Zen Studios is no stranger to VR, having previously released their Pinball and CastleStorm games on the virtual format, so I immediately jumped at the chance to review Out of Ammo, a visionary new approach to strategy and tower-defense. Regrettably, my first experience with this game would be on the PSVR, a system clearly not capable of realizing the dreams of the designer or the hopes of me, the player.
Out of Ammo starts you off in a bunker, with all sorts of option boards, config screens, mission select post-its, and a vast assortment of weapons and gear to play around with. This is where you will immediately learn to despise the controls, as neither option A or B provides anything remotely functional. You are forced to use the PS Move controllers, and without any directional input you must press buttons to spin left or right and press triangle to move forward. All movement defaults to stepped degrees and teleport walking, but it can also all be set to smooth travel if your stomach can handle it.
By design, Out of Ammo is a room-scale game, which works great when you are using a Rift or Vive with multiple cameras tracking your position, but the PS Camera is barely capable of tracking you when seated, so when it comes time to move about the virtual battlefield or even perform simple tasks like reaching down to your waist for a fresh sniper round, you might find yourself loading “air”. It really is a shame about the controls because the designers have made this game ultra-realistic as far as pulling pins from grenades, physically removing empty magazines and slamming a new one home, or even pulling back the bolt-action sniper-rifle to reload single-shot rounds. I really wanted this game to work.
Once out of the bunker I found myself in a tutorial that, while well-intentioned, was nearly as broke as the controls. You’ll be instructed to build various constructs like a bunker, machine gun nest, and a sniper tower. You’ll also learn how to possess individual soldiers, so you can experience the traditional sky-view RTS from a FPS perspective. Again, while conceptually fun the pop-up segment menus were hard to navigate as the shaky PS Move made it hard to select the proper “pie slice” option. The tutorial also wasn’t very clear in its instructions, so when I constructed my machine gun nest it was facing 90-degrees to the targets I was supposed to shoot, and the gun doesn’t swivel that far. With no way to rebuild or rotate the nest I was forced to occupy a random soldier and shoot the targets with an entirely different unit just to proceed.
Visually, the PSVR just isn’t capable of delivering what this game needs. Even in the bunker things were a bit blurry and jagged, but once on the diorama-style battlefields things got really bad. I could totally see the potential of what this game could offer on a more powerful system. This was like the ultimate game of war we wished for as kids with models and toy soldiers, etc. You wanted to reach out and touch the houses, and in the case of your own military units, that is exactly what you will be doing. Soldiers are blocky by design, looking like they escaped from a Minecraft game, and while recognizable and fully functional down to the last operational detail, the guns are a bit exaggerated and stylistic.
Ultimately, the game was just painful (to the eyes) to play. It was like viewing the world through a lens filled with water. Every straight line was jagged and there was animated stepping on every angle. The pop-up text was super-blurry and when the helicopter flies in for supply drops it flashed in and out of existence, making it look like a malfunctioning hologram. And for the record, I am playing on a PS4 Pro with a brand new ZVR2 PSVR headset, so it’s not like this can get any better.
I so wanted to love this game. Out of Ammo offers a visionary way to play a classic strategic war game with the ability to command troops from above, build units, call in airstrikes, and even inhabit the bodies of individual soldiers to perform specific tasks. There is a substantial wave-based campaign mode and an online mode for up to four players, but with so many visual and control issues I sadly can’t recommend anyone play this…at least on the PlayStation VR.
