Farpoint And How Sony Are Taking Aim At The Future Of The VR Shooter

The planet you find yourself on in Farpoint might look an awful lot like Mars, with a dusty reddish brown landscape and inhospitable atmosphere, but it’s not. This isn’t out lifeless neighbour, but one that would love to kill you. It’s time to pop your PSVR headset on, grab your gun and head out into the wastes.

What I wasn’t expecting was for this demo to be showcasing the game’s co-operative multiplayer, with one of the game’s developers there to guide me through in game. Where the single player story has you journeying across the planet’s surface to find out what happened to your ship’s expedition party, the game’s four co-op levels are much more about action and shooting bad things that come at you in large numbers, dividing your attention between multiple threats at once.

If you’re deathly afraid of creepy crawlies, you’d do well to stay away from this game, unless the catharsis of shooting bugs with big guns will help you overcome your fears. There’s smaller spider-like creatures that skitter towards you, larger beasts with big green sacks of green acidic puss that they fire at you, but then there’s also humanoid aliens with guns in hand and robotic enemies. You’ll have to deal with fairly standard alien soldier types, either trying to get up close to you or sniping from a distance, or the utilitarian and box-like designed robots, firing slow moving missiles up into the sky for you to try and shoot down.

Simply put, the Aim Controller is another accessory in a post-accessory world. By and large, we’ve moved on from gimmicky controllers and attachments, as we saw with the relative flop of PlayStation Move – somewhat ironically rejuvenated as an integral part of PSVR – and even Nintendo, who revelled in the likes of the Wii Fit board and Motion Plus add-ons just a decade ago, have pared things back to the Joy-Con of the Switch. The Aim Controller feels like a creation that’s out of step with where the market is today.

It’s also really quite nice. It feels good to hold in your hand, with an excellent solidity to its construction, but without too much weight. It leans on the light-based tracking system of Move and PSVR with the ball on the end, with an analogue stick that sits nicely under the thumb of both hands, and equivalents to many of the DualShock 4’s buttons within easy and intuitive reach. It might not need to exist – it almost certainly wouldn’t were it not for the absence of an analogue stick on the Move and the death of the Navigation controller – but if you do get one, it’s bound to add something to the experience compared to using the DualShock 4, just as having two Move controllers makes you feel more like you’re embodying Batman in Arkham VR, or actually shooting out of the van’s windows in The Heist.

Aiming down sights is nice and intuitive, with a holographic sight on the default assault rifle you use in the game. There’s a simplistic satisfaction to the way it works, which you miss when playing pristine and perfect shooters on TV, such as Call of Duty or Battlefield, as you have to manually peer down the sights and line up the holographic crosshair. An alternate fire mode launches laser guided rockets, another satisfying little moment of game design that’s so much better in VR than on a TV screen.

You can hold two weapons at any time, with this demo also featuring a shotgun, drill gun, plasma rifle and a sniper rifle. Swapping between the two is a slightly awkward process, needing you to move the Aim Controller up to your shoulder and bring it back down, though this only seemed to work half the time. You might also simply be better off sticking with the assault rifle, which blends accuracy with power and doesn’t need to be manually reloaded, instead featuring a simple cool down period if you’ve been firing for a long time.

Though you have two analogue sticks on the Aim controller, the default controls and the developer’s intended way to play is to have you stood up and physically turning around you to then head in that particular direction. There are other options that allow you to turn using the second analogue stick, intended to accommodate those players who do so sit down, but standing to play works very well. The game feels like it’s been designed so that you rarely have to turn around or head backwards unless you actually want to. Enemies come at you from a variety of angles, but they’re generally in front or to the side of you, and never from behind in my experience.

With a ton of enemies coming at you, there’s a lot to keep track of, but it’s a lot of fun buddying up with another player and trying to take it all down together. There’s a hint of goofiness to the other player’s run animation, as the model seems to move through the world while running on the spot, but at the same time, there’s the nuance of showing you where they’re looking and pointing. It’s impressively expressive to have them turn to you as they’re speaking, even more so when I know that they’re stood to my left in reality, but I’m instinctively turning to my right to talk to them.

That kind of physical presence carries over to the actual gameplay as well. You’ll do well to take cover in each of the battle arenas that the co-op presents you, moving strategically when you feel you can press the advantage. In fact, this was our downfall, as if just one of you dies and your partner is unable to revive you in time, it’s game over. I’d foolishly decided that, instead of hanging back, I really wanted to use the shotgun I also had in my inventory, rushing forward and finding myself with enemies awkwardly behind me as well as to the front. It’s at times like this that the default movement system might be a serious disadvantage. Then again, it was my own stupidity that landed me in this situation!

Though it may well be marred by the peripheral-itis surrounding the Aim controller and the associated cost, Farpoint has to be considered as one of the premier PSVR games coming out this year. It’s shaping up to be a real testament to the system’s capabilities, creating one of the first real blockbuster shooters for PSVR and virtual reality in general.