Mirage came out and people really liked it. And we saw articles where they said, hey, we're going to go back to our roots and we're going to make fun games again. And it's kind of like, well, what the heck have you guys been doing

for the last five years? Because it's obviously not making fun games at this point. So I do think there's a little bit of fatigue there as well. I mean, Ryan, you kind of said it. I think it's a culmination of a lot of different factors. I mean, as a VR game goes, we all thought this game looked really good. So according to the user reviews, it is pretty good. So it's either that VR is just not super mainstream, or they did a bad job marketing it, or it's a bad game. Well, it doesn't seem like it's a bad game. So at at that point it kind of points to one of the other two yeah or maybe everyone's saving up for

their apple provision yeah i don't know i don't know you guys my tiktok feed is giving me people pulling up to like curbs and getting out of their car wearing them and walking around and it looks it looks so stupid i think i think it I think it's incredible tech. But the fact that you see people getting out of their cars wearing them is like, all right, come on now. Don't be wearing these in public. Wear it at home. Yeah.

All right. Well, I think that wraps up everything in regards to this week in gaming. We want to say thank you to everyone for joining us. If you'd like bonus episodes and other perks, like getting all our episodes ad free in a day early go check it out at multiplayer squad.com you can find us on socials at video gamers pod and please take a second to rate us five stars and if you have an iphone you can leave a written review thank you so much and until next time happy gaming gaming. Together for liberty!

For democracy! See you, everybody.