Space Rift NON-VR - Episode 1 Reviews

Game is just a broken vr port. Playing with mouse and keyboard is not possible.

Unable to play unless in vr mode due to mode. Mouse DOA, flight stick DOA, most of keyboard DOA. Non VR version DOA.

Note that the NonVR gameplay of this game is buggy and unplayable with gamepad controllers.

I've heard that the VR version of the game works quite well - but for that you need to have the VR hardware to play. This review is specifically targeting the non-VR version's shortcomings. It seems like it could be a fun little space adventure WITH A BIT MORE WORK TO FIX A COUPLE OF BUGS THAT SORT OF MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAY PROPERLY. You are a pilot of a mining spaceship, you have to mine various minerals from asteroids to make money that will allow you to buy oxygen so you don't die out there in space. Well, that's your official job anyway. The thing is, due to a fluke in your ship's onboard computer system you get flagged as "abetting a wanted criminal" and your employer marks you for termination by drone fighter ships. So you're on the run. You turn to the people who accidentally got you into this trouble... they're building a system that will terraform Mars and free the people from the corporation's greedy grip. So they send you to... wait for it... mine various minerals from asteroids to find supplies for their project. In turn, they pay you so that you can upgrade your ship's engines, mining systems, and weapons. So yeah, you're an asteroid miner who frequently has to fight off enemy drone ships. You have a selection of a few different weapons to help you mess up your foes, and a small amount of skill is required to truly profit from the mining activities. See, it could have been a pretty fun little space adventure game. But... Game-killing bugs. ARGH! WHY??? One of the features is your email system in your spacecraft lets you listen to messages from various people, starting with your first employers at the mining corporation. These are meant to add to the flavor and story a little bit, but alas if you ever let one of those messages finish playing you freeze your view so you're focused on whatever you were looking at when the message ends, no other controls work, and you're effectively stuck. The only two ways to "fix it" are to Alt-F4 quit the game or else go full throttle until you crash into something enough times that you explode and die... but it's OUTER SPACE so there really isn't much stuff out there for you to crash into. This needs to be addressed before I can put my seal of approval on this game. Also, the flight controls are pretty horrible and clunky. I'm sure as a VR game it was pretty good, but when they tried to port the controls out of VR and map everything to keyboard/mouse or gamepad things did not go well. Worst flight control system I've ever tried in a space-flight game. And then some of the missions require you to scan special things (parts of a giant cargo ship, or special mineral deposits inside a demolished moon) by using your ship's searchlight and a special scanner function... these parts of the mission just don't work well at all, technically speaking. The flashlight thing points STRAIGHT DOWN below your ship so you can't even see it, so you're flying in the pitch black darkness even with it turned on. And the special scanners only function if you're already parked directly on (as in 5 cm or 2 inches away) the thing you're supposed to be searching for. IF you're any farther away you get a negative scan that says there's nothing there. So these special material searches are a PAIN IN THE NECK, I played 3 hours and 2 of them were just searching a tiny hole in a demolished moon looking for three little sulfur deposits that the person on the communicator said would "have a yellow color" but they really don't, and you MUST hit them with your special scanner before the game will let you mine the minerals out of them. So it was a good idea, seems like a nice little space adventure game... but a couple of deadly bugs make it so that you can't experience the full story, and the controls ported from VR to gamepad/keyboard are terribly implemented, and some of the special mechanics used in certain missions are just plain annoying. I'll probably finish the game anyway, someday, maybe... just because it's in my Steam Library now. But I don't recommend it to anyone else unless the developers can address the issues I had with it.