Lavender

This "game" is the equivalent of a IKEA furniture that is missing a few screws and bolts and that you have to completely assemble by yourself without any proper instructions. The community just consists of disappointed VRChat refugees, you can always hear them complaining about "how things will get better with time". Save yourself some time and just make an empty VR Unity project with a mirror, it would be the same experience.Their website and description is hyping up this project as if it is the next big social VR game. There is absolutely nothing original about this. This is a pure cashgrab.The controls:What utter ♥♥♥♥♥ to play this with Vive wands. A simple touch on the trackpad sends you flying across the room. Vive trackers also seem not to work and there is no description on how to make them work.The UI:As soon as you start the game, you get greeted with the default Unity message and get thrown into a green scenery and a mirror. From there on, you're on your own. You are also not allowed to log in unless you link your steam account.The SDK:It is just barebones. You make a unity project, you set an avatar component on your model, define the visemes, viewpoint, click a button and take the exported file to their website and upload it.Simple enough, though again, no working full body tracking, no eye tracking and it also tends to break certain models for some reason and there is absolutely no option to debug. Everything about it is bugged.The pricetag on this junk is just the biggest middle finger and insult.

At the day i am writing this, is hard to say if i can recommend this game. This is not a negative review, but more like, " it has a lot of potential, but right now in it's current state we cannot appreciate anything ". People are comparing this to VRChat, when VRChat came out a few years ago and the content was made mostly by the community, also let me remind you that this project is made by only one person, I might give this game another opportunity in the future, and who knows, maybe it can be a mix between and be a better VRC with Garry's Mod elements, The best we can do as beta testers / users, is give advice and recomendations to improve it. But as how it is right now, i cannot recommend it, might change my review while i see the changes

People who got their keys through patreon distribution after supporting for months have their reviews marked as "free" so their reviews don't count. Brainlets who bought a game in its first release in early access stage are review bombing because apparently an early access project needs to be %100 out of the box. June needs to deliver and continue to work on the features and the better then vrchat project that was promised, but people should stop buying this and expecting it to be a fully fledged game. Each of these garbage reviews I have read has been from a person who previously followed the development of this, or knew the state of it to begin with, then bought it just to scoff and be disappointed, if you didn't like it to begin with why touch it. I am disappointed by the amount of people willing to act like hounds, preparing for the release to buy it review bomb it and refund it. I just wanted a proof of concept to be finished before I dropped a dime on it, never touched the patreon, and now I know the game exist, and I am willing to support it, but just the same, I am willing to refund it if this doesn't deliver on these expectations in the next year. I'll take my positive review down myself if he doesn't deliver, but some of you seriously should understand the developmental speed of a single man on coffee pulling all nighters with one or two people helping, give the man a break, and if you don't like it, review if from the perspective you really came here for or list what you really think. Reading these reviews saying it wasn't a magical sparkling unicorn out of the box has been like watching many of my favorite early access games all over again. Short sighted people expecting a fully developed product too early when the name of the program is literally (Early Access).

Alright, here we go. I waited a couple of months to see if they could do some patches to maybe fix the glaring issues with the game, or wait for the player base to rise up. But Judging from the fact the last patch came out 15 Dec 2019 and their peak player count last month on steam charts was 7 people I feel its safe to say this game is dead on arrival. It was going to be a massive uphill battle when most people will just compare it to VRChat. A game with about 3+ years of player content, a smoother experience, has a player base in the 1000s and is free. Which on the subject of free I still cant get my head around why the developer of this game would slap a price tag on a game this raw and unfinished. Here's hoping that my review ages poorly but to anyone hoping for an alternative VR Social game. save your money or you will be greeted to a world buggy, unfinished and empty.

Completely left to rot, last update as of 6/15/20 was in December of last year. Edit 5/25/23: reinstalled to see if anything changed, to me it is now completely unable to be played as it seems the camera is stuck

