From Other Suns: Space Pirate Simulator for Oculus and Vive

If FTL: Faster Than Light (2012) and franchises Borderlands a child was born, then a monstrously complex offspring would invariably be From Other Suns,  a first person shooter/spaceship control simulator from Gunfire Games, the makers of  Dead & Buried (2017). Chronos (2016) и Herobound: Spirit Champion (2016) . Just like its procedurally generated spiritual progenitor FTL ,  FOS  will make you gasp at every turn, you can never be sure that the two or three hours that you spent fighting pirates, aliens or zombies will bring victory.

Note to reader: before I start, I want to make it clear that the transition from system to system in  FOS  carried out at the touch of a button. The map is finite, you travel from left to right, and the only piloting you will do is move from system to system. If you want to pilot your own ship and fly wherever you want, I would suggest you take a look at the category Steam "space simulator"  to start .  Now let's move on to the review.

Gameplay

You find yourself on the far side of space after testing an experimental warp drive that brings with it a horrific virus-like alien species that is hot on your heels on your way back to Earth. As the captain of a tiny Skimmer-class ship, you'll have to collect enough scrap metal (the universal currency) and buy, loot or steal enough fuel and rockets to get home safely. Sounds simple, right? Just explore the star systems, complete a few missions, shoot the fools, and you're home! Not really.

Maintaining, upgrading, storing missiles, and fueling your ship is just part of the game's balancing process. You will also have to support the NPC crew, because when you die from fire on an enemy ship, the spare crew members become an extra life. Once you're out of the team, you'll lose lives, so the challenge is to keep at least one bag of meat on your ship so you can keep moving forward. It gets especially hectic when you're in multiplayer and your entire team of three is wiped out, which can sometimes leave you with an assigned meat sack to protect while the rest of you continue to work like robots. You can, of course, buy new crew members, but they are both rare and expensive.

Repairing internal systems in real time while fending off enemy boarding parties during a ship-to-ship battle is just part of the desperation you'll experience as you walk by before your inevitable death. And when you're dead, you're dead. Everything is reset. You can exit during a private gate and save your progress, but you cannot return to any save point after death. This may sound like a horrendous appraisal of the game, but it really isn't. This is a fair warning that death is an integral part of your game. In the end, you will win, but it will take luck, a hard-won understanding of enemy types, and the help of permanent items obtained from in-game achievements.

As one of the only ways to truly advance in  fos,  using the game's achievements to obtain constantly available high-tech weapons and upgraded ships essentially acts as a difficulty slider that rewards the Sisyphus' perseverance over tech skills. There is no other way to adjust the difficulty. However, if you're like me, both lazy and incompetent, the only safe haven you'll find will probably be in a multiplayer game where other players have done the hard work for you. That's right, you can always be the assigned meatbag if you don't want to spend hours killing hundreds of pirates from a certain faction for the next ship unlock achievement. Just don't expect to be popular.

Ship-to-ship battles are often forced upon you by enemy FTL jammers, so you either fight to the death or throw everything you have at powerful pirate subsystems and hope to knock them down hard enough to either free you from the ground. jammed or reduced their tactical capability so you can carry and clear them by hand. The last part is my favorite as it really adds to the sense of danger. The ship-to-ship battles are pretty straightforward (fire on villains, repair subsystems) and you'll know almost immediately if you're heading towards instant play based on enemy stats.

Since so much depends on your ship, the first-person shooter element offers a welcome pause in order to otherwise manage the technical resources in the game. I wouldn't call it the perfect VR shooting experience, as the game's many comically large blasters make it impossible to look down, leaving you to spray and pray until you get a feel for where and how the gun shoots. There are about 5 or 6 classes of guns that vary in strength and magazine capacity, so you'll have to keep an eye out for the best guns when you're chasing enemy ships. After all, I was hoping it would go beyond one-handed weapons and eventually I would offer two-handed weapons as well, but alas, you'll find yourself armed with rocket rifle-sized "pistols" everywhere.

Carrying through an inventory with 5 pistols and two thigh holsters, the inventor system can make you scratch your head when you accidentally grab a pistol off the floor or wall instead of choosing your desired weapon, but you'll get used to it over time. game, be sure to properly highlight your gun and stay away from walls and other weapons in your quest to find the biggest and worst hand cannon available. The inventory, for all its shortcomings, is much better than scrolling through a flat interface.

