Apollo 11 VR Experience
What starts out as a pretty cool space simulator soon gives way to a disappointing overall experience. This title runs about 45 minutes and gives you the option between a more passive "cinematic" experience or a similarly uneventful "interactive" experience with added docking, landing and moon walking sequences. The docking and landing prove to be impossible given the complicated in-game instructions and unclear explanation on how to actually perform it. The moon walking/jumping itself felt very empty; graphics are subpar and textures look flat and two-dimensional in this space. Even the stiff flag looks so fake you'd swear the entire moon landing was staged.
I have to give credit where it's due for attempting to make a faithful yet educational take on the moon landing, but it's a piss-poor rendition of events. Aside from the initial excitement at being in the space shuttle during launch and watching the earth from a distance, there's really not a lot here to digest. In addition, it suffers from the problem of a lot of VR titles, which is that it takes you out of the immersion by showing you different angles that would be impossible to achieve if you were actually there. At one point, as the shuttle was leaving the moon, I shouted, "Wait! I'm still here!"
Unearthing Mars
At the end of Apollo 11, it mentions something about Mars being the next destination for man, which happened to be the perfect segue to this game. I don't know if it's because I was so disappointed by Apollo 11 or that my expectations for this game were nonexistent, but I actually found this really enjoyable (aside from the atrocious porn-level voice acting). It's about a two-hour (10 chapters) space adventure where you're mostly just following directions or solving simple puzzles. It felt a lot like Farpoint at times, if that were a basic exploration sim and not a FPS. After I finished my playthrough, I realized I had missed two trophies so I played it again in order to achieve the "good" ending, so it carries somewhat replay value.
If not for poor graphics, acting and dull lifeless models (I half expected a chestburster to come jumping out of one of them), this would be a recommendable title. I don't play VR games looking for an incredible challenge, but for unique experiences, and this seemed to be on the right track.
The Martian VR Experience
You'd think with all of the money studios are throwing at licensed experiences, this would have turned out great. How wrong you'd be. Essentially a 10-minute clip show built around 8 interactive segments (in quick succession, although spanning the entire movie). Besides being a mostly empty experience with mundane tasks, this feels like it should have been a complimentary title at best. I feel like I got more gameplay out of Ghostbusters VR. Or heck, even the free Spider-Man Homecoming VR.
Passengers: Awakening VR Experience
Now this feels like a real game, except it only lasts about 20 minutes and in the end you're stuck in a room for all eternity which is actually
ing frightening. Couldn't they build a menu screen or fade to black or something? The "puzzles" here are rudimentary, but it's mostly about exploration and it's cool to visit familiar "sets" from the movie. The ending is honestly quite laughable when you "save" the day by grabbing an item only a few feet away from the Chris Pratt character. This could have been so much more.
Kismet
Don't even waste your time with this bullshit. What was I thinking?!
tl;dr
So basically I just threw a whole bunch of money down the toilet. But at least it was 20% off.
k