Any past developments are pretty much not relevant and right now nothing is certain. Don't buy it, wait for any updates in the future. Then consider getting it. [strike]This game was release as Early access and it was very rushed. Therefore it is buggy and not 100% working. But thats ok, its only eraly access after all. The most issues players reported are already fixed or being worked on right now. It runs at a good framerate of over 300 FPS on my PC in desktop and sticks to 90 constantly in VR, no issues. The SDK is almost on feature parity with VRChat and will get scripting support very soon. I have been following the development for a few months now and know that it is going very fast. Most features you see in game have been overhauled several times over the past month to get perfected and proper performant. Lavender is using Unitys brand new ECS and DOTS, wich is a completely different way of writing code. It is based on Enteties instead of GameObjects. From the last few days of testing the game has actually come to a quite stable and playable state. Many features are still missing and there are definetely still bugs. But its on a good way. I recommend joining the discord server https://discord.gg/fWHjNfg and seeing for yourself. You can see all changes and updates in #devblog. And talk to people and ask questions. I myself have been maintaining a custom UI for a few months now and post updates to it occasionally. You can also just ask me if you have some specific questions. Setting up avatars and worlds is very simmilar to VRC, if you are fammiliar with it. Props work almost the same aswell. For the games server client infrastructure... thats a bit different to VRC. but yea, look into the discord server and ask questions there. There are many people who are willing to help and explain. I have supported this game on Patreon and have gotten my key from there. I have basically paid 40$ for it by now.[/strike]

at 04 Jan 2020 - Funny tech demo.

I agree with many of the other comments. There is no reason to buy this game at this time. This game is poorly designed tacky piece of garbage. Games like this are the reason steam's Marketplace is known for content flips and poorly designed games. Early Access is a poor excuse to release this game in its current condition. This game is Dead on Arrival. Don't waste your money.

TL;DR: It has a couple good features, but is a buggy mess, had a bad launch, and I want a refund. I came into this hoping it would be a better VRChat, ( a game I have over 2k hours on, and even with VRChat's flaws I still think it's a good game compared to this.) but I was sorely disappointed when I first spawned into a world on launch day and first thing the keyboard that is supposed to control logging into a Lavender account (which HAS to be linked to Steam) didn't work, my avatar started spazzing out (pretty much described as spagettification (and yes, like a black hole)), had no eye tracking, emote system broken (on Vive controllers, just lightly pressing the touchpad moves you and also controls emotes), preview pictures on avatars not loading, sound overlapping, doubling over, clipping something awful, and the FREAKING VOICE CHAT DIDN'T WORK (because apparently it crashed)! ARGUABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE GAME! Once I was finally able to get into a world, the loading room which is a really cool idea in my opinion (you load in with everyone who is also downloading the map, like an elevator), there were so many people in this small elevator that the collisions start bugging out and your avatar spagettifies and you're looking around only to find it whizzing around the map at light speeds. I'm a very forgiving person, so I tried to look past most of this and try to find the good in it, since it is indeed EARLY ACCESS. So I put on my full body trackers, and after fiddling with it for a while to get them to work, I tried them out. They claim to have a "better IK" than VRChat. This is definitely not true. For one, my knees bent inwards, and since there are collisions with the floor, my ankles twisted sideways like I had broken them. I was walking around on my feet sideways. BUT! After all this, I found someone staring at a mirror oddly enough, and since there are collisions, I was able to stand on this person's hands and they were able to hold me up! How cool?!?! Although, you can pretty much do this manually in VRChat with playspace mover. After my session in VR, I decided to try desktop mode. One cool thing is that you can take your VR Headset off and play in desktop mode without having to restart the game. I thought this was really neat and VRChat really needs to do this. I thought it was a little better experience, but my avatar just started spazzing out again!!! So I restarted in "true" desktop mode without SteamVR running to see if it would fix the issue. NOPE! I loaded in, walked to the mirror, simply jumped and my avatar started spazzing out (like the pikachu with visemes on the body in VRChat). Would I recommend this? Definitely not in it's current state. For one, it was late on release. It was supposed to release in Nov 2019, then Dec 4th, and now we finally have it, like a week after it was supposed to release. But honestly, I feel it should have stayed in Beta for much longer before asking for money for this. I really wanted this to be an awesome game, because it was supposed to be the answer to most of VRChat's problems. I really hate that it had such a bad launch, but these issues I've described should have been noticed a LONG time before release. I mean I've played under 2 hours and I've mentioned numerous issues. I would think a developer that spends hours upon hours developing a game and testing it would notice these issues far before a consumer like me would. I really tried to be forgiving and support a good thing, but unfortunately, I think I will be requesting a refund, until it gets better. I may give it 6 months, buy it again and change my review. But as of right now I just can't recommend this. ESPECIALLY for 20 dollars.