Zenith: Nexus

Few games in this library have as clean a before-and-after as Zenith. It launched on 27 January 2022 as Zenith: The Last City, and the reviews from that first week read like a genre moment: "I've been thinking about this a lot, and I don't think I've had this much fun with a game in, 5 years? Maybe 6?" reads one, at 120 votes. Another, at 664 votes, opens with a joke about VR immersion (itching, screaming, a very embarrassed fellow player) that's become something of a minor legend in its own review section. The comparison that comes up constantly, unprompted, is Sword Art Online — the fictional VR MMO from the anime — because for a lot of early buyers, this was the first time a game had actually delivered something close to that fantasy: full-body flight, gesture-cast magic, and a shared open world you explored standing up.

What actually happened, verified outside Steam

The story from here isn't just a matter of reading player reviews — it's independently documented by VR press. Ramen VR closed a $35 million Series B funding round to build the game out, reported by Road to VR and UploadVR among others, with plans to grow Zenith into a broader platform. By early 2024, the studio disclosed the game had been running at a loss for the better part of a year and pivoted to a free-to-play structure, releasing a new mode called Infinite Realms and reselling the original paid game as The Last City DLC. Then, in August 2024, following one final content season (Season 4: Golden Isles), Ramen VR ceased new development on Zenith entirely, citing player retention it hadn't been able to solve despite the funding. Servers keep running; new content does not arrive.

That timeline maps almost exactly onto the shape of the negative review corpus. Complaints spike hard in 2024 — 33 of the 100 most-helpful English negatives are from that year, against 26 from launch year 2022 — and 21 of the 100 use some form of the word "abandoned." "It pains me as both a Zenith VR fan and someone who has longed for a VRMMORPG to say I can't currently recommend this game," reads a 297-vote review from February 2024, written right as the pivot was announced. Another, at 214 votes, is blunter: "keep in mind the game had $35 million dollars in funding, and not a single Kickstarter goal has been fulfilled yet."

The complaint that outweighs the gameplay ones

The specific grievance that recurs most sharply isn't about difficulty or content pacing — it's about what happened to the money players had already spent. Twenty-four of the 100 negatives raise some version of the free-to-play conversion directly, several using close to the same words: "they took a VRMMO that cost $30 and made it DLC for a free to play seasonal game," reads one, "due to lack of players." Another, far shorter and more recent, states the core objection as plainly as possible: "So I just found that after paying for the game, you make the game free with no compensation?" This is a version of a pattern this library has seen before with older live-service titles — the top complaint being about the business relationship rather than the moment-to-moment game — except here it's recent, well-documented, and specifically about a studio that had the resources to keep going and chose not to.

What still works

None of this erases what made the early game genuinely good. Combat, flight and traversal draw consistent praise across both eras of reviews — one late-era review, written well after the development halt was public knowledge, still calls the VR combat "the most important" thing the game got right, ahead of every other modern MMO feature it lacks. The achievement data is consistent with a game whose opening hours land well and whose depth thins from there: the first major milestone sits at 68.1%, dropping to 29.3% and 20.0% for the next zones' quest lines — real early engagement, tapering the way reviewers describe.

5.5 out of 10. Zenith: Nexus is a genuinely important, well-executed piece of early VR MMO history, built by a studio that had both the ambition and, for a while, the funding to see it through — and it's worth experiencing on that basis, especially since the free Infinite Realms mode costs nothing to try. But it's also a documented case of a well-capitalised studio walking away from active development after converting what backers paid for into a free tier, and that context should sit alongside any recommendation rather than behind it.