Shaun Munro reviews Farpoint…
Impulse Gear’s much-anticipated VR shooter Farpoint has been touted as something of a killer app for the PSVR, which though swimming in dozens of titles and “experiences”, has served up few certifiable must-have AAA games so far, the most high-profile being the magnificent Resident Evil 7.
Though Capcom’s terrifying VR jaunt remains King of the hill, Farpoint does benefit hugely from its not-so-secret weapon – literally – with the marvelous Aim controller substantially elevating an otherwise boilerplate space shooter that most players likely wouldn’t touch were it merely a 2D game with a conventional control scheme.
One of the game’s most alluring boasts is the promise of a full-fat VR campaign, which places players in the shoes of a shuttle pilot who, following an accident involving a space anomaly, ends up stranded on an alien planet and must battle through a fleet of murderous creatures in order to retrieve a pair of scientists who also landed there.
And so the game begins, hurling the player into a planet infested with spiders of all shapes and sizes, and letting them have at it. First things first; this is without question one of the most immersive gaming worlds to grace PSVR to date; the visual detail is extremely impressive given the unit’s fairly middle-of-the-road tech specs, and the bright colours of the planet’s surface really do encourage the player to stop and smell the roses, so to speak.
On top of this, players who purchased the Aim controller bundle – and I wouldn’t recommend playing the game with a DualShock – will also have a ridiculous-looking hunk of plastic to lug around, yet it’s a surprisingly light and incredibly ergonomic piece of kit, designed to replicate the feel of a gun while providing excellent button placement for weapon swaps, reloads and general menu navigation. The in-game guns themselves look mostly terrific, and though it’s a shame there aren’t more of them, the feeling of closing one eye, gripping your Aim tight and staring down the machine gun’s holographic sight is easily one of the PSVR’s niftiest and most engrossing experiences.
It’s a bit of a shame, then, that Farpoint‘s campaign is pretty uninspired for the most part. Though there are some welcome cinematic interludes after every level, the story isn’t that interesting and the game is sorely in need of a greater diversity of environments and enemy types.
Working somewhat in the game’s favour is the overall intensity of the experience, which encourages players to shoot through the campaign in brief chunks, making that familiarity feel less irksome. I found myself working up a sweat after 20-30 minutes of holding the gun and shooting, so tended to take frequent breaks, and I imagine attempting to finish the game in a single sitting would invite both exhaustion and more than a little ennui.
Though there’s also a Challenge Mode available, which turns the campaign’s levels into an arcadey time attack sprint, arguably the game’s best overall experience is its online co-op mode, which allows players to suit up with another soldier to fight through four additional levels.
What really impresses here is the sense of presence your human buddy has; the other player can wave their gun around in real life and the movements are replicated in-game with incredible fidelity, and the genius move to include a microphone inside the PSVR headset makes the experience even more enjoyable with a talkative pal (assuming they speak your language, of course).
The levels themselves are your basic wave-based bug, robot and alien hunts, but when paired with a like-minded ally, they become a massive time sink, significantly more so than the single-player offering. Though the game as yet lacks a dedicated PVP mode, you and your co-op partner can also engage in a little makeshift vs. play after clearing through a section of a map. And while we’re talking about things the game should have; a fully co-op campaign would grant Farpoint so much more replayability.
All things considered, was I still paralysed with fear the 100th time a spider leapt at my face? Absolutely, and so if you’re an arachnophobe you’ll want to ponder this purchase carefully. If you’re chronically scared of spiders you really need to sleep on whether or not you want to put yourself through this, because as someone none-too-fond of the creepy crawlies myself, I often had to will myself to keep pressing forward with the campaign in particular, as excellent as the gunplay is. Thankfully the most annoying of the critters can be dispatched by just closing your eyes and panickedly blind firing in their general vicinity.
The game has also made some clear concessions for the VR medium; flying spiders will do you a solid by creeping back around in front of you after diving past your face, in a merciful move mostly intended to lessen motion sickness (but I totally abused it to make fighting the spiders easier). To that end it does feel braced a little awkwardly between being totally on-rails and as free as, say, Resident Evil 7.
Accessibility is clearly and smartly put at a premium here considering the added bother of handling a gun in VR, and holding down the Aim controller’s options button brings up a grid visualising your spatial relation to the PlayStation camera should you get too disorientated. Comfort settings are also mercifully extensive and allow pretty much every kind of player to cater movement to their liking.
It’s pretty bizarre though that, with all these accessibility options to choose from, Farpoint has such an egregiously terrible save and checkpoint system. The game only saves at the end of every chapter and makes no effort to inform you of when this is, so don’t even think about quitting unless you’ve just seen a cut-scene, at which point you should hear a trophy pop for completing the mission.
Meanwhile, dying can easily throw you back 5-10 minutes at a time, which again, if you’re no fan of spiders, can make the grind back for another go a little demoralising. At least for the save issue, you can make use of the PS4’s excellent suspend-resume feature to create your own “save” (bar a power cut), though you might need to give the Aim controller a firm shake upon resuming in order to correct the tracking. Either way, a patch will hopefully remedy the horrendous save system in the near-future.
As satisfying as the Aim controller experience generally is, it’s also worth mentioning that the tracking is far from perfect, even when following Sony’s calibration guidelines to the letter. The gun would occasionally appear to wobble in-game, and sometimes I’d need to give the controller a quick shake in order to realign the sights. Though these moments are thankfully fairly infrequent and remedied in mere seconds, it’s pretty surprising that Farpoint‘s tracking is actually outdone by another, decidedly lesser-known PSVR title, the terrific arcade shooter Dick Wilde.
While Farpoint may boast a pretty bog standard campaign in 2D terms, as a VR shooter, it becomes something very special indeed in spite of its many flaws, and as a preliminary demonstration of the Aim controller’s capabilities, it passes with flying colours. Is it the feature-rich, legitimately brilliant experience you’d gladly play outside of VR like Resident Evil 7? No, but it presents a convincing vision for the future of VR shooters, one its successors can both draw influence from and significantly improve upon.
Pros:
+ Aim controller functionality is extremely good (for the most part)
+ Some of the best visuals on PSVR
+ Co-op is ridiculously addictive
Cons:
– Campaign is a basic, linear shooter
– Atrocious save and checkpoint system
– Some occasional tracking issues
Rating: 7/10
Reviewed for PS4
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more video game rambling.
