Unseen Diplomacy 2

The original Unseen Diplomacy was one of my go-to experiences to show other people my VR headset for years. It was only a few minutes long, lacked a lot of visual polish, and required an obscenely large VR space that required me to play it in my living room, but it was one of the very few VR games around that felt like it was genuinely made for room-scale instead of relying on teleportation or joystick movement. I always thought that its movement redirection system would surely catch on and be used by more games, and now almost 10 years later I guess one finally has. Unseen Diplomacy 2 is a lot more user-friendly; you don't have to have a huge open space, and you don't have to get on the ground and crawl through vents if you don't want to. But in both cases, the more you are willing to do so, the better the game gets. There are new options to move around with traditional VR movement controls, but if you have a big enough space the entire game can be played with just your body. Everything you interact with is made to be immersive, with very few "press A to use" moments and lots of funny features like the blowgun letting you blow into the microphone to use it. One of the levels I played had a big web of cables that I could snip one by one to make a clearing to physically step through, and one was full of wine bottles I could grab and use to tip cameras upward for a bit. Searching rooms for intel and squeezing into tiny elevators without ever having to worry about your VR boundaries is even more fun now than it was in 2016, and it feels immersive on a level I think a lot of Quest-era VR games have lost since then. This unfortunately isn't an option that's available for everyone since it requires so much empty space, but if you can spare the room I highly recommend it. It's a little bit rough around the edges every now and then given its Early Access status, and there have been rare moments where I've gotten softlocked and had to restart the game. But if you have a big VR space, you've gotta try this. It's bigger, flashier, and cooler than the original tech demo was, and 10 years later it is still very, very fun crawling around like a stealthy little worm in the middle of an empty room.

Inventive, fun, gorgeous sharp & clear art style. Vibesy music. Love all the gadgets. I'm playing with a full tracked space and RL movement and BOY HOWDY my 41 year old knees feel every single time I go down to the floor lol. This game is the physical therapy by body needs :-P

The idea of a game with complete freedom of movement and rolling around the floor with helmets under lasers is more suitable for autonomous use, but I'm still glad that I can have such a game in my Steam library, I didn't bother with setting up the floor space and looking for a room with a free 2 by 2 meter space, as the game asks, because you can choose to move on the button, you will understand the essence of the game anyway: we are going down in a capsule-lift to a secret randomly generated mission, where each location fits into those same 2 meters, but can have several floors with stairs, you will find nice comic graphics here, crawling through ventilation on your knees, finding codes, ability to cutting wires, unscrewing nuts with a screwdriver, scanning the retina, and other tools with a little clumsy mechanics, but this is Early access, and conceptually the game works, this is a big step for the developer, because the first part of the game looks more like a low-poly techno demo, it's even sadder that no one has noticed the game yet, but the entry threshold is really high. // Идея игры с полной свободой передвижения и катания по полу со шлемами под лазерами больше подходит для автономного использования, но я всё равно рад, что могу иметь такую игру в своей библиотеке Стима, я не стал заморачиваться с настройкой пола и искать комнату со свободным 2 на 2 метра простанством, как просит игра, ведь можно выбрать передвижение на кнопку, суть игры вы поймёте итак: мы в капсуле-оифту спускаемся на секретную рандомно сгенерированную миссию, где каждая локация умещается в те самые 2 метра, но может иметь несколько этажей с лестницами, вас ждёт приятная комиксная графика, ползание по вентиляции накарачках, нахождение кодов, обрезание проводов, выкручивние гаек отвёрткой, сканирование сетчатки, и другие инструменты с пока кривоватыми механиками, но это же ранний доступ, и концептуально игра работает - такая хорошая фитнесс-тренировочка получается, это большой шаг для разработчика, потому что первая часть игры больше похоже на малополигональную технодемку, тем печальнее, что игру никто не заметил пока что, но порог вхождения у неё и правда высокий.

[h1]Experienced on the Meta Quest 3[/h1] You can view my gameplay & early impressions here: https://youtu.be/8a9MaZXaCuE I think the core gameplay loop is solid. The foundation for a good game is there. However, I also have to admit that the experience still feels like Early Access. There's just an overall lack of polish in the experience, which can make the gameplay feel frustrating at times. I do have to confess that I did NOT play this game in full room-scale and I do believe the game is intended as a full room-scale experience. However, you can play seated. You have full locomotion (stick or button press), along with smooth or snap turning. It does have all the tell tale signs of a roomscale game though, with lots of narrow corridors and even tighter room spaces. I'm sure the game is a lot more fun if you're moving in your roomscale and crawling on the floor and all that jazz. However, stuff like using the spy tools is a cumbersome process due to the lack of polish. Just putting your tools back in your inventory can be quite the ordeal as you try several times to holster them back. Your whole upper body is a patchwork of different inventory slots which can be frustrating to navigate. On top of that, some items are clunky to use, such as the "blow pipe" which fires on it own or will fail to fire when you need it or will be difficult to aim with or will fall to the floor or fly off unto areas unknown. It doesn't help that the UI itself is clunky to navigate. Game is running on the Unity Engine. On my RTX 5090, I was getting mostly 90 fps, although I did have severe frame rate drops during scene transitions. Also, the entire screen would go black if I went out of bounds, which happened a few times without it being my fault. It was difficult to get in bounds once out. The game is fun when you're not frustrated by the overall clunkiness. [b]Rate 6/10.[/b] [quote]Please note: I received a free Steam key through the Steam Curator Connect program. If you enjoyed my review, please consider joining my Steam Curator group [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Oculus_WMR]Oculus Rift Reviews.[/url][/quote]

EDIT: Polish price was fixed, thank you. I bought HTC Vive on release and I loved the original Unseen Diplomacy. I hoped the sequel will be worth the wait. Unfortunately, price of this game in Poland is THE HIGHEST IN THE WORLD, the equivalent of 17.3€, while it is 14.99€ in Eurozone. Why? Developer's behavior is childlish and pathetic. They wrote "Realistically the game is already as cheap as we can make it across all currencies." Is it, though? They also offered this claim: "as a small team we simply don't have the time or resources to investigate each currency individually, we have to rely on what Valve thinks is appropriate." Source: https://steamcommunity.com/app/3634690/discussions/0/600790523214790346/#c598541076225264810 Ok, maybe they really are the little indie guys and really don't have "time or resources to investigate each currency individually"? Let;s check! Suprise! SteamDB data exposes their blatant lie - they manually changed prices in EIGHT currencies. Wait, what happened to having "the time or resources to investigate each currency individually" and having to "rely on what Valve thinks is appropriate"? They lowered the price in ultra-rich Switzerland by a whopping 22%, but could not lower it for Poland? Proof (see "Suggested price" column): https://steamdb.info/sub/1281151/ When I politely asked the developer about this on BSky, their immediate response was to block my account - they blocked me literally minutes after I asked. Real class. My post: https://bsky.app/profile/polishourprices.pl/post/3m7v4xrf5o226