RAID VR Demo Impressions: A Rock Solid Gameplay Loop With Peculiar Design Choices

We checked out the PC VR demo for RAID VR as part of this week’s Steam Next Fest and found a promising gameplay loop that plays it a little too safe.

Imagine if the charming Border Bots met an extraction shooter like Ghosts of Tabor somewhere in outer space and had a baby. That’s RAID VR in a nutshell. You take on the role of a pseudo-intergalactic customs agent, scanning ships at a checkpoint for potential contraband. If a scan reveals a ship carrying illegal goods, you board the ship and remove the offensive cargo by force.

The Next Fest demo starts you at rank 4 and ends when you reach rank 6, which took me a hair over thirty minutes to do. Also, note that the demo only supports two-player co-op whereas the final game will support four players.

At the start of your shift, spaceships line up in multiple lanes that you can switch between with your control panel. You have a list of icons representing illegal goods to check for, varying by type and color. After the scan completes, you have a limited amount of time to decide to let the ship pass or intercept it. Choose to intercept and the ship is tractor-beamed to you to board and engage in combat with the smugglers. All of this works very well, with an intuitive control panel that all makes sense on first sight. The colorful cel-shaded art style, as it usually does, looks fine in the headset and the sound design complements the gameplay well. There is a concerted effort to make everything in the game, including the options menu, a physically immersive action, so points for that.

The issue for me starts when you intercept a ship. Rather than a dynamic roomscale shootout, you are limited to moving around a rectangular border at the front of the room, dispatching robotic foes from a distance and fending off any sword-wielding bots. This immediately felt far too restrictive. After defeating the smugglers in less than a minute, you use a telekinetic grab system to pull contraband to you and drop into a vortex just below your original standing position. It’s fine, but could be so much more if you had full freedom of movement around the room. I also could not help but think about this part of the game with four players. That rectangle felt small for one, so I hope it scales up for four.

That said, the action is designed this way for a reason. All of your shifts are time limited and you have to process as many ships as possible. Every second counts, even when you watch them tick away while the ship is pulled to your station and docked. To help with this, some intercepted ships don’t have combat. You enter to some collectible loot, seize any contraband, and you’re out in maybe half a minute. It was admittedly deflating to get hyped for a shootout and not get the payoff, though it does save on time. It would’ve been nice to have the option to walk around and maybe nab hidden bonus loot, even if I was choosing to sacrifice time to do so.

The weapons mostly feel fine to use and have some fun designs, like a rocket launcher that fires off tiny aliens. I laughed every time I used it, though two-handing it came with a fair amount of jank. Some weapons and your shield have a timed reload, so you can’t go dual-wielding guns blazing all the time, lest you get stuck doing a Matrix-style dodge to avoid return fire. This will be hit-or-miss for most. I did not mind at all, but run-and-gun shooter fans that prefer manual reloading may yearn for more, particularly considering your loadout is chosen for you shift by shift.

Besides the scanned intercepts, you will also see a smuggler ship warp in that needs immediate attention. These are full ship raids with multiple rooms, some of which are locked and require you to acquire key cards to access. The raids make the checkpoint interceptions even more confusing. It is clearly possible to move around a full room in the game, so after completing a raid, going back to the scanned interceptions felt even more restrictive.

Lastly, the walking speed feels slow and doesn’t have a sprint option. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, the smugglers are also slow as are their bullets, making them easy to dodge. I play a fair amount of VR shooters, so this may be experience talking, but I never felt threatened playing RAID VR, even with upwards of four bots shooting at me at once.

RAID VR feels like a game trying to be as accessible as possible, but in the process stripping some of the excitement out. You want to move faster and be more dynamic than the game allows you to be. The gameplay loop itself is easy to learn and mostly fun, but the action can use some tweaking. It feels a bit too safe and easy for its own good, though I did enjoy my time in the demo. The question is whether that fun will be fleeting across longer sessions. At the very least, RAID stays on my wishlist and I look forward to the full release, which is all a good demo needs to accomplish.