Seeking Dawn VR by Multiverse Inc., attempts to bring the world of a space soldier exploring a possible habitable planet to life. The game opens on a space ship where you navigate the controls as instructed by your female commander. There is clear romantic tension or at least they joke about some kind of romantic tension through the whole storyline. The voice acting is good enough, but the mouth syncing is really terrible. That did not really detract from the gameplay, however, as you rarely see her again once you are down on the planet’s surface. The controls take a moment to get used to and so does the UI, but once you are used to them, they are amazing. Everything feels straight out of the future and is not too complicated to understand. There is a quick select menu that is accessible from one controller and the general menu that is accessible from the other. It really is awesome to be running away from a giant alien monster just to open the quick select menu and grab a healing capsule or an “alienburger.” The game also allows you to run faster by physically swinging your arms, which was very enjoyable and created some really entertaining moments.
Seeking Dawn is really fun to play when it runs. I experienced a lot of crashing and freezing issues during my run of the game. These crashes were especially frustrating because the saving and quick saving option of the game never save your location. I am not entirely sure what they are saving because when I would reopen the game, I would be at some random point in the map that I had previously traveled through. The map in this game is really large with lots of materials to be found. There is a lot to be explored so losing progress to crashes is not ideal.
But when the game did run successfully, it was great. The visuals alone were really stunning and pretty much every creature was able to be interacted with. By interacted with I mean shot at, but it was still fun to shoot at the flying jellyfish. The mining and tree gathering aspect of this game was also really innovative. Instead of a pickaxe or axe of some kind, I had a futuristic blaster that launched robotic balls at either the tree or the ore. The tree would disintegrate in seconds and the ore would take a little longer as it hovered and was lasered apart by the robotic balls. Both were interesting to watch and didn’t really tire on me over the course of the game. Every gesture you make is designed to make you feel like you are in a future soldier’s shoes. You place your controller behind your head to view your current objective and subtitles appear floating above your left hand like a communication device. The little details of this game really added a lot to the experience.
The enemies were terrifically designed visually, but did feel like different levels of sponges at times. Some of the larger monsters take a really long time to defeat because you only have a pistol to start out that does not do a lot of damage and it doesn’t seem like there is much reward for killing them. There are little mechanics you can figure out about them that make them less challenging. For instance, you can agro a certain type of alien and it will attack a larger alien that is docile next to it. There is nothing that prompted me to try this, but the world allowed it, which was a great touch. Seeking Dawn is a time commitment, however, unlike other VR titles it requires a lot of dedication and time to get far in the campaign and develop your stats. This can be a good or bad thing depending on what you are looking for in your game, but I found it refreshing to have a game that attempted to have a full story.
There is a big part of this game that is exploring the outer reaches of the forests and camp. But as previously stated with the monsters, there is little reward. After traveling across a tightrope that I physically clung to using my controllers as hands, all I was rewarded with was a healing capsule and a couple of ores. Those same items can be found in a less perilous area, so I thought my efforts were rather wasted there. If Seeking Dawn were to offer more of an incentive to explore the outer reaches of the planet and fight the most dangerous of enemies, the gameplay would be significantly improved. It still has some amazing visuals and gameplay to go through, but at times it feels lacking. I only really explored the map because the quests told me to and I only killed the enemies because they were in my way. If I knew that I could find something worthwhile in the far parts of the map or in the corpse of the animals, then I would face those challenges with much more enthusiasm. There is still a lot to do in this game regardless of the lack of rewards, which makes it a very playable and decent VR title.
Rating: 7/10
Watch the Seeking Dawn Trailer:
Seeking Dawn is available on HTC Vive (Steam), Oculus,and PlayStation VR.
HTC Vive Review
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Overall Score - 7/107/10
I've always been a huge fan of video games and their ability to completely immerse the player in their world. I got my start in FPS games like Halo, but I have branched into nearly every area. My current fascination is surrounding VR and how it completely changes one's gaming experience.
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