In the future, there is a perfectly safe sport where you jump into a warp tunnel and then use rockets on your hands to manoeuvre around asteroids, lasers, and other obstacles at breakneck speeds, or blast them out of your way with your space guns. This all sounds like a thoroughly thrilling spectator sport, I’m sure you agree, but donning your VR headset to play Space Drop is sadly rather dull.
Depending on what difficulty you start on, your first impressions may vary. If you start on the easiest difficulty you’re going to be totally underwhelmed by the lack of challenge. I’d recommend starting on the hard, the third difficulty, where you can get used to things with a little challenge. Ultra, the final difficulty, is just ridiculous. It’s not impossible to beat by any means, just incredibly frustrating instead as trial and error is the only real path to success.
The bigger issue is that the obstacles – the asteroids, spinning lasers and laser grids – are all the same regardless of the difficulty, it’s just that there’s more of them. It’s incredibly repetitive after a few runs and only gets more so from there. It’s a bit of a shame because there’s maybe thirty minutes when you first start playing where the game feels like it has some real potential. During this brief window, as you first master weaving through obstacles and blasting others out of the void, you can almost reach a sort of flow state – everything is so quick there’s no space for focusing on anything else. It’s just that after the first few experiences you’ve seen everything the game has to offer, just in slightly different combinations and closer together.
There are a couple of control options, one where you hold a button and aim your guns to move around and another where you don’t hold the button, the latter of which is superior unless you want cramp in your trigger fingers. Movement at least works well enough, giving enough fine control to fit between two lasers whilst still allowing you to quickly get over to the other side of the play area if needed. The guns are at best serviceable, though. They do what they’re supposed to do, though I’d recommend turning off the laser sights if you want any level of challenge.
The game looks relatively good. It’s set in space, obviously, and there’s planets and asteroids to briefly marvel at before each level begins, but even then it’s not like you can stop and enjoy them in a level without getting an asteroid to the face. The music is both incredibly repetitive and completely unremarkable, like the music you’d find in the background of a sci-fi themed mobile game, and whie the sound effects do their job well enough, they also aren’t that notable.
