Language Lab

So far, this is a cool game. The concept is great and really forces the brain to think. This is an early access review, so obviously things need to improve. A few bugs, for instance, lesson 2 the food would disappear and not return so you have to completely close out of the game and re-enter and restart the lesson which got annoying after the third time. So DEVS please add something where you can just go back to the menu to restart instead of closing the game all the way out. Definitely will need more material, and games in the future, but so far pretty cool. Lastly, I wouldn't allow any type of walking freely feature, it gets me dizzy real fast, I like pointing and teleporting for movement

Played on Quest 2 with Air Link I played two lessons and now know the word for carrot, so far no technical issues found. Game is repetitive enough to be annoying but actually useful for memorization. Definitely see myself playing a lesson or two a day. My only feedback is to add subtitles (in your target learning langauge), so you can know the characters that correspond with the words you're learning.

Have only played through some of the main lessons of Spanish, so far. Could be something special with more updates, it's just okay as it is right now, but it's obviously in early access. For the (current) price of free, though, there's really no reason not to check this out. As far as what this game does well, the devs have used VR to create a space where learning feels a lot more natural than the typical textbook, homework-y approach that is more common. Like the game says in its description, it aims to capture the way humans actually learn languages at a young age. I don't think this will get anyone into being genuinely fluent in any of the languages presented here, it's pretty basic stuff, giving you very simple tasks to get you started with vocab and grammar but that's not really a problem. I have a pretty rudimentary background in Spanish, and I felt that this was a really useful way to prop up and supplement what I am learning outside of the game. It's also more focused on understanding vs. actually speaking, but apparently speech recognition is on the way, so that could change. As far as problems I have with the game so far, maybe my biggest is that there are no subtitles available, as far as I can tell. In fact, I couldn't find a settings menu. This could just be me being dumb, and I will edit the review if this is the case. But without subtitles, it's can be difficult to follow along, combined with the audio being spoken at pretty much full speed. There's vocabulary that I had to look up later to make sure of how it was spelled; going off of just the game audio will mostly just leave you with a general idea of how a word is spelled or spoken. So, along with subtitles I would appreciate an option to have the audio repeated back slowly. Going back to the issue of no settings, that also means there are no graphics settings, and the game doesn't run amazingly. I don't have a particularly beefy rig, but most VR games I own can usually be played on medium settings with little to no problems. The game has very simple graphics and pretty small environments so it felt weird to be experiencing any sort of frame drops, but I'm sure this will be ironed out in the future. The controls can feel a little clunky too, but again, a lot of this stuff is probably going to change. But all that being said I think this could be a really valuable tool if it's executed well. Again, it's literally free at the time of this review. TL;DR: Really cool idea, but still has a ways to go. Great way to develop basic vocab and grammar, wide selection of languages too. Controls and performance could use some work, and there's some general quality of life stuff that I think could go a long way, but I'm very interested to see where this goes from here. No reason not to check it out.

I personally love this game and I do recommend it, but it has some major downsides. Positive: - Immersive - Work with full sentences instead of just words - Great way to build vocabulary and grammar understanding - Seems to be a real voice, or at least a high quality fake voice, as it sounds authentic to me Negatives: - You only get partway through the first level before they ask you for money to continue. It's weird because when they ask for money they say you get some of the stuff for free, yet it won't let you continue past that point. It should be more clear like, "You have reached the end of the free content, you must pay at least $9 for the first month to continue." It took me a little while to realize that I couldn't play anymore without paying. - Is a subscription-based game as opposed to being able to just pay for the game and be done with it. I paid $9 for 1 month and I'd guess that's my last month because I don't need a new subscription for a game that is so buggy and doesn't seem to get a lot of new updates. But if they'd asked for $30 or something I feel like I would have paid for it to get the full game. - Must know the language a little first - I feel like you need to come in with some language knowledge to get the most of this. At least for Mandarin Chinese. I don't think it would have been possible to play the game if I had no knowledge of the language to start. - MAJOR debilitating bugs. More info below. - I wish there was some moving life in there like a cat wandering around, a fish tank, something moving outside the window. It would be cool if when you turn on the TV or the laptop it put a picture on the screen or something like that, etc. You feel really alone in there - Would be nice to have more control over the sounds, like being able to pause the instructions, change the volume, etc. Bugs: - Biggest bug: Transportation is awful and inconsistent, which is too bad because you have to move around a lot. An extremely frustrating part of the game that keeps taking you out of learning and stuck fighting just to move across the room. - Another major bug is that it's difficult to grab things at times. The controller sometimes has to grab all around an item to pick it up. - Some items have inconsistent names. For example, the cushion from the sofa has two different words (at least in Mandarin), depending on whether you're holding it, or getting instructions. Perhaps it's that there are two words for the same item, but it feels like a bug and it's confusing to get instructions for one word and then when you pick up the cushions it's a different word. - In the shooting game, there doesn't seem to be a way to leave besides closing the game? - Also in the shooting game, it's not really a bug, but it's weird that the laptop is backwards so it looks like a black box, instead of facing you so you can see the keys and screen and know it's a laptop. - You get hints in the lessons when you're taking a long time to complete the objective, by making the items you're supposed to work with blink. However sometimes the wrong items blink which is confusing. For example in the first game (in Mandarin), the fireplace blinks at times even though you don't do anything with it. - There is a question mark in every level, which I assume is meant to show tips or instructions or hints or something. But when I click on it I get a blank box without any writing. So I know it sounds like a lot of bad, compared to the pros. However, it's so amazing to get to be talked to in Chinese and get instructions. It's nice to hear full sentences and have to understand what to do from it. I feel like I've learned a lot, and I have learned to fight with the controls to move around and do what I need to do. I am so thankful to the developers for this amazing game and idea. There really is nothing else like it, that I know of, that is immersive with Mandarin Chinese in VR. So thank you very much. I hope the developers understand I only listed all the bugs because I love the game so much and hope that fixing the bugs would make it more useful for more people so they get to experience this. My magical hopeful goal would be for the developers to connect the system to Google Translate voice-to-text and then check to see whether what Google hears matches what is supposed to be said. That way you could also say the words back and it would tell you whether Google heard the right words or not. Or just some other way to practice pronunciation. Anyways, thank you again to the developers. This is an amazing game and I hope that you will continue to develop it further.

