It's a very basic VR shooter. A tutorial level, two shooting-gallery levels, and a boss level.
The reload mechanism is "reach behind your head". which I liked and worked reliably.
I counted about ten mobs all told, but likely missed some: claw guys, gun guys, sniper guys, big guys, giants, bats, ants, allies, end boss. There's a nice range there. Melee, flying, shooting. Big and small and huge. Fast and slow. Weak and tough. Humanoid and insecty. AI isn't great, but they don't always just charge you - sometimes they charge the stuff you're trying to protect.
I started writing this review before I'd completed the boss level, so started out calling it "the first boss level". Nope. It's a shame, because they could have told a story, and left the player feeling they'd played a whole game. As it is, it was jarringly short and felt like a coverdisk demo, as the boss level popped up "you have unlocked another level"... but you haven't. In retrospect that was a relief, because the game itself just wasn't great.
I'd recommend this game only for those who have played other indie VR shooters, and want to collect 'em all or something. Which is to say... I can't recommend this game.
[b]Completionist warning:[/b] there are nine achievements, and [b]all achievements are broken[/b]. And I don't just mean they don't trigger (though none do), nor that they are for things missing from the game (though there are two for unlocking classes, and that feature was removed)... I mean that even the images for the achievements are not there. Broken image links. It seems they used to work: 75% are shown as having finished the tutorial, 2.6% killed the boss, which I think shows how worth-completing this short game is. There also seems to be a bug in tracking how long you've played it. It says I've played 38 minutes, and I suspect it took longer, just wrestling with the menus. But on the other hand... yeah, I'd guess three hours maybe, playing as a completionist that WOULD have got every achievement, if any were working?
In each shooting-gallery level you're in one of two bunkers, shooting a half dozen or so waves of bad guys attacking you from all sides, while they try to destroy various things you're trying to defend (people, spaceships, bunkers, etc). You can teleport between the two bunkers to get a different shooting angle, at least until one of them is destroyed, but other than that, you're basically stationary. You get "teleport walk" in the boss level, but the only use of that is to avoid the boss' straight-line charges. You never get stick-rotate, so you will need to be able to turn 360.
This is a twitch shooter, with no radar or information about where you're being attacked from, other than a voice saying which of the things you're defending are being attacked.
It uses laser-beam targeting, so all you need to do is line up with the thing you want to shoot and pull the trigger repeatedly until it falls over. There's a little thought needed for leading distant targets, but that's quite rare because generally they're walking or flying straight towards you.
Shooting the mobs can drop one of about four powerups: health (a cross), base repair (a wrench), damage (three bullets), and energy (a ball). These meanings aren't explained anywhere ingame: I got that from their blog.
You can be one of three classes: dual gunner, dual gunner, engineer, and something else I forget, I tried only dual gunner: the game didn't feel worth retrying for the other classes. Used to be you'd have to unlock engineer and dual gunner, but now you can play any class from the start. If you save enough energy, you can trigger your class' special attack, which for the dual gunner is autofire, and you can finally give your aching trigger fingers a few seconds of rest. Other than that - one shot is one trigger pull, and you need to constantly shoot.
The boss is "kill you if it touches you, except when it doesn't, what's collision detection again?" Not hugely impressed there.
The "mission hub" area has a "start" button that you must push, which is positioned directly [i]behind[/i] you as far as your standard setup goes. This was in my real-world bookcase. No way to teleport, to recenter, no way to reach it, so no way to start the first level... I moved some books and could juuuust reach it, trying to find a way that I could do it while the sensors behind me could detect I was doing so. I needed to do this before every level.
With this, plus the lack of stick rotate and the 360-angle you're being attacked from, and the lack of height scaling so if you're in a chair you can't see over the bunker walls, there's really no effort made to catering for people playing in chairs or at desks.
The plot is nonexistent. The premise is: you're a robot commander of a fleet who flies down on his own to do missions which somehow always end up with you being attacked by waves of aliens but you can't walk. In the intro before the first mission, as you see in the video, a meteor storm destroys most of the fleet, but it doesn't affect the mission and all the ships are back undamaged and in the same positions after the mission - the meteors are never mentioned again. It feels like this scene was meant to lead to something, but they kept it in because it was dramatic. Your mission control/bridge has single button on it, and a bunch of robot-people walking past just to troll you because you can't walk. A voice keeps screaming to destroy you all, in English, but the mobs are all aliens, and the main bad guy is a giant bat with poor collision detection. Through it all a speech-to-text voice tells you that: you are doing well; mobs are attacking your bunker; you need to shoot some rocks; aliens are attacking your escape ship; or you are dead.
[b]The videos and screenshots are misleading.[/b] In the first video you see the player in third person; this is no longer in the game. In the first video and the first, second, and fourth screenshot, you also see them leaving the bunker; this too was removed. At some point in GreenLight process, it was apparently made so you could "run, sprint and leap through the air"... which you see in action at the end of their video, but was then removed again and placed into a new game. It seems that after the first boss level, they gave up development on this game, as they wanted to work on that spinoff game instead. And that's fair.
But it means that this game is less than a third of the game it is priced as. Bear that in mind when buying on sale.
