Category: neat corporation

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‘Budget Cuts’ for PSVR Now Delayed Until September

Neat Corporation, the team behind Budget Cuts (2018), originally wanted to bring its VR stealth adventure to PSVR back in May. After a delay due to the global slowdown, which pushed that date to July 10th, the studio is again marking a definitive launch date in stone: September 25th.

Update (July 3rd, 2020): Neat Corp has released a PS blogpost outlining its new September 25th release date. Ostensibly as a form of recompense, the studio has also built a new PSVR-exclusive level called ‘Panopticon’.

Update (May 7th, 2020): Neat Corp has announced in a recent tweet that Budget Cuts for PSVR won’t be launching in May 2020 as previously planned. The delay, which is due to the global slowdown, is pushing the release to July 10th. We’re glad to hear that the team is taking the extra time to nail it down, and continue on with their work in these uncertain times.

Update (March 23rd. 2020): – Neat Corporation, Coatsink, and Perp Games today announced that the original Budget Cuts will be coming to PSVR on May 15th with a simultaneous digital and physical release. There’s still no word on whether a Quest version is still in the mix.

Original article (January 20th, 2019): Budget Cuts puts you in the hum-drum world of an endless office complex. Just as you’re about to die of boredom, a fax comes through that warns you of impending doom. All of the humans in the office have been mysteriously replaced by worker drones, and it’s your job to get past the deadly security bots with only throwing knives and your trusty portal-style teleportation gun to figure out what happened.

While we genuinely liked the game, unfortunately it was plagued with performance issues early on which actually forced the team to reschedule launch well after reviews were already out in a bid to smooth over some of the game-breaking bugs that made their way to some reviewers.

That said, Neat Corp has plenty to do to get the physics-based stealth game in shape for the decreased graphical and CPU power of the PS4. Another hurdle to jump over will invariably be the PS Camera’s smaller, front-facing tracking volume that will no doubt require users to make heavy use of snap-turning locomotion in addition to the game’s native teleportation scheme.

Whatever the case may be, we’re hoping it does well enough to bring the game to Oculus Quest, because it’s clear a virtually unlimited tracking volume would be an insane addition to a game that gets you dodging, ducking, and cowering under virtual desks for your life.

The post ‘Budget Cuts’ for PSVR Now Delayed Until September appeared first on Road to VR.

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‘Budget Cuts’ Gets 4 New Levels with Launch of Arcade Mode

Neat Corporation announced their stealth robot-killing game Budget Cuts (2018) is getting a special update today that is putting four new ‘arcade’ levels into the base game.

Update (February 14th, 2019): Budget Cuts today receives the previously teased ‘Arcade Mode’, which brings four new levels to the game. The special mode comes free to all owners of the game, and puts a clear focus on replayability, replete with local leaderboards and collectibles in each level. In the today’s update, story mode’s ‘Extra’ difficulty level is now also “a bit more difficult,” the studio says in a Steam news post.

Original Article (November 9th, 2018): In a Steam news post, developer Linnéa Harrison says the studio has been thinking about how to make Budget Cuts easier to pick up and play, something the 5+ hours story doesn’t easily provide.

The arcade version is said to come with four “entirely new levels and missions,” Harrison says. The best bit—owners of Budget Cuts will receive the new arcade levels for free.

There’s no word on when the Arcade version is coming (see update), and Neat Corp is staying tight-lipped on the specifics.

If haven’t had a chance to play (or want to waste some time while you wait), check out our in-depth review of Budget Cuts to see what makes it tick and why we gave it an impressive [9.2/10].

The post ‘Budget Cuts’ Gets 4 New Levels with Launch of Arcade Mode appeared first on Road to VR.

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Budget Cuts Launches On Oculus And Steam

Budget Cuts Launches On Oculus And Steam

One of the most anticipated VR games — Budget Cuts — is now available on Steam and the Oculus Store.

