End Space VR was one of the first space plane-fighting simulators to launch on the Oculus platform.
It promised an adrenaline-pumping simulation of space fighters duking it out across the cosmos.
In this End Space VR review, we’ll take a close look at everything that the game has to offer, what it lacks and whether or not you should buy it.
End Space VR
End Space VR is a space-fighting sim that puts you in the middle of intergalactic plane fights. The gameplay is much deeper than one would expect. You don’t just shoot planes and win. Your weapons operate on strict cooldowns which need to be managed smartly to succeed.
Alternate #1
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
If you’re someone that appreciates little details and an in-depth flight system, then this game is definitely worth considering. It features a large collection of planes and jets to choose from. All of them differ from each other in how they fly so it keeps the gameplay fresh.
Alternate #2
Warplanes: WW1 Fighters
As you may have gathered from the title, this VR game has you flying WW1 fighter planes into battle. The gameplay can get pretty intense and the game mechanics are also deep enough to keep most players engaged. Furthermore, the sound design is immaculate as well.
Quick Summary of the Main Product
End Space VR plops you in the cockpit of a starfighter jet that you will be in for the entirety of the game. It’s equipped with lasers, missiles and an assortment of other artillery. Your mission is to protect the precious jump-drive technology from rebellious forces.
How do you do that?
Well, by blowing them up, of course. The controls within End Space VR can be clunky at times but overall, it’s fairly smooth and intuitive. The great thing about it is that it’s not just a shooting simulator.
There are cooldowns you must manage and if you mess up at the wrong time, you’ll often be dead because you’ll have no proper way to defend yourself.
This offers a certain level of challenge that keeps the player engaged throughout the course of the game.
Features and Benefits
Impressive Visuals
Everyone is excited about VR technology because it can put you right in the middle of some amazing, beautiful, trippy or even, intense visuals.
When you’re hurtling through space battling it out with rebellious fighter jets, we can assure you that it looks absolutely magnificent.
Intuitive Controls
Even though it was one of the first space fighter jet simulators to come out on the Oculus, it takes advantage of many of its unique controller options.
The game takes advantage of the touch controllers as well as the gyroscopic controls to create synergy between your head’s movement and your controller’s movement.
This allows for some great and responsive controls that you can utilize to steer your plane properly.
Great Core Gameplay Mechanics
As mentioned earlier, it’s not just about shooting rebellious fighter jets. There’s a lot more going on under the hood than you see on the surface.
Not only must you shoot and destroy them but you must also dodge projectiles hurtling towards you, manage cooldowns, manage ship damage and more.
Factors to Consider Before You Decide to Buy Carnival Games VR
Price
End Space VR is available on Steam for quite a cheap price.
With its great visuals, fun gameplay and responsive controls, we think the price is more than justified.
Platform Compatibility
The great thing about End Space is that it’s available on a variety of different platforms.
You can get it on the PC, on the Oculus, on the Playstation 4 and it’s even available on Android. That means, you can get it from the Play Store and if you have a mobile-based VR headset, you’re good to go.
Fun Factor
The gameplay is super fun. However, it’s important to note that it can get repetitive after a while.
If the game’s price were higher, we would’ve said that this is pretty much a deal-breaker. However, for what it’s priced at, we think it’s a pretty fair deal. The gameplay is fun enough to keep you entertained for a fairly reasonable time.
Advantages and Disadvantages
- Cheap pricing
- Fun gameplay
- Easy-to-learn controls
- Great sound design
- Stunning visuals
- Poor leaderboard integration
Social Proof
We wanted to check out what other people thought of End Space VR. Since it’s been out for a while, we didn’t have a lot of trouble finding user reviews for it online.
Here’s what they had to say:
Similar to End Space VR (Recommendations)
#1: Best Visually Pleasing Alternative - Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown Review
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is a great addition to the plane-fighting simulator genre within VR. It should be noted that the game has regular missions as well as missions that are specifically designed to be experienced in virtual reality.
