Virtual Reality is all about putting you in the position you want to be in. Want to be a race car driver? You can be. Want to work in an office for some reason? That’s possible too. Want to be a super being next evolution of the human race and defend Earth with your super overpowered megaton force attack against hordes of invading aliens? As specific as that might sound, we got you covered. We’ve been playing Megaton Rainfall and have been having a megaton size blast doing it.
If you too decide to join the good fight, you’ll be thrown into the world with only the briefest of introductions from an unknown voice. You’re told you used to be a human. You are now a supreme nuclear being a la Dr Manhattan and have to save the world from “invaders”. That is all. Noting else. Are we the good guys? Why is there invaders? Who is commanding us? Not important, blow things up.
The first few missions let you explore your powers. Flying you over the entire planet zooming through well-known landmarks like the Grand Canyon and United Arab Emirates Palm Islands. Starting off with just one attack, you’ll gain more power with each completed mission until you are the most deadly creature in the universe.
Flying Superman style into outer space and then burning on fire back down through the atmosphere to pull up at the last minute is an awesome feeling, especially in virtual reality. You have absolute freedom in where you go and how you traverse the landscape which is both exhilarating and nauseating. We’ve said before how VR games need to be careful with movement and some games have conquered it well by either slowing game pace or purposefully making the character unable to move like PSVR Worlds The London Heist.
Megaton Rainfall is the complete opposite of this. You can move in all directions at 1,000,000mph. The game developers have added in “blinkers” that put black patches on the edges of the screen when turning or going backwards and there is also the option to turn on jagged jumping turns rather than smooth lifelike ones; but we thought these ruined the soaring like an eagle feeling that the whole game is about. We turned off all of these aids for the full experience. This did mean that our play times were reduced to one mission chunks. It was worth it. If you do get too sick of virtual reality, you can always turn it off and use your TV as usual.
But enough of just flying around. What you are supposed to be doing, oh great powerful one, is fighting the alien hordes. These bad guys arrive in polygonal ships that would be more at home on the N64. The graphics could be directly taken from Lylat Wars with smooth, shiny surfaces and big red weak spots on every enemy. We guess this low polygon is the trade-off for an entire planet to rocket around in VR.
The gameplay is somewhat repetitive. Go here, kill this. Go here, kill that. Go here, kill this and that at the same time. The missions shake things up a little having the player dart in and out of buildings chasing enemies. You’ll also have to nail your accuracy otherwise that skyscraper full of innocent people is going to get nuked by you. You have infinite health (because of course), but you’ll fail if too many innocents die. It’s more likely that the latter will be due to your inexperienced nuke hands than the invading alien scum.
The concept of Megaton Rainfall is very cool, and we were excited to play it, but the truth is a game like this won’t work until we’ve all got our virtual reality sea legs. It needs a few more years of VR to get people more used to not getting sick and an improvement in graphics. Maybe it would have worked as a regular FPS but we would have expected a lot higher graphics for that. Fun to try but not worth a full game, unfortunately.
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