The stealth game that sees you lurking around hallways to throw knives into unsuspecting robots is now available to buy after multiple delays. The game is priced around $30 but launches at a 10 percent discount.

A lot of people who bought VR headsets early on were so impressed by the original Budget Cuts demo in 2016, it seems many will pick up this game no matter what review score we add to our official review. We’re hopeful the leaders at Neat Corporation — a small indie studio — choose to share sales milestones as it could be useful information to other developers interested in making a VR game. Indie favorite Beat Saber cleared 50,000 copies at $20 each in a week, and 100,00 copies in a month. It took H3VR two years to sell 100,000 copies priced at $20 each from the launch of hand-controlled VR in 2016 to this year. Budget Cuts is priced higher than those other games, so it doesn’t need to sell as many copies as those others to clear the same revenue milestones.

We’re in the midst of E3 coverage right now but as soon as we get back to our headsets and play through the released game we will update our review. In the meantime, we’ll be watching for reports on Twitter and, if you pick up the game, please share in the comments what you think of it.

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The post Budget Cuts Launches On Oculus And Steam appeared first on UploadVR.

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Escape The Office In Budget Cuts, Now Available

Budget Cuts, the virtual reality (VR) title about sneaking around an office and need to throw knifes at robots has finally released. Developed by Neat Corporation, Budget Cuts has been a long time coming and following a recently delay back in late May, players who have been waiting can now pick up the title today.

The title was first revealed back in 2016 and has since been the subject of a number of delays. The most recent one being in late May of this year but fans waiting for the title had to come to terms with delays back in early May as well. Finally though, it is time to let loose your inner knight throwing skills.

As an employee at the mega conglomerate TransCorp, your job is to stamp papers and file files. Unfortunately TransCorp is an expert in the business of manufacturing cost-cutting robots and this soon puts your job in danger. As another one of your coworkers is being dragged off to HR, a mysterious package arrives at your cubicle. It is then from here that you will need to do everything you can in order to save your job, and possibly your life.

Budget Cuts is also making use of a unique portal based locomotion system, designed to reduce the risk of motion sickness and offer players a lot of freedom. Talking about the design behind this system, Joachim Holmer, co-founder of Neat Corporation explains: “Early on, we knew that that we didn’t want it to cause any sort of motion sickness. Motion sickness could be an entire post of its own, but, long story short? we can’t accelerate the player in the game, unless they also feel that acceleration in reality.” To achieve this, players have to throw out a beacon which then then teleport to. Not only does it create a reason within the videogame as to how players can reach high areas and such, but it fits with the design of the whole title.

VRFocus’ Staff Writer Rebecca Hills-Duty previewed Budget Cuts saying: “Budget Cuts is a great title, with substation story and meaty, challenging gameplay, and an entertaining style, but it does suffer from some significant performance problems that do detract from the experience. Budget Cuts could be elevated from good to utterly brilliant if it is given a little more time in the oven to bake in and correct the issues.”

Budget Cuts is available now on Steam for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive and also on the Oculus Store. It’s currently priced at £20.69 (GBP) on Steam, discounted from £22.99. However, Oculus Rift owners might want to go via the Oculus Store as at the time of writing it is priced at £19.99 (GBP) there.

For more on the title in the future, keep reading VRFocus.

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Preview: Budget Cuts

If you work in a stereotypical cubical farm-like office environment, you may have occasional entertained fantasies about dramatically sneaking out, doing Batman-style stealth takedowns along the way. Budget Cuts is the virtual reality (VR) videogame that fulfils that fantasy, and then some.

The office environment of Budget Cuts would appear, at first glance, to be a slightly exaggerated and cartoonish take on the typical office of the modern world, but, strangely, it is staffed almost entirely by robots. It seems that your boss, called Rex, is determined to remove the human factor from his business entirely, so you need to escape before you are next on his list.

Your guide on this journey through the office world is Winta, who communicates with you through fax machine messages and who provides you with your main weapons, several sharp knives and a ‘translocator gun’ which acts much like the Portal gun from Portal.

