Farpoint (2017)

Virtual reality is such a weird ball of wax. I think I finally understand why it seems to be in a perpetual state of limbo, adopted fervently by a die-hard faction of the gaming populace and overlooked/unloved by the popular majority. Intrinsically, the games you find in the format are filled with astronomically high highs and abysmally low lows. On one hand, the immersion that you experience when the all-encompassing visuals first hit you is something that every gamer should experience. There really is no adequate way of describing the sheer scale of it all - the bizarre brain process that occurs where you are in a 1:1 state of first-person altered reality. It's deeply uncanny and singularly entrancing, like a perceptual magic trick that you never get quite used to. The simple act of being inside of a digital world is incredibly compelling and majestic and in some cases, the game that you play within that world is similarly compelling. More often than not though, the experience is an exhausting one. VR gaming never at any points feels completely natural or comfortable. Sure the headsets are comfy enough in some cases and you don't have to be flailing around to play a good portion of them. It's that your body - specifically your brain, just doesn't really like it. And that unease, mixed with the minor inconvenience of putting on a headset that limits your spatial awareness in the real world and perhaps most importantly, the ability to look at your phone every few minutes, is what keeps people at arms-length. Anyway, I digress. Farpoint is a pretty decent, if underwhelming, VR first person shooter. It’s an amiable sci-fi story that doesn’t overstay its welcome but also has very little going for it in terms of creativity. Stranded on a desert planet, you must blast your way through an army of giant (extremely Starship Troopers-esque) bugs. There’s a narrative about a couple who was stranded on the planet before you that plays out and has some emotional beats that hit decently well but it all kind of feels like a movie you’ve seen before. What the game does do well is immersion. Like I said before, it's the best thing that VR has going for it hands-down. Looking out across the vistas of this barren planet feels really cool and isolating. When the game decides to track your controls properly, the space bug shooting is pretty fun too. It’s some real no-frills FPS-ing that would be pretty lame if it wasn’t in VR, but it IS in VR, and therefore 10x more thrilling. For whatever reason, I can play these types of games with smooth motion as long as I drink lots of water. Not sure why but it helps. I really have that teleporting movement option all of these games allow you to enable but I understand the need. For me personally, it’s immersion breaking. When the game decides not to track your movement properly, it’s literally unplayable - an issue all too common in VR. So yeah, this one is a soft recommend if you’re looking for some VR shooting and a reason to bust out the ol’ PSVR but it isn’t likely to make any new converts. And I think that until VR game creators discover some new alchemy to break through the barriers mentioned earlier in the review, we are kind of stuck here in a state of arrested development. As a technology, it wows. That’s not enough any more.