When you've spent the best part of your day playing collectible card games with a man cosplaying as Geralt from The Witcher, it takes a special something to make you feel like maybe, just maybe, you're a bit too nerdy. That special something is Ubisoft's Star Trek: Bridge Crew, a four-player VR co-op game for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR that lets you live the dream of captaining a Federation starship through deep space. Even the most hardened of Star Trek haters are going to love this.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew puts you in one of four roles: Captain, Helm, Tactical, or Engineering. If you're playing on your own, AI fills in for the other roles, but ideally you want to find a group of well-heeled friends with enough disposable income to buy both a great gaming PC and a VR headset (at least until PS VR comes out). From there, invite everyone over to your place and have one big nerdy Star Trek: Bridge Crew LAN party. That, not so coincidentally, is the exact setup on show at Nvidia's E3 2016 booth.
Armed with four PCs, four Oculus Rift headsets, and four sets of Oculus Touch controllers, I (along with what has the be the most enthusiastic developer team of all time) began our mission with individual video briefings for each of the four roles. In engineering, for example, you're given a panel with sliders for shields, phasers, and engines, along with an overall amount of power that you can send to each one. At the helm, the role I chose, you're given a confusing array of maps, throttle and heading controls, and an impressively large chrome lever to shoot the ship into warp—once engineering has the engines sufficiently powered up at least.
In the captain's chair, you can tap on panels in the armrest to issues orders to the rest of the crew as you keep an eye on the overall state of the ship and any enemy ships that might be around. Whoever sits in the captain's chair had better be adept at handing out those orders verbally, though. As we found out after answering a distress call from a distant star system, in the heat of the moment there's no time for pleasantries.
Much of the joy of Star Trek: Bridge Crew is in how quickly it sucks you in. It's one thing to watch a classic episode of Star Trek and quite another to be sat at the helm of a starship surrounded by neon blue panels and roaming redshirts. The attention to detail in the panels and in the ships is impressive; clearly, there are some real fans working on the game. But there's also a real awareness that the whole thing is, well...rather silly. Turning around from my seat at the helm to find my fellow players wobbling their arms around in the air like a lunatic certainly took an edge off proceedings.
However, according to the captain, it wasn't as amusing as watching me try to pilot the ship, a tricky process that involved sliding my left hand up and down a touchscreen slider to control the ship's velocity, while also using a touchscreen joystick to steer it with the other. Suffice it to say, the captain grew impatient. Eventually, after plotting a course to the source of the distress signal and swinging the ship around to line up with the warp trajectory (highlighted by blue rectangles on the view screen), we were off.
"Scan for life signs" barked the captain as I gingerly steered the ship past a ruined space station towards some floating escape pods. "Tactical, drop the shields and prepare to beam up survivors," he continued. I moved the ship within transporter range, but a Klingon Warbird appeared, and soon we were abandoning survivors in favour of raising the shields and launching an all-out attack. This required a delicate balance of power between the phasers, the shield, and the engine—and the captain asked for more power from engineering throughout.
With the red alert klaxon sounding and the Klingons attacking, panic set in—as did shouting. I don't know about you, but when faced with a Klingon attack and a rapidly failing set of shields, delicately maneuvering with a virtual touch panel is tricky at best. Tensions ran high. From the outside, seeing four people paw around in thin air while screaming obscenities at each other must be an amusing sight, but such is the brilliance of Star Trek: Bridge Crew. None of us playing the demo ever felt anything less than totally dedicated to the mission.
Sadly, while we escaped with our lives, we didn't rescue all the survivors from the distress call. But that mattered little. For the first time since the Oculus Toybox demo, I felt like I had played a VR game that was a truly social experience. And with multiple missions—some of which are procedurally generated!—as well as an extended single-player campaign, there's even a chance that Star Trek: Bridge Crew might be more than just an entertaining demo. If not, at least I got to hear the captain say "make it so" before warping off into the wild blue yonder.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew will be released "in the autumn" this year for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PS VR.
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