Mastering the translocator gun quickly becomes critical to your success. You can use a ‘preview portal’ as a window to check the coast is clear, but you must be careful as your portals are visible to the gun-toting security robots who seem to be around every corner.

The graphics are great, a faux-cheery facade that overlays something much darker and more sinister provides a satisfying level of dissonance as it is all too easy to imagine this as any office you have ever worked in.

The story becomes surprisingly engaging with impressive speed, mostly thanks to the quirky storytelling and the well-performed voice-overs. You become absorbed in trying to unravel what is really going on in this business staffed with androids.

The tools and menu system take some getting used to, and it is worth taking the time as Budget Cuts is unforgiving of mistakes. Players will need to cultivate a great deal of patience, memorise layouts and patrol routes and carefully plan a course of action, along with a Plan B and Plan C in case things go awry, which they often will. This is by no means a title where you can just bull rush your way through.

Playing on the Oculus Rift, there are a few notable problems, there are some frame-rate dips that slow things to a near crawl at times, and there is some inexplicable jitter on some of the text which can make it all but unreadable, causing significant problems in some areas. The loading is also something of an issue, it seems to take forever to reload after you failed, which is another source of frustration.

Though teleport movement is not popular among many VR users at the moment, Budget Cuts make excellent use of it as a core gameplay element rather than it being a simple and cheap way to avoid motion sickness.

Budget Cuts is a great title, with substation story and meaty, challenging gameplay, and an entertaining style, but it does suffer from some significant performance problems that do detract from the experience. Budget Cuts could be elevated from good to utterly brilliant if it is given a little more time in the oven to bake in and correct the issues.

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Budget Cuts Delayed Once More, Release Date Now Pending

Nowadays, it’s unfortunately quite often the case that videogames launch with bugs, seeing day one patches roll out or numerous updates in the following weeks. The virtual reality (VR) industry is no different, yet sometimes developers hold off launching all together if things are really bad. And that seems to be the case with Neat Corporation’s Budget Cuts, scheduled for arrival tomorrow, it has now been put on hold.

In a Reddit posting today, Neat Corporation outlined why its taken this last minute step, a day before launch: “Long story short – we were pretty late in properly optimizing Budget Cuts, thinking we wouldn’t need as much time as we actually did. The optimizations we implemented in this final stretch, while useful, ended up not helping as much as we had hoped. We thought our initial delay of two weeks would be enough, but even throughout these last few days, working into the night and firing on all cylinders to get performance up, we’re still not hitting an acceptable and consistent framerate. We were too optimistic, and we’re very sorry about that.”

The post goes into greater detail about various facets of Budget Cuts which need imporvement, including Occlusion Culling, audio performance, rare progression-blocking bugs, a weird screen glitch when framerate drops on the Oculus Native build, and other framerate issues unique to Oculus Native.

Due to the various issues Neat Corporation has to deal with there’s no longer a confirmed launch date. “The honest answer is that we don’t know,” the studio states. The post mentions several time lines, from “we have to delay the release again for a few days” to “approximately 1-2 weeks.” So at present even the team isn’t sure how long these bugs will take to address.

It was only a couple of days ago that Neat Corporation released the final launch trailer for Budget Cuts, after previously delaying the launch by two weeks from earlier in May.

Budget Cuts is a stealth experience set in a world full of robots. You play an employee at mega conglomerate TransCorp who finds out their job is in danger. After a mysterious package arrives you must then head out and save your job. To do this you need to sneak around the facilities, using whatever vents, ceiling crawl spaces and more to remain hidden. Should you be spotted then it’s time for some knife throwing action.

As further details continue to emerge regarding the delay and new launch date, VRFocus will keep you posted.

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‘Budget Cuts’ Release Date Confirmed for Tomorrow After Previous Delay

Neat Corporation today announced that Budget Cuts, their upcoming VR stealth game, now has an official launch date after difficulties with framerate stability and other bugs encountered in the game delayed the game’s May 31st launch. And there’s not much time left to wait, as the game is set to launch tomorrow, June 14th at 10 AM PT (local time here).

