Voronium - Locust Sols

overall i say try it

there is no options menu
cant change vr turning
cant recenter your view meaning u have to stay in your playspace orgin and face the right way

a decent tower defense game in vr

Valve Index controllers don't work, I can move my hands around, but that's all the interaction I can do.

Surprisingly good. Takes a bit to understand how everything works but once you do it's great strategic setup first half leading to tower defense second half.

Changed my mind to "not recommend", but I think it requires detailed explanation.
The game is not completely bad - but there are so many bad elements that adds up and start poisoning the fun.

What I liked and what feels good:
+ Clean visuals with almost no visual noise.
+ Music and sound, voice acting
+ Guns are big which is good for VR - easier to aim.
+ No stupid reloading, shooting pistols and grenade launcher feels rewarding.
+ Entering and leaving level happens without loading

But there are issues I wish to explain in details:
- When on a base between missions, the interface is blocked until the narration ends. And it happens after each mission - you can't choose next mission or access upgrades menu before voice finishes speaking. Very dumb, very annoying.
- Building turrets in a mission consumes the main resource. And it is never explained to player. You may finish the mission but with almost 0 money left. That is especially demotivating when the mission was hard to beat: you put a lot of effort and the payoff is in reverse proportion. The game forces you to replay easier missions where you can win without extra turrets at all.
- Guns available to the player. The first two guns, pistols and grenade launcher, are good: requires some skill to shoot, fun to operate. But the other two... The effect and operation is not instantly obvious to the player. When there are 3 and more guns, switching to the needed gun becomes a challenge and I didn't found an option to exclude unneeded guns from my arsenal. Ounce you unlocked it - it will be with you on every mission.
- Upgrades for the guns may seem ok, but you didn't feel any noticeable difference.
- Enemies are boring: looks the same and are bullet sponges. Except the very basic one they require multiple direct hits to kill. It generally feels better when there are many low-HP enemies that one with high HP, but the game does not do that.
- TD games usually prioretizes towers over manually controlled weapons (abilities). Towers do main damage while manual abilities are situational and in general do very little damage. But that is not regular top-down TD, it's a VR game where you shoots in 1st person and it is the main player's activity within the game. And your direct shooting is made less important that building towers. That feels seriously broken especially in higher levels: the game forces you to shoot in 1st person and focus all your attention on it, but it is not the way you win.
- The difference between towers not obvious: looks like it is always better to use more expensive towers, no combinations of towers of different type (like freezing tower + splash damage tower) are involved.
- The amount of guns and types of towers is very limited. The levels looks the same with no variations in visual style, the same with enemies. There is not enough content.

Conclusion!
The issues with amount of content may be hard to fix for a small dev. team, but it is totally unreasonable why other aspects of the game are below the threshold. Overall the game has good formula: TD + shooting gallery + upgrades. That makes it somehow interesting to play in general, but any sole aspect of the game is not up to the standards: TD is bad, shooting gallery is bad, system of upgrades does not has enough options and in turn also bad.
The game starts to feel repetitive after ~1 hour of play.

Great combination of Tower Defense, FPS, you have to shoot fast think fast and manage your resources.

The intro was great, basically earth died, some humans went to space to find another planet and halfway there there are some problems, you are awaken to help solve them. (mainly robotic looking spiders are stealing your voronium, and you have to kill them)

You can place your towers along the path the enemies can take, you can see a very cool 3d map of the area and plan accordingly.

Your main tower is the one you can control, others are the usual fast shooting, slowshooting, explosives and slowmo towers. All of them can be upgraded outside the levels to make them more powerful the next time.

Performance was great, graphics are a little simple but they look alright, voices are well done, it really feels polished in most aspects.

There arent that many different enemies that i could see (so far only 2), and i could only open up 3 different levels i could replay, i dont know if ill eventually open up more.

Overall is one of the best tower defence games in VR, but it still feels a bit simple and repetitive, definitively worth it if you are a fan of the genre, or if you get it on sale.

I really enjoyed playing this game. It's pretty challenging and gets intense when there's a lot of enemies attacking you. But once you pick up an effective strategy, the game tends to be to easy. The game is definitely worth it when it's on sale. It would be worth the full price if it were to have more content.

Overall: Great game with easy to learn controls

Nice tower defence game with a scifi mining theme where you shoot mechanospiders and can deploy turrets to aid you.

Game is very short, takes 2-3 hours to get full upgrades. Pick it up on sale if its really cheap, otherwise dont bother paying much for 3hrs of gameplay.

Turrets are nice, but i would appreciate some sort of C-RAM turret to deal with the incoming ballistic bombs and drones. Once you got a few turrets all your attention is on those flying things which gets boring quick.

A fun, not too serious, tower defence that you can jump into and play for a few minutes and have a polished experience. I've seen much worse at higher price points.

It is a fun wave shooter and tower defense combination, I like the pull mechanic for moving yourself and I would like to see it implemented in other games.

