Farpoint

SO NEAR, AND YET SO FAR. $79 | PS4 | www.impulsegear.com

EIGHT MONTHS ON from launch, PS VR feels like it’s still struggling to find its feet. Don’t get us wrong, the hardware is solid and impressively accessible. It’s the software that’s lacking, with even its more impressive titles mostly so thin, they feel more like tech demos than fully-fledged games.

Farpoint, then, carries a certain weight of expectation. What the platform needs right now is a truly triple-A experience, and that’s certainly what Sony’s marketing has promised. The reality, unfortunately, is rather less substantial.

It begins by stranding you (a space pilot) and two scientists on an alien world, via a strange wormhole. Separated from your buddies, you follow their trail in your search for a way home.

The story of the lost pair, though told to you via contrived ‘holo logs’, is a surprisingly effective, compact, sci-fi tale. Both its fantastical and more grounded emotional moments are given the room they need to breathe, resulting in some striking and affecting sequences. The problem is that it’s completely disconnected from what you’re doing.

While those two are playing out a story of tragedy, survival and hope in the face of impossible odds, you’re playing through the legend of The Man Who Shoots Things. Your job is to fight endless hordes of unexplained alien monsters that they never even mention, and then watch the pair silently from afar like a creepy third wheel. VR should make you feel involved in what’s going on — here, we permanently feel at a remove.

The moment-to-moment action is, at least, solid and frequently tense, especially when using the Aim controller available bundled in with the game. Shooting giant alien spiders with an assault rifle is nothing new, but just the fact of being in VR does lend it a more exciting aspect. Larger beasts especially have a real sense of scale to them that can make them genuinely frightening — the resulting moments of clip-emptying panic are a perfect organic homage to classic sci-fi action movies.

It’s a far cry from a fully-featured FPS, however. The limitations of the tech (and the average player’s nausea tolerance) result in what is essentially an on-rails shooting gallery. While you do technically control your movement, your only real options are forward, strafe left and right, or blindly reversing backwards, as you progress through what amounts to a long corridor. It’s Time Crisis, not Halo or Mass Effect.

Frequently undermining the most spectacular setpieces, too, are frustrating difficulty spikes and unforgiving checkpoints. Particularly infuriating is the inability to save your game mid-level — fans of short VR sessions be warned: if you don’t finish the 45-minute long section you’re on before stopping, you’ll have to replay it.

As a piece of novelty VR action, Farpoint is fine enough — uneven but boasting its share of clever tricks and twists. But as a full-priced, first-party, triple-A justification for both your original PS VR purchase and the new Aim controller, it leaves much to be desired.

The game ends in a sequel-baiting cliffhanger — cheeky, certainly, but perhaps appropriate given its place on a platform that itself seems in limbo.