Update (06/13/18): Neat Corp sent out a surprise tweet this morning saying the delay is coming to end.

The original article detailing the delay follows below:

Original article (06/30/18): The studio announced the news via a Reddit post, saying that the long-awaited Budget Cuts still suffers optimization issues. The studio says they’ll be taking the time to improve the game’s stability and framerate until it’s “consistent and acceptable,” delaying Budget Cuts launch until further notice.

The latest delay comes after a two-week delay earlier this month, which Neat Corp says they thought would be enough to fix the outlying issues with the game.

With the review embargo up since May 28th, we’ve already had a chance to dive in, giving it a solid [9.2/10]. In my playthrough, the bugs I encountered weren’t grave enough to consider the game unreviewable, or even remotely unplayable. In retrospect, I may have just been lucky to have seen acceptable frame rates on my admittedly higher-spec test rig and HTC Vive, and didn’t encounter anything more than what I would consider minor bugs that weren’t gamebreaking in the least, something Neat Corp said would be ironed out for launch, then scheduled for May 31st.

SEE ALSO
Watch the First 12 Minutes of 'Budget Cuts'

We did note bad optimization on Rift, but went ahead with the review on Vive anyway, giving the studio the benefit of the doubt that the press version wasn’t ready for Rift users in the first place, citing the lack of 180-degree sensor support on the press build on Steam.

“So, when will the game release? The honest answer is that we don’t know, but it’s going to be as soon as the game is as performant and stable as it should be,” says Neat Corp’s Freya Holmer. “I’d like to say we’re releasing soon, but that meant 2.5 years last time we used that term, so I’m going to say “in 5 minutes” which should mean approximately 1-2 weeks. Will it take longer? Maybe, maybe not. It’s very hard to predict when the issues we’re facing have many unknown variables and moving parts, which is why we’re not ready with a specific release date. Maybe we’ll time it perfectly with E3, to make sure our game will be drowned out by all of the other announcements.”

On the docket of items to address: occlusion culling, audio performance, eliminating rare progression-blocking bugs, and fixing screen glitches when framerate drops on Oculus Native build.

“On behalf of the Budget Cuts team,” says Holmer “we’re truly sorry, and hope you’re all okay with waiting just a little bit more.”

While disheartening to hear, we stick by our review score, and look forward to the day when users can see for themselves why we rated Budget Cuts so highly; hopefully sooner rather than later.

The post ‘Budget Cuts’ Release Date Confirmed for Tomorrow After Previous Delay appeared first on Road to VR.

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Watch the First 12 Minutes of ‘Budget Cuts’

Budget Cuts (2018) is a room-scale VR stealth game from indie studio Neat Corporation. Launching on May 31st on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, we took the time to show you just what this objectively fantastic game looks like from the very beginning.

Banter from office drones is a near-constant in Budget Cuts, as the docile bots are designed to replace your human colleagues. It’s the military-grade security bots you have to watch out for, using your teleporation gun to sneakily zip around the vast office complex and dispatch the gun-totting robots before they get a chance to shoot you first.

For more info, check out our full review of Budget Cuts, which we gave a solid [9.2/10] for its killer VR game mechanics, its engaging story, and the adrenaline-soaked feeling that comes part and parcel with hiding under a desk, hoping to fly under the radar of the see-all, kill-all robotic enemies.

The post Watch the First 12 Minutes of ‘Budget Cuts’ appeared first on Road to VR.

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Stealth Title Budget Cuts Delayed Until End Of May

Some videogames can take quite a while to develop depending on the team, with some taking years to build. Neat Corporation announced its virtual reality (VR) title Budgets Cuts in January 2016, prior to any of the main head-mounted displays (HMD) launching. Then in March the studio demoed Budget Cuts at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2018 revealing 16th May as the official launch date. Today, however that date has now slipped to the end of this month. 