I really don't like the computer voice and personality.

great graphics, interesting, enjoyable gameplay. my only problem is that it can get overwhelming fast. i dont know if this game was ever planned to have multiplayer, but i think it would thrive from it. even with just peer-peer connections it would be a ton of fun. i want to re-itterate that this game is FUCKING COOL AS SHIT

I tried it but got a refund. I've got far superior tower defence games in 2d that I haven't fully played yet. The controls in this are terrible. Sparse graphics and the game play is just tedious. The guns feel like pea shooters. Not immersive at all. The VR does nothing for it.

I got this game for ~$2. At that price, sure it's worth 3 to 4 hours of gameplay. I usually don't care for low poly art styles. Voronium is near the cut off for 'looks too garbage to be immersive'.

This game feels very unfinished. The standard issue laser rifle has an overheating function that never overheats. In the early stage beginning levels your fingers will be fatigued from holding the triggers the entire level, but it will never overheat... Also, since the right handed rifle is a mirror image of the left, the text is also mirrored. There is a fair bit of balance that could be done. Once you place 4 or 5 defensive structures you have no need to use your guns anymore, you can sit back and watch. Can be kinda boring. Most of the secondary weapons you will never need. It's nice to have them, I guess, but just placing towers and using the standard laser rifle will get you by with no problems. The 'Peacemaker' and the 'Gravity Gun' I used once and found them to be useless weapons.

There's only 9 levels which are grouped by sectors Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Each sector you have to survive for a certain pre-determined time for your mining robot to collect the Voronium (you have no control over this mining robot and as with most video game robot narrators/guides, it has very dry humor). Once you have enough Voronium you unlock the next sector. I really didn't see the point of having a goal for the Gamma sector as there's no reward... I reached the goal only to be disappointed that the game was over.

I wish there was more to this game.

My only suggestion is for there to be more than 4 enemy types. Currently there's little mech bug that jumps at you, medium mech bug that throws glowing rocks, and big mech bug that spits out quadcopters. I counted the quadcoptors as an enemy type to be generous. They do very little damage, take one shot to destroy, and are more of an annoyance than anything else.

Why doesn't the big mech bug also have a laser, or shoot explosives which quickly destroy towers? I'm fairly certain the medium mech bug with rock throwing does more DPS than the big one. That is, assuming the medium mech bug was positioned correctly as to not be throwing all of his glowing rocks at the wall. I guess there's another feature for ya.... The little guys have no reason to jump at you if they are just going to hit a wall and fall back to the ground. So make it so they only jump when they know they'll do damage. Medium mech bug throws glowing rocks at the walls instead of trying to reposition itself to have a guaranteed damage dealing arch. The big mech bug isn't free of this lazy development either... Often the quadcopters fly straight into the walls and explode...

I played 'Gamma III' a handful of times (this level rewards you the most Voronium and I wanted the, nonexistent, next sector to unlock) and on every single playthrough towards the end of the levels duration there's this big mech bug that gets stuck and stands there doing nothing until you shoot it a bunch. Every single time.

Considering the low price, the game was enjoyable. However, once you know what you're doing it becomes way too easy and just like 99% of "VR Only Games", it's way too short.

VR Setup: HTC Vive with 4m x 4m room scale, GTX980.

This game is crisper than a fresh apple. Audio, Visuals, and Gameplay are very refined.

The UI is done very well too, a blaring issue in many VR games.

It's basically your standard FPS/Tower Defense, but it has its own unique twist on it.

If you like Tower Defense games and have a VR setup, it's a must have.

Good job Gamalocus! I look forward to see what else you do to this game!

EDIT

This is good fun! Similarly priced VR-titles are a bit more like tech demos, but this is actually a game with original gamelplay. It's a solid VR shooter, which essentially replaces free movement with tower defense, allowing you to take manual control of and switch between towers. Solid look and feel, nice humor, does not take itself too seriously.

Just starting playing but it's pretty polished. Plays like a RTS where you take control of a tower and then it becomes more like a wave shooter. Graphics are clean & pro, sound is good and shooting is satisfying.

This i great fun! I like tower defence and this is like tower defence on steroids. Wild!
I also really like the graphics and the atmosphere of this game. If you like action and tower defence strategy
i can definitely recommend this title.

I LIKE this game! The combination of FPS and TD is really good. I'm an average FPS player and my favorite casual game is tower defense and at first I was a bit skeptic if this might work, but I'm surprised how well it does. The devs seems passionate about the game so my only wish is more creeps to shoot at.. oh, and a 1v1 moba style gamemode would be awesome! 🙂

It's the only VR shooter so far that doesn't make me motion sick - they nailed it!
I love the combo of a shooter with the strategy element of tower defense, somehow it balances the action-packed shooting.

One big flaw.
Everytime I unposses a turret, I reappear far away from the controls....not kewl.

Tower defence in VR - though it did sound odd I liked it. The combination of strategy while also taking part in the action, makes this game an interesting hybrid. A bit hard in the beginning, but you quickly get a hang of it. Definitely one I can recommend, as there are many good entertaining hours in this game!