Now I know before we start that Farpoint has been around for a little while. Enough for the major publications to offer their reviews on anyway. But of us small fry, we need to wait for things like Comic Con before getting our hands on certain games, Farpoint being one of them.
So Sony Playstation had their latest VR title hooked up inside their booth, and were offering time slots to book to check out the new VR shooter. Our time was 12:30, and we even turned up a little early in excitement and anticipation.
Now Farpoint isn’t the kind of VR game that we thought it was. We’ve seen first person VR before, but it’s usually a protagonist on some kind of pre-determined rail, and all you need to do is point and shoot. Now with Farpoint, they’ve integrated a new type of ‘gun controller’ into their game, with a thumbstick for in-game movement. So, you as the player, control the movement of your character. No rails, and from what we saw, large open spaces. Well, except when the game saw us scaling a cliff edge. Yes my legs felt a little numb at the drop.
So Farpoint commenting on what we experienced saw the player enter an unknown planet. It wasn’t explained to us as this was a technical demo, but it looked pretty alien. And the fact that this planet is inhabited by BIG spider type creatures. All we knew is that we had this gun, an assault rifle which later fired grenades. The gun was very responsive to our movements, and made you want to adopt a military stance keeping your gun controller against your shoulder and aiming down the sight, which by the way, felt AWESOME.
You genuinely felt powerful, and the immersion was just insane. Graphically the game wasn’t the best, but having the feeling of being inside a new alien world, with an assault rifle that actually felt pretty real, was incredible. I just hope that this is the starting point of what is going to be some very interesting titles.
