Singularity 5 by Monochrome Paris bills itself as an immersive wave shooter, and for such a goal, it certainly accomplishes it. This game is beautiful – the best VR graphics I’ve seen so far – and without any lag at all. It’s really impressive just looking around at these massive creatures and buildings. The game centers around a robot takeover of Paris in a dystopian future. The black, white, and gold color palette sets the atmosphere really well. In terms of gameplay, though, this game is really hard. I’m not usually one to dislike difficult games, but often I found myself not even knowing why I’d lost; there’s not much attention to the beginner’s experience in this game.
When possible, I personally like to have as little UI as possible so as not to distract from the overall experience. However, it’s important to not have so little UI that the player is left confused. In a wave shooter such as this one with enemies attacking simultaneously from all sides (sometimes even behind me), I need to know things fast and be able to act just as fast. Steady health regeneration enforces different gameplay strategies depending on my health: if I’m low on health, I’ll try to be more stealthy while I regenerate, but if I have health to spare, I’ll go guns ablazing and tank everything. Really the only indication I had of my health in this game was that the colors of the environment would fade when I was low, but I never got a sense of how fast my health regenerated or how many hits it took to kill me. Raw numbers would have been great. The same goes for the boss fights. The normal enemies died in a few hits and I ended up learning which guns are best for each enemy, but the bosses have no health bar. I would end up making it to the boss only to fail repeatedly because I wasn’t doing enough damage or was hitting the wrong spot. As a result, these boss battles would drag on for up to 20 minutes each attempt. I’m usually a fan of finding new strategies on each successive attempt, but since this game is so active and each attempt takes so long, my losses were not only demoralizing but physically debilitating. I had to take a break after each attempt. Perhaps the rapid constant swinging of my arms could be turned down a little bit.
That brings me to the physical aspect of this game. The most effective strategy I found was to flail my arms a lot to get rid of the swarms covering my vision, but this exhausted me fast. Some enemies force you to duck, but with so many of them, I was constantly just moving my head in circles. Along with the occasional screen shake, which shouldn’t be in any VR game ever, this game is certainly something you can’t play for too long. I could only handle sessions of half an hour each. That being said, each play session was extremely rigorous, so if that’s what you’re looking for, this is for you. I do have to say there is something satisfying about sweating through wave after wave of enemies, but that entails that you eventually get to the end. Given that each attempt was sufficiently draining, some play sessions didn’t end in the positive sort of catharsis I wanted and rather left me with a negative one, violently ripping off my headset and collapsing into a chair. Perhaps shorter tasks to accomplish would aid in this; at least I would have made some discernible progress. Overall, though, I can’t imagine that the replayability of this game is too high since each level has a leading strategy to finish, so maybe having more levels or adding more variety to the current levels would help with that, but this game was fun for the short time I played it. It really is beautiful and fun when it cooperates, but unfortunately this didn’t happen as often as I had hoped.
7.5/10
Check Out the Singularity 5 Trailer:
Singularity 5 is available on PC via Steam and is compatible with Vive, WMR, and Oculus Rift.
Steam VR Review
I am an aspiring game designer looking to explore the philosophy behind game creation. Some of my favorite games include Overwatch, Super Smash Bros, Portal, and Beat Saber.
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