Saga of the Void: Admirals

I'll be straight with you: I came into this one skeptical. VR strategy games have a long history of promising the god-view fantasy and delivering a wobbly tech demo with 40-minute battery life. Saga of the Void: Admirals is a solo-dev effort from RowlesCorp Studios that somehow clears that low bar by a meaningful margin, and in a few spots surprises you outright. The core hook is scale manipulation. You can pull your perspective up to command-god altitude and watch 50-plus ships chew through each other across the void, then physically shrink yourself down to fleet level and have capital ships tower over your headset. It sounds like a one-note showpiece, but the developer actually built RTS mechanics around it rather than just bolting VR on top of an existing genre template. Spawning ships is handled physically - you grab a hologram with your controller and pull the trigger to drop a unit into the battle space. There are 12 ship types to work with across matches that support up to five players and bots in various combinations, and the campaign ladder runs a progression of increasingly difficult missions backed by bot opponents when human players aren't around. Multiplayer is cross-platform, which matters given the thin player base you'd reasonably expect from a self-published VR title released in 2017. Bot support is treated as a first-class feature rather than an afterthought, with full co-op and custom lobby options including five difficulty tiers and three maps - so you won't be stranded in empty lobbies. That's the right call from a solo dev. The community is small but the Steam user reviews that do exist sit around 92 percent positive, which for a niche VR strategy game with 27 votes actually tells you something: the people who showed up mostly liked what they found. The downsides are real though. The discussion boards show players who couldn't figure out how to play without a hand-holding tutorial, and there are lingering bug reports around controller input and interface angles. This was rebuilt nearly from scratch out of an earlier title called CapitalShip: VR, and some of that seam-work shows. The UI is functional rather than polished, and there's no indication of ongoing development post-2020. If you need a live ranked ladder with matchmaking infrastructure behind it, look elsewhere. This is not that game. But if you want a VR RTS that actually runs without melting your frame rate - 50-plus ships with no performance issues is a genuinely credible claim here - and you're okay with a smaller, quieter community, there's real substance in the box. For shooter fans like me who only dip into strategy when the hook is strong enough, the VR scale mechanic is the hook. It changes the spatial relationship to the battlefield in a way that flat-screen RTS games simply cannot replicate. That's the one thing this game does that nothing else on PC currently does better.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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