In a Steam posting Neat Corporation has said: “Due to some unforeseen obstacles in the development of Budget Cuts, we’re going to have to delay the release date of the game.

“The reason is simply that we want to release Budget Cuts in a state that we’re proud of and know will be enjoyable throughout the entire game (without killing our devs in the process).”

Gamers who’ve been following Budget Cuts and are keen to see the title arrive for Oculus Rift or HTC Vive won’t have too much longer to wait as the launch date is now 31st May, 2018.

Budget Cuts is a full roomscale designed experience where you play a secret agent employed by a secretive company to infiltrate other firms. To do this you’re provided with a teleportation gun which can fire you through windows, down corridors and even through vents. It’s in these smaller space where you’ll have to actually duck down and squeeze through, finding hidden corridors and other spaces to sneak into.

VRFocus got some hands-on time with Budget Cuts, saying: Budget Cuts has lost none of its charm over the last two years, and with an estimated run time of around 7 – 8 hours should provide a decently sized, novel experience. VRFocus has  enjoyed what it’s seen so far, we’re keenly awaiting Neat Corporation’s VR launch in a couple of months time.

If any further details are released in the run up to launch, VRFocus will keep you updated.

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Preview: Budget Cuts – A Neatly Packaged Spy Adventure

It’s always nice when a promising looking title disappears then remerges bigger and better than before, but that’s exactly what Neat Corporation has done with stealthy, spy inspired experience Budget Cuts. First announced way back in 2016, the studio released a teasing demo for HTC Vive owners on Steam. It’s only been during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2018 that Budget Cuts has returned with new screenshots and an actual release date. VRFocus managed to get some hands-on time with the HTC Vive version of the virtual reality (VR) title and its shaping up to be one of the indie hits of 2018.

VR has its fair share of action oriented titles, letting players march around shooting things until they turn to mulch. Budget Cuts is different, being all about creeping around, trying not to get spotted. Playing a spy, the object of the campaign is to sneak into rival companies and steal secrets using a variety of high tech gadgetry.

The main device on hand is a teleportation gun. While movement in VR has certainly moved on since 2016, with teleportation no longer the defacto choice for comfortable travel in VR, in the case of Budget Cuts the system is neatly woven into the gameplay design, enhancing the stealthy approach. It’s not quite like any other teleportation seen in other VR experiences as it tends not to be instant. Instead the gun fires a ball which can be bounced through holes, around corners, basically anywhere where there’s a gap. Upon this blue ball landing you’re given a magic mirror of sorts, a viewing panel that lets you inspect the area before teleporting, ideal for scoping out enemies before making the decision to move.

As mentioned this is ideal for sneaking into difficult or tight areas, being able to squeeze into vents or maintenance rooms. This is another part of Budget Cuts’ charm, you need to be prepared to get limber. If your trying to teleport into a vent and you’re standing up then it’s not going to work, requiring a hands and knee approach just like a normal super spy.

Budget Cuts 2In the section VRFocus played there was no hand holding or linear gameplay. Given free access to wander around just about anywhere – some doors were locked/didn’t open –  it was all about learning the surroundings, finding out what led where until a route presented itself. This inevitably turned into find a key card to unlock a particular door, rudimentary stuff which is likely to get more complex as the levels progress.

With no actual guns or weaponry to hand finding the first security robot then required evasive manoeuvring until some sort of implement presented itself. This turned out to be a pair of scissors that could be flung like a throwing knife. This kind of thinking on the fly rather than having an inventory full of items did make for a far more intense and enjoyable experience – you can obviously store items should you come across a deadly stapler.

Budget Cuts has lost none of its charm over the last two years, and with an estimated run time of around 7 – 8 hours should provide a decently sized, novel experience. VRFocus has enjoyed what it’s seen so far, we’re keenly awaiting Neat Corporation’s VR launch in a couple of months time.