YMMV / Boneworks

• Awesome Music: The game's main theme is a soothing synth piece that conveys the cyberpunk/technology-heavy feel prevalent throughout the game, as well as somehow sounding nostalgic.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: A majority of players agree the gameplay is revolutionary for VR, but the vague, almost characterless story has been criticized as shallow to nonexistent. While there is a lot of lore to uncover, the confusing nature of the narrative can make it seem like it has no real impact on the story.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • While the game's "simulate everything" approach to physics has been praised for the flexibility it gives, it does lead to a few of these. Climbing pipes in particular has been noted by many as buggy, which can cause the player's in-game head to bounce around like a pinball even if their real head is stationary, which causes nausea. Other mechanics people have had issues with are the virtual gun stocks which can cause two handed weapons to spaz out at times and the finicky nature of the "body inventory" causing players to grab the wrong object.
  • Ford has 5 body slots to carry weapons and items in. 4 of them are pretty standard; one over and one under each arm. The fifth is on his back. This last body slot can be a real pain to use on headsets with inside-out tracking (i.e. those that don't use an external lighthouse), as it requires a controller to leave the HMD's line of sight. This results not only in objects being dropped behind Ford, but can also cause the player to grab the object off their back instead of a fresh magazine while reloading.
  • In general, it's arguable that Boneworks is potentially too ahead of its time in many respects, compared to the arguably less mechanically ambitious but significantly more polished Half-Life: Alyx, which prioritized accessibility. A lot about the game's design, especially the emphasis on physicality and giving the player a physical body in-game, can easily lead to this in varying ways for a lot of people.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Several of the mechanics introduced in the tutorial either only show up there, or are hidden away, not used as proper parts of the main campaign. Many of the bladed weapons aren't used until the climax, the balloon lifts and balloon gun are discarded, and the gravity lifts are used for one puzzle before being dumped. This is especially odd considering the game lacks any kind of modding capability or map creation, which would doubtlessly allow for the playerbase to use this stuff to its fullest extent.