Info about The Light Brigade:

Official game description:
Enlist in the ranks of The Light Brigade, humanity’s last line of defense, and journey through procedurally-generated battlegrounds as many times as it takes to free the souls of the fallen trapped within.
Realistic gunplay inspired by historical World War weaponry creates tense battles against increasingly difficult enemy soldiers, creatures, and bosses. In VR, aiming, shooting, and reloading bolt-action rifles, machine guns and pistols feels highly immersive and tactile.
Powerful light magic pairs beautifully with gunplay. From infusing your rifle's bullets with light magic to raining fireballs on enemy hordes, magic spells complement your rifle by adding more combat tools to your arsenal.
Start your run with a standard-issue rifle and loot for powerful attachments like explosive charms, poison gun barrels, tactical scopes, silencers, and more. If you fall to enemy fire, survive long enough to retrieve your fallen soul or lose your run progress to permadeath.
Cleanse the souls of the fallen to climb the ranks of The Light Brigade and spend rank points to upgrade your weapon, passive abilities, and spells. Unlock new player classes and gain access to new weapons, loadouts and play styles, adding even more variety to your runs.
Loot treasure chests and enemies during your run to collect an array of magical tarot cards, each with unique powers, buff/debuffs and passive abilities. Acquire stronger versions of these cards to create devastating stacking effects.
Infinitely procedurally-generated battlegrounds make each run completely unique, forcing you to traverse carefully through ever-changing hostile environments. Enemy soldiers lurk around every corner, so position and strategy is crucial for survival.
What led to the world's downfall? What do the Obsidian Forces want? Uncover these mysteries and bring the world back from the brink of total darkness before it's too late.
We've been hard at work on **future updates** and are currently in production on a wide variety of post-launch content. Given the modular design of our roguelike system, it is fun & seamless to continuously add more to the game. So expect new content in the form of new biomes/worlds, enemies, guns/weapons, unlockable player classes, attachments, online features, items, as well as general improvements to the user experience.
If you'd like to stay updated on our development, you can follow along by joining our Discord.

Release date: 22 Feb, 2023

Categories: First-Person Shooter, Virtual Reality, Roguelike, Procedural Generation, Character Progression, Weapon Customization, Card-based Gameplay, Strategic Combat


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Engaging & Replayable Core Gameplay (weight 0.99): Players consistently praise the game's fun, addictive, and challenging gameplay loop. The high replayability, driven by varied characters, levels, and upgrade systems, ensures long-term engagement and value.
- Exceptional VR Roguelike Shooter (weight 0.78): The game is frequently hailed as one of the best, if not *the* best, VR roguelike shooters available. Its polished VR implementation, satisfying gunplay, and depth are particularly noted in a genre often lacking quality titles.
- Satisfying Weapon Handling & Variety (weight 0.6): Reviewers love the game's diverse and well-designed weapons, emphasizing the satisfying feel, realistic weight, and impactful feedback. The variety encourages different strategies and keeps gunplay fresh.
- Immersive World & Sound Design (weight 0.3): The game's aesthetic, level design, and soundscape contribute to a highly immersive experience. Randomly generated levels ensure variety, while detailed sound effects and haptics enhance the tactile feel of the VR environment.
- Diverse Classes & Progression (weight 0.25): The game offers a wide array of classes, each providing unique playstyles and strategies. This variety, combined with a rewarding meta-progression system and unlockable content, significantly enhances replayability and player investment.
- Engaging Card Buff System (weight 0.07): The holographic card buff system is highlighted as a cool and impactful feature. These stackable, rarity-tiered cards provide random buffs that significantly influence gameplay and allow for powerful build customization.
- Dedicated Post-Launch Support (weight 0.07): Players appreciate the developers' ongoing commitment to the game, noting consistent free updates and optimizations even years after launch. This dedication fosters a positive community perception and enhances the game's longevity.

