THOSE DAMN ALIENS! VR

My honest reaction walking into Those Damn Aliens! VR is that it captures exactly the energy of 2017 early-VR optimism: someone saw a headset, thought "aliens, guns, waves," and shipped it fast. That instinct is not inherently wrong. Some of the most charming VR experiments came from that moment when developers were figuring out the medium in real time. The question is always whether the craft caught up to the concept, and here it mostly did not. The setup places you as a lone scientist at space research station X34-Zelta. Alien hives have boarded your ship and the waves keep coming. There are two modes to work through: a campaign that structures the onslaught into ordered chapters, and a survival mode where the goal is simply to last as long as you can against escalating alien hordes. Multiple weapon types are present, with the promise of unlocking futuristic firearms as you progress. On paper, that is a reasonable loop. Shoot, survive, unlock, repeat. The moment-to-moment question is whether the weapons feel satisfying to wield in VR space, and community feedback consistently pointed toward controller input being unreliable, with random firing and misfires reported on Oculus Touch hardware. That is a foundational problem for a wave shooter: if pulling the trigger behaves unpredictably, the tension the genre lives on evaporates. Visual presentation drew persistent criticism around lighting, or the absence of it. Multiple players noted the environments read as excessively dark and visually indistinct, making it difficult to parse alien types and spatial layout in the heat of combat. For a VR experience, where the headset already limits peripheral awareness, murky environments compound the problem rather than create atmosphere. The sci-fi interface design has ambitions toward that clean, functional aesthetic that works well in VR, but it needs legible surroundings to land. Steam user reviews settled at Mixed, with only 40 percent of ten reviews positive, which for a wave shooter with a narrow target audience is a meaningful signal rather than statistical noise. I want to be fair to what Deceptive Games was attempting. Wave shooters do not need to be sophisticated. They need tactile feedback, readable enemy behavior, and a difficulty curve that gives you something to chase. Those Damn Aliens! VR has the structure for that in its campaign and survival split. The achievements and trading cards suggest it was built with replay motivation in mind. The problem is that the technical foundation, specifically controller mapping consistency and environmental visibility, undercuts the parts that could have made it a low-stakes, genuinely fun twenty-minute VR session. The community conversation in 2017 was already asking whether this was simply another stationary wave shooter with no locomotion ambition, and the answer appears to be yes. That is fine as a design choice, but it has to be executed cleanly, and the evidence suggests it was not. If you are assembling a VR library on a tight budget and want something you can hand to a newcomer for a quick alien-blasting session, there are better-polished options in the same price tier. This one carries the charm and the limitations of a first-gen VR experiment equally.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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