Megaton Rainfall Review

I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of us have fantasised about having super powers, be it flight, super speed, super strength, or the ability to fire projectiles. These powers are confined to the world of fiction (unless there’s something we don’t know), but fortunately VR has the ability to give us an experience of being a super powered being, and that’s where Megaton Rainfall comes in.

Megaton Rainfall puts you in the role of a super being tasked with protecting humanity from an alien invasion whose goal is to wipe out life on Earth. This being is guided by a god like voice who tells you about the nature of the universe in which you reside, but while that is quite interesting it isn’t as interesting as blowing up a variety of alien ships all over the planet.

With the power of flight, the ability to survive in any environment and being able to shoot projectiles from your hands, you’re pretty damn powerful to start with. As the levels progress more powers are awarded to you, like a continuous dash, telekinesis, and what amounts to basically firing a nuke. You have to be very careful with your aim with that last power.

As you get more powerful, so do the aliens with new ship types emerging to eradicate humanity that might feature the ability to cloak themselves and attach to buildings, camouflage, burrow underground, and deploy their own nukes. Every single ship is a danger and they need to be dealt with quickly or missions will be failed. As you’re invulnerable there’s no health bar for the main character, but instead a mission is failed if enough collateral damage has been caused around the globe, with this damage being humans killed and buildings destroyed.

What is impressive about Megaton Rainfall is its scale. You can go anywhere on Earth and every building can be destroyed. It’s quite a sight when you use your megaton nuke power on a city and just watch as the cloud of chaos engulfs the area with buildings falling inside it. What’s even more impressive is that you’re not limited to just the Earth.

You can fly around freely exploring not just the Solar System, where you can land on planets and even the surface of the Sun, but you can go much further afield as well. You can fly out of the Milky Way and head towards other galaxies. I flew for ages and didn’t reach an end point. What’s even better is that there are some great views in the void of Space, and it was quite a relaxing atmosphere to fly about in.

What isn’t so relaxing are the missions themselves. They’ll start off easy enough, but the stakes get bigger each round, with Megaton Rainfall not letting you rest as alien ships come pouring in an disperse all over cities. Prioritisation is key and all your powers will come into play in an effort to succeed. While missions can be beaten in around five minutes and a seemingly small number of just nine missions in total, you’ll be replaying a few of them due to how tough they can be.

You also need to keep an eye on how ships can be destroyed. Most will be taken down with projectiles you fire, but some will require you slamming into them at super speed and others require a bit of patience before an opportunity presents itself. What I learnt is that you can’t save everyone unless you have superhero reactions yourself, and you have to come to terms with some necessary losses and collateral, even going as far as destroying a building yourself in order to stop a ship from reaching a larger target. Even so, much of the gameplay does boil down to aim and shoot.

Megaton Rainfall is playable both on a TV and in VR. It feels really good to play in VR, but I advise going in with comfort settings at first, even if you think you have your VR legs as I did. There’s no other VR experience quite like this game where you get from side of the planet to the other in a matter of seconds, so definitely play with blinkers on to get used to that feeling and then turn them off if you’re feeling confident enough.

When it comes down to it, Megaton Rainfall is a decent shooting gallery experience, but its story is lacklustre. Being called Offspring by the god character became a bit cringey after a while, and the plot itself did try to reach for some philosophical meaning but didn’t quite grasp it. All that mattered were that aliens were invading and they needed to be stopped.

A rare bug did spoil my time, cropping up in the final mission where two ships fail to materialise and leading to a mission failure. I’m not alone in this and a small percentage of other players have reported it as well, but Pentadimensional Games have informed us that a fix is expected by the end of the week. It is an unfortunate error that does detract from an otherwise solid game.

What’s Good:

  • The scale of the universe
  • Fully destructible environments
  • You feel like a super being
  • Powers are interesting to play with

What’s Bad:

  • Gameplay does feel a little basic
  • Awkward and lacklustre story
  • Rare game-breaking bug, though a fix is incoming

Megaton Rainfall is a game of incredible scale and there aren’t many titles that let you go off exploring a large universe quite like this, when you aren’t blasting alien invaders out of the sky. In VR it is quite a spectacle, though that can’t shield it from the fact that it’s quite a basic shooting gallery experience whether on TV or in VR. Megaton Rainfall is very much worth checking out if you have VR, but even without that side of things you have a decent enough superhero simulator.

Score: 7/10

Version tested: PS4/PSVR

 

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From the heady days of the Mega Drive up until the modern day gaming has been my main hobby. I'll give almost any game a go.

3 Comments

  1. Thanks for the review. I’ve been impressed with the scale of the game in the videos but wasn’t sure about the longevity of the gameplay. The zooming out into space does sound appealingly chill though. Iirc it’s all been done by one guy too, pretty impressive if so and i think i’d still like to try it out at some point.

    • Ditto Aran – though have paid for and downloading now!

  2. Sounds really interesting. Once you’ve done all the missions can you just chill and explore?

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