Common complaints:
- Unreasonable Difficulty & Frustration (weight 0.46): Players consistently report an unreasonable and frustrating difficulty curve, citing issues like low starting health, quick deaths, and enemies that scale with player level. This leads to tedious runs, unfair encounters, and a general lack of enjoyment, with many feeling the game is not fun or a waste of money.
- Lack of Content & Depth (weight 0.43): Many players feel the game lacks depth, variety, and meaningful content, especially for a roguelike. They describe it as simplistic, barebones, and repetitive, with little procedural generation and a limited number of levels, bosses, and gameplay mechanics. This leads to boredom and a lack of replayability after a few hours.
- Poor Weapon Handling & Movement (weight 0.28): A significant number of players find the weapon handling to be awful, describing guns as heavy, sluggish, and wobbly. This is exacerbated by slow movement speed when two-handing weapons, making strafing and dodging difficult, and contributing to an overall unresponsive feel.
- Limited & Unimpactful Upgrades (weight 0.23): The upgrade and attachment systems are widely seen as boring and ineffective. Most upgrades and attachments offer only minor damage increases, lack synergy, and do not significantly alter gameplay or provide meaningful build choices, making them feel useless and unrewarding.
- Repetitive Cover-Based Gameplay (weight 0.11): The core gameplay loop is often reduced to repetitive cover-shoot-cover-shoot mechanics. Players feel forced to constantly seek cover or use teleportation due to high enemy accuracy and lack of safe fallback locations, leading to a monotonous and unengaging experience.
- Weak Sniper Class (weight 0.1): The Sniper class is consistently reported as underwhelming and difficult to use, especially on higher difficulties. Issues include low fire rate, lack of starting scope, inability to reliably one-shot enemies, and loss of aim when cycling the bolt, making it feel significantly weaker than other classes.
- Frustrating Final Boss (weight 0.09): The final boss is a frequent source of frustration, described as a 'run ender' due to its bullet sponginess, high damage output (killing in 2 hits), and the combination of homing bullets with other enemies. Players also reported bugs preventing phase transitions or blocking altars.
- Ineffective Magic Wands (weight 0.07): Magic wands are largely considered ineffective and unsatisfying. Most spells do minimal damage, are inaccurate, and offer little utility compared to firearms, with only one wand (the barrier one) being deemed useful by some players.
- Problematic Teleportation System (weight 0.07): The teleportation locomotion system is criticized for being clunky and immersion-breaking. Accidental teleports due to joystick mapping, short cooldowns preventing rapid movement, and the system feeling 'ancient' are common complaints, especially for a VR title.

Gameplay feedback:
- Diverse Class System (weight 0.33): The game features multiple unique character classes, each with distinct weapons, abilities, and playstyles. Players unlock and level up these classes by purifying souls, which in turn grants points for permanent upgrades to weapons and perks.
- Progressive Difficulty & Replayability (weight 0.27): After completing the game on basic difficulty, more challenging modes are unlocked, increasing enemy health and map complexity. This, combined with semi-procedurally generated maps and varied loot, enhances replayability and encourages multiple runs.
- Methodical Pacing & Run Length (weight 0.26): Despite being a shooter, the game's pace is often slow and methodical, requiring patience and calculation. A complete run can take 1-2 hours, contributing to a significant overall playtime for unlocking content.
- Deep Upgrade & Customization Systems (weight 0.24): Players collect various enhancement elements such as weapon attachments (muzzles, crystals, charms, optics) and Tarot cards during runs. These provide stackable modifiers, magic effects, and special shots, allowing for significant customization and strategic depth.
- Core Roguelike VR Shooter (weight 0.22): The game is fundamentally a roguelike first-person shooter in VR, emphasizing repeated runs through levels, death, and progression. It combines fast-paced shooting with roguelite mechanics like temporary buffs and permanent upgrades.
- Strategic, Cover-Based Combat (weight 0.22): Combat is methodical and requires players to utilize cover, manage lines of fire, and make calculated moves. Going 'all guns blazing' is often punished, as death can occur quickly, encouraging a slower, more tactical approach.
- Challenging Boss Fights (weight 0.16): The game includes multiple boss fights with unique mechanics that demand strategic thinking. There are currently 3-4 distinct bosses that players encounter in a set order, with harder difficulties unlocking after initial completion.
- Souls-like Death Mechanic (weight 0.1): Upon dying, players enter a ghost state and must retrieve their souls from their corpse, similar to Dark Souls. All previously killed enemies in the area respawn, adding a layer of challenge and consequence to death.
- Ubiquitous 'Praying' Mechanic (weight 0.09): The 'praying' mechanic serves as a primary interaction method for almost everything in the game, from spawning at base and picking up items to retrieving souls and changing difficulty. It also provides temporary combat advantages.
- Linear Arena Progression (weight 0.08): Players progress through fairly linear arenas, clearing small stages of enemies. While maps have some procedural generation, the overall order of zones and boss encounters remains consistent across runs.
- Cryptic Lore & Story (weight 0.05): The game's story is presented cryptically, offering small bits of lore without a clear narrative, reminiscent of Souls-like games. Much of the world-building is left to player interpretation.
- Teleportation Locomotion Option (weight 0.05): The game offers a teleportation locomotion option, which players can use for quick traversal, flanking enemies, or dodging projectiles. It serves as an alternative to traditional movement and jumping.