My suggestion to the developers is not to force the player to travel across the room to put something away. Cool idea but it is frustrating. Most of my time was spent trying to move around while carrying objects and not learning.

Great idea. Will probably need some manual review for some languages to be really good.

"Language Lab" is not a game. Games contain meaningful gamelike interaction and game loops, which are absent in this software. Instead of being a game, "Language Lab" is a software application that a crap ripoff of Duolingo only without any academic qualifications, that the developer couldn't work out how to complete making, and only works in a VR tech demo mode. The application seeks to teach you other languages by letting you look at stuff in VR. Wow. I mean, there's so much garbage on the low end of Steam that... well... this fits in perfectly with all the other crap. For those unfamiliar with what actually makes something a game, a "game loop" describes the interaction and feedback a gamer has when playing a game. Tetris, for example, has a game loop where a random block appears, the gamer interacts with the block to position it, and then the game decides if that finishes a row or not, increases the players score if any rows were completed, then gives the gamer another block to position. Counter-Strike has a game loop where a player seeks another player, tests their skill against that player by shooting them or being shot, the computer rewards the player if they win, and then if the player survives, they repeat that loop. There's no loop here, no true interactive feedback. It simply is not a game, it cannot be "played". This has misleadingly been launched in the "Games" section of Steam instead of the "Software" section. This is a common mistake for developers who are new to Steam, or don't understand the difference between games and software which isn't a game. It seems this software published incorrectly as a game is simply lack of experience/knowledge of the correct process. Here's a link for the process to publish non-game software on Steam: [url=https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithPublishing?issueid=925]Steam Developer Help With Software Publishing[/url] It's unfortunate this process was not known about/followed, resulting in a software application being published in the wrong place. Publishing things which aren't games on Steam in the Games section as games is misleading to gamers and somewhat harmful, because it pollutes the Steam marketplace and takes away visibility and market exposure for genuine game developers who do the right thing and make games for gamers. There are no gameplay loops in this software, no "gameplay", no meaningful game like interaction. It's a software application and as such has no merits as a video game for gamers. Because of this, I cannot recommend this non-game software as a game to gamers. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the product peaked at [b]only 10 concurrent users[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB shows this peaked at [b]only 10 concurrent users[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.

i can now speak french fluently

First and foremost, no it's not perfect. But it's free and frankly despite not exploring everything it has to offer yet, it's already passed my expectations. Pros: -Varied content, lessons, and minigames to help keep the otherwise flashcard-like learning engaging and fresh -Material is likely to be encountered in everyday life, while also skipping over a lot of concepts that over-saturate language learning apps thanks to the focus on nouns. -Controls are intuitive if you've used other VR based programs/games -Entirely free, no content locked behind paywalls (that I can tell) Cons: -Voices are text to speech rather than actual humans or AI, causing some low quality pronunciations -Some objects are unrecognizable visually due to the very basic visual style -Text that shows what an object is called rarely actually shows properly on the screen, usually being cut off by some invisible barrier -Automatic hints are a little too frequent/overbearing -I was playing to learn Russian, and an occasional word was translated to something understandably similar rather than the actual noun (IE, "salad" instead of "lettuce")