ARM (Asteroid Resource Mining): Planetary Prospectors (Steam VR)

System: Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift & Windows MR
Price at Time Of Review: £11.39
Comfort Rating: Red (Extreme Movement)
Genre: Space Shooter
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers, Gamepad, Keyboard & Mouse
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: Yes
Age Rating: PG

Description: Trapped as an asteroid mining prisoner, explore, mine and craft to find unique ways to escape from the Mining Barge that is under control of an advanced AI alien race. Explore a procedural generated open world with fully destructible environments governed by Newtonian physics-based on Real factual science simulations.

Review: You play the game as someone who has been locked up on board a mining barge, You are sentenced for lord knows how many years of hard mining labour. The good news is you do have a little help with a mech. The whole game setting looks and feels like a horror game. It’s dark and psychological, like the person you are playing is being tormented or something. Your mech has upgradeable parts which will help you mine bigger and better things and there is also a modular damage system which is quite nice. The ARM tool of your mech is worthy of note, enabling you to pick things as well as use other tools. This game is all about trying something new, something different.

Playing ARM: Planetary Prospectors feels like a testbed for a load of different ideas, but never brings one single idea to fruition. But worse than that this is not a game made for VR at all and you will be feeling very nauseous in no time at all. The controls are also something that at first is an issue, but I did get used to them after a while. Having said all those things, I do feel like there are some great ideas here and the game is certainly not lacking in content ideas. One day I think this will be a great game, but that day is not today or in the foreseeable future.