Underdogs Review (【=◈︿◈=】Faux)
For a long time I would have said all the VR games worth playing were already long released, however Underdogs proves that there is still so much more that can be done in the VR space.
From a wider perspective, VR imposes a ton of limitations onto making games. They require more computational power to run than normal games, so you either have to limit the scale of experiences, compromise on performance, or hope that your player base has a beefy enough PC to run the game. Then you have aspects like locomotion - an analogue stick is intuitive for motion and turning in flatscreen space, but expecting it to be as intuitive in VR space isn't an assumption you can take.
Underdogs overcomes these limitations beautifully. The stylish, gritty, comic-book adjacent look of the world and the game means you don't have to compromise on scale or experience, the art style (despite being relatively simple in terms of actual gameplay) works really well especially with the lighting choices, so you never lose the suspension of disbelief. Secondly, the way you move in the game is so incredibly elegant. You operate a giant gorilla mech, so your arms double up as both weapons and the method of moving around. That one design choice opens up an entire world of interesting mechanical depth. It means you have to be careful with your strikes because if you commit to using both arms for an attack, you can't move. If you lose an arm in combat, you have to rely on a single arm to both move and fight with. If you use one arm to move, you can combine the movement and swinging of the other arm to add a ton of momentum to your attacks.
Although my current time on Underdogs is short, and it only took a couple of runs before I was able to finish the game on the easiest difficulty, I am unable to stop gushing about some of the design decisions and their implementation into the game. The game is engaging and fun, and always presents problems to you which have multiple interesting solutions without severely punishing you for previous decisions - your ability to fight and win is mostly limited by your creativity in problem solving, and there's no other way a great game could do it.
The overwhelmingly positive rating is truly well deserved, and my only wish is that they are able to expand on the backdoor run style of map and continue adding new weapons/ content to the game. If they can figure out a way of doing that and turning the game into a Gunfire Reborn style exploration action roguelike, I would happily put this game alongside the big 3 VR games - HL:A, BeatSaber, and Blade and Sorcery.