A gorgeous game, but definitely wait for a deep sale.
Hubris is a bit of a mixed bag. It completely nails the visuals and movement, but the combat and VR mechanics are pretty clunky. I had a good time with it overall, but honestly, don't pay full price for this. Grab it on a discount like I did.
Starting with the good stuff: the game looks absolutely stunning. The lighting and environments are top-notch, and I was stoked that I could run it smoothly on max settings. The story is completely forgettable, but let's be real, that's clearly not the main focus here anyway.
Where the game really shines is how you move around. I absolutely loved the climbing. The light blue highlights on the ledges are a great touch and make it feel super intuitive, even if it gets a little janky sometimes and your hand snaps to the wrong spot. Swimming feels great too, though I wasn't a huge fan of the Torpedo gun compared to the regular lasers. Also, contrary to what some other reviews say, I actually really liked the hoverbike section! It was easy to steer, and I honestly finished that part wishing there was more of it.
Sadly, the combat is a big letdown. The gunplay just feels weak, there's zero "oomph" when you shoot. The enemy AI is super basic and easy to wipe out, even on the hardest difficulty. The "heavy soldiers" are especially broken; you can just half-hide behind a pillar and they won't even shoot back, they just slowly walk at you and tank hits.
The reloading is way too dumbed down. You get infinite ammo, and reloading is literally just pushing a cartridge in. It's so fast that it completely kills the difficulty. I found myself just standing out in the open, not even bothering with cover. The two-handed aiming is incredibly annoying as well. Why can't I just use the dedicated grip button? Instead, the game makes you physically move your controllers close together to trigger it. It was super buggy for me on SteamVR (though it worked better on OpenXR via Virtual Desktop): sometimes my left hand would grab the gun, and sometimes it just wouldn't.
The weapon upgrades are kinda lame. Your starting pistol eventually turns into a shotgun and a machine gun, but levelling them up just boosts damage and ammo. There's no real excitement to upgrading since the guns look very similar. Plus, once you unlock the machine gun, you'll never touch the pistol or shotgun again because it just shreds everything in seconds.
Outside of combat, the inventory UI is pretty frustrating. My hand kept accidentally brushing against other menus when I just wanted to pull out an item. It gets incredibly annoying when you're trying to unload a bunch of crafting materials into the extractor. I really don't get why there isn't a way to just grab a handful of items at once.
Quick heads-up for Quest/Virtual Desktop players: Make sure not to use VDXR when playing this! If you do, Steam won't track your hours and your achievements will won't be tracked. I missed out on the first half of my achievements because of this and lost about 2 hours of playtime.
