Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone

“The main thing I dislike is the way the main missions are structured; it's the usual, scripted, and 'AAA' narration snooze fest with some computer hacking girl in your ear that doesn't provide much interesting dialogue.”

“Dialogue and story: this is honestly just a personal gripe but the dialogue to me is like AAA Ubisoft levels of corny, and some of the story just really doesn't make sense, like what do you mean we have full observation on this isolated house and can see everyone through thermal signatures but you couldn't seem to find the truck that left a few hours before the mission starts?”

“The story is nothing too special, you're a vigilante hitman who is like a watered-down punisher, no depth or character development, but this game isn't made for cinematic gut-wrenching storytelling.”

“Just from the first steps the game is very poorly optimized, I had very bad frame drops even after dropping my graphics settings to the lowest.”

“The VR optimization is terrible, the game averages around 15 FPS on low graphics with a 3060 Ti and 32GB of RAM. There are loads of bugs, especially with melee, but the performance makes the game unplayable unless you have a supercomputer.”

“In VR, it's downright unplayable at times, and changing the graphics from the highest possible to the lowest possible changes nothing.”

“While the game's core gameplay has potential, the systems behind it need a lot of improvement before being anywhere near the Half-Life: Alyx mod or what the trailers show.”

“The biggest control issue for me is the leaning mechanic. Enemies just swarm you like brain-dead zombies, death animations are random and don't match the physics of the situation, executions feel useless since grounded enemies pose no threat, and there is no actual hiding or sneaking mechanics because once you fire a shot, enemies will always know where you are no matter where you hide.”

“In the game you can pick up objects from afar, but the obligatory force draw mechanic sucks in this game: you need to be a certain distance away from the object and hold your hand in a very specific way to maybe pick it up. This is especially frustrating because the holstering mechanic isn't very good and your weapons will fall down a lot.”

“Starting up the game, it freezes.”

“Biggest elephant in room for now is performance and crashes, second is hands are floaty even when I disabled smooth hands, also have problem with grabbing things from the floor and mid air, magazines very buggy to grab.”

“Game is very buggy as I can not hold handguns with 2 hands without them stuttering and spaz-ing out, my guns and hands get stuck on objects and the knife combat is too janky to be fun.”

“The phone & audio in general: there's no separate slider that differentiates the soundtrack that plays when you don't have the music player, so you either have this very basic and kind of loud soundtrack whilst you're trying to be stealthy or listen for audio cues or footsteps, or no music at all, just pretty annoying. The phone is a very nice touch but it's only nice when the screen doesn't have a giant crack in it. To my knowledge, there's no way to fix the screen so when you're inside, especially with the lights on, you can barely see your phone screen. Also, if you die with your audio player still on with custom music, it doesn't stop when you die or reload checkpoints; it makes a weird lag sound and just continues without restarting or stopping the music.”

“I will however say that the music choices (besides the two classical music options) are pretty bad.”

“The game feels very sluggish, and at times the soundtrack blares way too much to hear the enemies coming in.”

“Considering it's a very early access build, replayability is kind of low, which upsets me more than the lacking content and can make the game more boring.”

“The game also holds your hand with a stereotypical agent Bond British chick in your ear telling exactly what to do, making the missions have no replayability.”

“Very hyped up and definitely enjoyable as an action game, but I felt it would be lacking in replayability so I decided to bail early and refund while I still could.”

“The game needs more atmosphere and better sound.”

“(I did encounter a bug with the post-process filters in the 'recording (VR)' section, where the effects also applied in my headset view rather than just the recording view.)”

“There is much to love here, atmosphere, you can upload your own music as well, so you upload the John Wick club OST and just start blasting.”

“The amount of time between boot and doing the one thing I want to do in this game is just tedious.”

“I don't know if this is how it works, but I'm guessing that when you bring a gun like a rifle or a shotgun it lowers your score, which to me makes it feel punishing to try to have fun, and I don't like the idea of grinding in this game.”

“A lot of grinding.”

“The story is nothing too special; you're a vigilante hitman who is like a watered-down Punisher, with no depth or character development. However, this game isn't made for cinematic, gut-wrenching storytelling.”