Performance notes:
- Excellent Performance & Optimization (weight 0.11): Players consistently report that the game runs exceptionally well across various PC setups and VR configurations, including older GPUs like the GTX 1070. Many highlight its smooth performance and excellent optimization, making it one of the best-running VR titles they've experienced.
- Strong Quest 2 Compatibility (weight 0.04): The game demonstrates flawless performance and compatibility with Quest 2, even when using wireless connections like PrismPulse. Users report no issues when playing on this headset.
- Quest 3 Visual Quality (weight 0.04): On Quest 3 with a powerful PC (RTX 3080) and Virtual Desktop, the game delivers a visually impressive and sharp experience. The standalone Quest version also maintains good graphical quality.
- Pico Controller Issues (weight 0.04): Feedback indicates that Pico controllers require optimization, with specific complaints about imprecise aiming, particularly when using iron sights on the Pico 4 headset.
- Virtual Desktop Launch Method (weight 0.02): Users are advised not to launch the game from the 'games' tab in Virtual Desktop when using a Quest headset, as this can prevent connection to Steam.
- Game Crashes to Desktop (weight 0.02): One report indicates that the game frequently crashes to the desktop. This is a critical issue for the affected user, though it appears to be an isolated report in this feedback set.

Recommendations:
- Highly Recommended VR Experience (weight 0.59): Many players enthusiastically recommend the game, especially for VR enthusiasts, often calling it a 'must-have' or one of the best VR titles available. It's seen as a solid, enjoyable experience within the VR shooter genre.
- Worth Buying on Sale (weight 0.45): While many recommend the game, a significant portion suggests purchasing it when it's on sale, viewing it as an even better value. Some also note that its current state or price might be a barrier for a full-price recommendation.
- Potential for Future Updates (weight 0.44): Players see great potential in the game and express hope for future updates to add more depth, polish, and content. Some indicate they would return or recommend it more strongly if improvements are made.
- Assault Class Recommendation (weight 0.02): Players suggest trying hard to unlock or using the Assault class to improve the gameplay experience, particularly in dealing with 'sponge-y' enemies.
- Quest Version Preferred (weight 0.02): One reviewer specifically recommends the Quest standalone version over the Steam version, suggesting a potential difference in experience or optimization between platforms.
- Refunded Due to Issues (weight 0.01): One player returned the game and gave a negative review, indicating that despite a discount, the issues outweighed the enjoyment for them.

Other player notes:
- Strong Visuals and Audio (weight 0.19): Players consistently praise the game's aesthetic, noting its clean fantasy vibes, lovely art direction, and well-done sound design. The visual effects and overall polish contribute to an appealing and immersive experience.
- Desire for More Content (weight 0.15): Players express a strong desire for additional levels, bosses, classes, and lore. There's also interest in more weapon attachments, cards, and charms, indicating an appetite for expanded gameplay variety.
- Active Developer Support (weight 0.12): The development team is highly regarded for their continuous updates, bug fixes, and regular addition of new content. This ongoing support demonstrates a commitment to improving the game and expanding its features.
- Gameplay Mechanic Suggestions (weight 0.1): Players have specific suggestions for quality-of-life improvements, such as a crouch button, options for faster movement while holding two-handed weapons, and better management of inventory/belt items.
- Positive Core Gameplay (weight 0.08): The game offers cool guns and magic wands, with surprising historical accuracy in weapons. Players enjoy the class system and the core loop, with no major gameplay-hindering problems reported.
- Minor UI/UX Improvements (weight 0.06): Suggestions include better explanations for daily runs, clearer options, and a more consistent way to use gold keys and shops in certain areas. There's also a request for an expanded wrist view for stats.
- Unique Roguelike Experience (weight 0.06): The game is recognized as a roguelike with a unique blend of Souls-like dark fantasy and a magical World War setting. The story and spirituality are interwoven into these mechanics, offering a distinct gameplay loop.
- Context of Acquisition (weight 0.06): Many players acquired the game through bundles, sales, or beta testing, which influences their initial perception and expectations. Some are still early in their playtime.
- Mixed Opinions on Realism/Detail (weight 0.04): While the overall aesthetic is praised, some players note a lack of attention to detail and realism in the graphics. The environment is described as having foggy areas and simple structures.
- Negative Comparison to Other VR Games (weight 0.02): One reviewer expressed a strong negative sentiment, stating there's no reason to play this game over Alyx mods and questioning the developers' understanding of video games. This appears to be an isolated, highly critical opinion.
- Specific Bug Reports (weight 0.01): A minor issue with grabbing magazines was mentioned, indicating a small area for improvement in interaction mechanics.