For all your many balancing issues, ammo isn't really one of them, as both the enemy and your ship have enough reload stations scattered all over the place for you to refill your pewpewpew juice. However, after a while, shooting can become a tedious exercise due to the lack of a visual indicator of enemy health, and you wonder how many times you need to headshot an unprotected person with an explosive grenade until he/she turns into plasma dust.

Along with weapons, consumables in the game - stimpacks and cargo hold hacking devices - can only be found on other ships, so you'll have enough luck to find them and have enough space in your secondary inventory to bring them back next time.

To be honest, in single player mode it can be too masochistically. It's bad enough to have ignorant AI crew members getting killed at any moment, while in multiplayer you can send a real live person to protect the ship's vital guts. Multiplayer allows you to plan strategies, complete levels faster, and generally consume more consumables to create a respectable stash on your ship. It's also just more fun to play and learn from others as everyone tries to crack the code on how to get to Earth faster and more efficiently. This is somewhat hampered by the level of difficulty, which scales based on the number of living crew members on board, but I'm willing to bet that multiplayer is still easier than a single player from a long distance.

From Other Suns  is a lot of fun with the right team, as in Star Trek: Bridge Crew by Ubisoft  (2016)  so if you're thinking about playing solo, you'd better have a hard head on your shoulders.

Immersion

When the big bad mother alien ship is jumping forward at a steady pace, leaving every ship and station destroyed in its path, you will never have much time to grind anything, as 5-10 times by beating the game, you mostly depend on pure luck and maybe one or two wise tactical upgrades to get to the end goal. And even then, you may have just limped along with crappy upgrades, one last stim and a do-or-die attitude that you've honed after 10 hours of play spanning multiple runs of the game. This kind of existential panic, whether in single player or multiplayer, has a great way of stealing your attention by keeping you engaged until the very end.

Dangerous gunfights aside, it's just as immersive as hanging out and exploring ships. Virtually nothing is interactive, which seems like a missed opportunity on a galactic scale. Poker chips are lying quietly in the dining room, the TV is dead and gray in the crew quarters, and your hand is looking at everything for nothing. Another small list of gripes: NPCs don't react when you try to move them out of the way, and you aren't even given a satisfying weapon clang since your weapons also pierce each other.

Due to the inventory linking system, even the simple transfer of weapons to another player becomes a chore. You must - and I'm not joking - either find a recharging station/wall holder to swap weapons, or throw it on the ground  which doesn't always work. You will also have to learn how to drop the weapon on the ground so it doesn't automatically go back into your inventory.

When nothing seems solid and almost nothing reacts to your presence, you learn to ignore the vast majority of the environment, only scanning a few dedicated consumables and keycards. You sort of check internally as the promise of switches and fools is broken during the first game session. This is a real shame, because procedurally generated interiors are visually rich, and ideally they should provide an equally rich interaction with objects.

However, the ambient sound is excellent, offering various hums and hums to make the ship really feel alive. The soundtrack also deserves more praise than I can give, lending moments of true cinematic quality when needed. The voice acting is a grand mix of American and East London accents, most of which are convincing and very well done.

There is a noticeable lack of positional VOIP, meaning your shipmate's voice always sounds the same no matter where you are, but it's a pretty minor grunt.

Comfort

There are several movement styles available that give most people the style they are used to, and even one that is little used in Gunfire, which Gunfire calls "comfort mode" but could be more accurately described by calling it "teleportation mode" from a third party." In this mode, you pilot your copy forward while your POV stays behind. As soon as you find the place you want to be, you will instantly teleport there. This keeps you honest as your 1rd person copy is still vulnerable to damage, but gives you the added benefit of the most comfortable VR movement style outside of natural 1:XNUMX room scale movement.

There are also head and arm movements in first person, giving you more of a traditional FPS feel. I used to play mostly seated, which gives you a smooth forward movement relative to your body. This allows you to move forward by looking left and right and does not require significant body movement. Both smooth and sharp turning are available.

The inclusion of comfort mode and instant turn, along with "forced grab" of items, makes this game extremely comfortable to play both seated and standing.

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