Super Stardust Ultra VR is a port of the PS3 game to the PS4 and had VR contented added as DLC. This is a twin stick shooter and despite the VR in the title, the main game does not require VR, only the Invasion Mode DLC does. In the game, the player controls a spaceship orbiting a planet. The controls are simple and the tutorial is literally two screens. The left stick moves you around the planet while the right stick is where you’re aiming to shoot. As you’re going around the planet, you will be trying to avoid asteroids and enemies.
Your weapons will destroy the asteroids and break them up into smaller pieces. Hidden inside the larger pieces are green power-up rocks and shooting them will reveal items to pick up. Most of the pick ups will be bonus points but you can also get weapon upgrades, extra lives and shields. There are three types of weapons that you can swap on the fly with the shoulder buttons. Each weapon is useful against a particular type of asteroid (and to a degree, enemies). Not that you cannot break asteroids with other weapons, it’s just less efficient. You also get a limited supply of bombs which destroys all objects in the near vicinity of your ship and a boost that gives you temporary invincibility as you speed out of your current spot.
The enemies will spawn in waves. You’ll get quick enemies that die in one hit and tanky ones that take a barrage before they fall. Navigating through the enemies and asteroids while picking up items is a juggling act. Things will get frantic, there’s no avoiding this. This is the best part of the game though and is heaps of fun. Being able to weave between obstacles while shooting in another direction at the same time is satisfying. The controls are tight and fluid, there are no moments where death is due to wonky controls, it’s just that your skills were lacking.
Unfortunately, your ship dies in one hit (unless you have a shield which will protect you from one hit). This can throw you off in the beginning as you’ll be weaving and then suddenly die. With the huge amount of effects in the later levels, especially with enemy gunfire, there’s every chance a projectile will seem to appear at the last second and kill you. You get a limited amount of lives and losing all of them means a game over. This gives a lot of tension during boss battles, which appear at the end of every level, knowing that if you die here you will have to repeat all the previous levels.
Going for the achievements or wanting to go for a no-death run can be a killer. The one-hit death or a max of two-hits means that the tables can quickly turn from an excellent run to retrying. One slight mistake of overlooking a small piece of asteroid and you lose your shield or die, it’s brutal.
The game has a lot of different modes. The Arcade mode is the classic game. You play through five planets, with each having five stages. Once you complete a planet, you can select to start off from there so while dying does not mean restarting from the very first planet, you will have to start from the first stage of the planet. Depending on your skills, it doesn’t take long to beat all five planets on the easier difficulties, around two hours should do. Higher difficulties will require more skill and time though. One neat thing is that play enough and you can feel your skills improving. Before, you may die in the first wave, but soon enough, you’ll be able to make it through 70% of the arcade mode without dying and eventually, the whole mode without dying.
Survival mode has you try and survive as long as you can while looping around a planet. What make this hard are indestructible objects that keep spawning around you making it hard to navigate. Your ship will only have indestructible boosts to help prolong the inevitable but it is difficult to make it past even 40 seconds. Endless mode pits you against infinite waves of enemies. Unlike the arcade mode where everything is predictable and thus you can anticipate what will happen next, these are random waves. It makes it quite hard especially when it throws meteor storms at you which are spawning huge amounts of small asteroids. It likes to mix the three different types of asteroids and then on top of this, there are heaps of enemies. Each wave has a “nuke” which when destroyed will eliminate every object on the field, thus, this is the key to survival and getting a high score.
Impact mode disables everything except your boost. Gain points by defeating enemies and breaking objects, which you can only defeat by boosting. You can extend your boost time by hitting any object while boosting and it is addicting to try and chain it as long as possible. While it can be frustrating when your boosting time breaks early as you couldn’t hit any objects in time, especially at the higher speed, you keep trying one more time because when you do manage to get a long boost going, it is satisfying.
Bomber disables everything except bombs. You can replenish your bomb supply by blowing up the bombers. You will need to use bombs with strategic timing as objects will rapidly spawn and clutter up the screen. You’re constantly tested on whether there is enough space to dodge or if you need to clear your immediate vicinity with a bomb. Time attack is a time trial where you try to beat each planet within a certain time. The waves are different compared to Arcade mode. There are items that reduce the time by a small amount. Dying will give you a massive time penalty, adding three minutes to your time.
Blockade has your ship constantly producing a chain of asteroids. You need to last as long as possible while objects and enemies are constantly spawning. You will have access to all your abilities though. Planet mode has you play one planet of your choice and isn’t much different to Arcade mode.
Invasion Zone is DLC for the base game but is included in this package because this is the VR mode. The normal game has 3D support so you can play the other modes using the headset. However, in Invasion Zone, the gameplay is changed up. You now take the view of the pilot of a mech on the planet itself. You move around with left stick, aim with your headset and right stick, and have four types of weapons. Of course, being able to freely move the mech means you can easily get motion sickness, doubly so if you boost around. The normal mode starts off very easy to compensate for the change in controls and is more forgiving. Due to the low resolution of the headset, things in the distance are really blurry and hard to make out.
Finally, the game supports multiplayer, both online and split screen, in versus and co-op modes. Overall, Super Stardust Ultra VR is a great game. The arcade mode is a blast and the game has a ton of additional content through its many modes. The inclusion of the VR mode is neat, even if it is ultimately short and forgettable. This is a fantastic example of the twin-sticker shooter genre.
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