Budget Cuts, the long-awaited VR stealth game from Neat Corporation, releases in just a few days’ time on May 31st. The review embargo for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive adventure just lifted, though. Despite having spent a lot of time inside the game, we decided against publishing a review straight away. Why?
Well, simply put, there’s a lot of bugs, and some of them are too big to ignore. There’s a fun core game in Budget Cuts but, playing on Rift through SteamVR, we encountered bugs where objects would fly out of our hands, knives would stick to our heads when thrown, and even levels with regular hard crashes that, frankly, made progression a massive slog. Neat Corporation did warn us that there were bound to be bugs, but it’s hard to properly judge the game in its current condition. But the team still has a few days to fix some of these issues before you can pick it up, and it may well be that the Vive/Oculus Home experience differs from what we’ve tried, so it’s only fair.
Rest assured, when the game does work, we’re having a lot of fun with it. This take on VR sneaking isn’t perfect, but there’s a real rush to zapping through office spaces, keeping your head on a swivel in search of threatening enemies. We’re not quite ready to call Budget Cuts VR’s very own Portal, but there are some ideas here that remind us why we love this platform so much in the first place.
We’ll bring you our full review as soon as we can but we want to give Neat Corporation a chance to address the issues we’ve encountered before dishing out the final verdict. Stay tuned.