Emotions:
- Satisfaction (weight 0.33): Players are highly satisfied with the game's core gameplay loop, including engaging gunplay, diverse classes, and rewarding progression systems. The well-balanced difficulty, immersive atmosphere, and overall polished VR experience contribute significantly to this positive sentiment, often exceeding expectations for a roguelike shooter.
- Frustration (weight 0.17): Frustration stems primarily from technical issues such as bugs, poor AI (enemies shooting through walls, aimbot accuracy), and clunky controls or item interactions. Unreasonable difficulty spikes, repetitive content, and issues like slow movement while aiming or problematic ammo retrieval also contribute to player annoyance.
- Disappointment (weight 0.14): Disappointment arises from unfulfilled potential, often due to perceived lack of content, variety, or depth in mechanics like procedural generation and weapon attachments. Players also express disappointment with graphical compromises, poor weapon handling, and class imbalances, feeling the game could be much better.
- Excitement (weight 0.1): Players are excited by the game's addicting and challenging VR roguelike shooter experience, often recommending it as a must-play or one of the best in the genre. The fluid gameplay, satisfying gunplay, and the thrill of progression contribute to a highly positive and engaging experience.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.05): Enjoyment is driven by the fun and engaging VR shooter experience, particularly the satisfying gun feel and well-implemented roguelite elements. The overall quality of the game, smooth movement, and diverse classes enhance the fun factor for players.
- Hope (weight 0.03): Players express hope for future improvements, including more content, better class balance, and fixes for existing bugs. There's a belief that with continued developer support, the game has the potential to become even better and fulfill its promise.
- Admiration (weight 0.02): Admiration is directed towards the developers for their dedication, responsiveness, and the high quality of the game, especially for an indie VR title. Players praise the game as one of the best VR roguelikes, highlighting its exceptional gunplay and overall design.
- Desire (weight 0.02): Players desire more content, including additional levels, bosses, classes, weapons, and attachments. There's also a specific wish for a co-op mode and better class balance to enhance the game's longevity and variety.
- Boredom (weight 0.01): Boredom sets in due to the repetitive nature of roguelikes in VR, particularly after a few hours of gameplay or when encountering certain environments. Tedious loot searching and repetitive ducking and covering mechanics also contribute to a lack of sustained engagement.
- Love (weight 0.01): Players express strong affection for the game, particularly those who enjoy roguelikes and shooters. The interwoven story, spirituality, and roguelite mechanics resonate deeply with these players, fostering a strong emotional connection.
- Anger (weight 0.01): Anger is triggered by perceived 'idiotic design' choices, such as the weapon re-equip mechanic after dying, and offensively bad gun handling. Unfair enemy AI and a perceived lack of gameplay depth also provoke strong negative reactions.
- Engagement (weight 0.01): Players feel engaged by the process of learning new weapons and tactics, the challenging difficulty, and the rewarding progression system. The game's lore and overall roguelike experience also contribute to sustained player involvement.
- Challenge (weight 0.01): Players find the game challenging, particularly due to difficult boss fights, high overall difficulty, and the lack of aim assist. The need for smart movement and tactical play to overcome obstacles contributes to this sense of challenge.
- Surprise (weight 0.01): Surprise arises from the game's unique genre mix, unexpected jump scares from enemies like dogs, and the rare occurrence of a VR game launching without an early access tag, indicating a polished release.
- Immersion (weight 0.01): Immersion is fostered by the game's atmosphere and world/visual design, particularly during active gameplay runs. These elements draw players into the game world, enhancing their sense of presence.
- Dislike (weight 0.01): Players express dislike for the overall game experience and specific issues related to level generation. These factors detract from their enjoyment and create a negative impression.
- Anticipation (weight 0.01): Anticipation is driven by the expectation of a better hardware experience and the hope for future updates. Players look forward to improvements and new content that will enhance their gameplay.
- Annoyance (weight 0.01): Annoyance is caused by specific gameplay elements such as the inventory belt, problematic AI, and frequent loading screens. Bugs also contribute significantly to player irritation.
- Addiction (weight 0.01): Players experience addiction, constantly returning to play the game despite external factors like extreme heat. This strong compulsion leads to losing track of time and even dreaming about playing the game.
- Underwhelmed (weight 0): Players feel underwhelmed when the game fails to meet their initial expectations. This sentiment suggests a discrepancy between what was anticipated and the actual gameplay experience.}