It’s time to get back to Budget Cuts; Neat Corp just released a significant update to its original VR stealth title.
The Performance Update, as the upgrade is called, aims to bring many of the new improvements and features introduced in 2019’s Budget Cuts 2 to the original game. To do this, Neat ended up porting the entire original game to the sequel’s codebase. The results, Neat says, should include massively improved performance and bug fixes.
That last point is important, as it was bugs and AI issues that really brought down the original Budget Cuts experience for us when we first reviewed it. Enemy AI was all over the place, but Neat says its rewritten that system too. Hopefully we’ll see some big improvements, then, as we thought Budget Cuts 2 – co-developed with Fast Travel Games – was a big improvement.
Not only that, but this update introduces one of Budget Cuts 2’s own post-launch features – Mutators. These replace the difficulty modes and allow you to customize your experience in a number of different ways, including auto-assist for throwing weapons, bullet time dodging and, importantly, smooth locomotion.
That’s still not all, though; Budget Cuts 2 has a Performance Update of its own. It’s not as significant as the patch for BC1, but still includes important updates like the AI rewrite and new Mutators. To top it all off, both games are now on sale.
Elsewhere, the original Budget Cuts is still on for a launch on PSVR on May 15. However, Neat confirmed to us that the initial console launch won’t include the Mutator features as the game is too far along in initial development to port to a new codebase. That said, the team hopes to add these improvements at a later date and does include the performance changes.