It’s not as restrictive as many of its competitors in terms of how you take on the fight and engage the enemy. Ace Combat 7 provides you with the freedom to explore the aerial battlefield and try out different tactics to defeat your opponents.
You get three unique missions within Ace Combat 7 which are in VR. All of them are highly varied and definitely worth experiencing.
Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
Price: Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is not the cheapest. It’s about what you’d expect from a AAA title. Some consumers may not be able to afford it but if you ever get the cash for it, its high price is definitely justified.
You get a ton of content and all of that content is highly enjoyable, well-polished and fun to play.
Platform compatibility: Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is available on the PC, the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One. It should be noted, however, that the Xbox One version does not have the VR missions since the console does not support VR.
Fun factor: Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown offers a smooth and responsive experience to the user. This coupled with the freedom that you’re provided, the experience is super fun and pushes you to explore your surroundings.
- Diverse locations for different missions
- Versatile collection of planes
- Responsive controls
- Beautiful visuals
- Level design encourages exploration
- VR content is separate from the main game
Best Visually Pleasing Alternative
The best visually pleasing alternative is Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown thanks to its amazing graphics, freedom to explore and intuitive controls.
#2: Best Arcade-Style Alternative - Warplanes: WW1 Fighters Review
Warplanes: WW1 Fighters is a great experience that caters to both, serious gamers as well as casual players. Depending on what type of experience you want, you can opt for the simulation route or the arcade route.
The former offers an in-depth and robust experience of being a WW1 pilot that is as true to life as possible. The latter is just a fun time that you can pick up and play with ease.
The sound and level design within the game is really something to behold. It does a great job of immersing the player in the sounds of WW1 aerial battle.
Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Warplanes: WW1 Fighters
Price: The price of the game is definitely justified when you look at how much variety of content it has to offer to players.
Platform compatibility: The VR game is available on PC. Hence, if you have a mobile-based VR headset or a PS VR headset, then you won’t be able to enjoy this game.
Fun factor: As mentioned earlier, it provides you with two types of modes that are fun depending on who you are. Of course, it’s up to you what type of experience you want but the overall gameplay is engaging and fun in both of them.
- Intuitive controls
- Engaging sound design
- Decent pricing
- Great game modes
- Effective visuals
- Motion sickness issues
Best Arcade-Style Alternative
The best arcade-style alternative is Warplanes: WW1 Fighters thanks to its variety of game modes, user-friendly controls and immersive sound design.
Buyer’s Guide
In this section, we will highlight the factors you must consider before you buy a game, specifically, a VR game. When it comes to VR, you have to take into account a lot more factors than a typical video game.
This is a major reason why many consumers have trouble with VR games: They don’t do their research before they buy them. Oftentimes, many of the hardships that such consumers face can easily be avoided by taking the time to research VR games.
The factors you must take into account before you buy a VR game include:
Price
You’ll be limited by your budget and how much you can afford to spend on a VR game. Not to worry though because even if you have a small budget, you can still find some worthwhile VR games to play.
Highly priced does not necessarily mean overpriced.
This is something that many consumers don’t understand. They might see a highly priced game and avoid it at all costs because they think the price isn’t justified. However, surprisingly, in many cases, this is simply not true.
Many VR games out there are actually highly priced because they have a lot of content to offer. Either that or the technology used to create them is new and unconventional.
When it comes to highly priced games, of course, it’s important to do your research. We’re not saying that every highly priced game has something unique and great to offer. There do exist games with high price tags that do absolutely nothing to justify it.
These games should be avoided at all costs.
When you look at the price tag of a VR game, you have to look at it in context to what the game will offer you.
- Does it offer a wide variety of content that could keep it fresh for a long time?
- Is new content constantly being added to the game?
- What is the quality level of the content? Do you think it’s too repetitive or do you think it’s varied enough that it’ll keep you entertained for a long time?
These are all questions you can ask yourself to determine whether or not a game’s price tag is justified or not.
User-Friendliness
User-friendliness is super important in VR games. If a game is not user-friendly within VR, you’ll have a lot more trouble getting it to work compared to a regular game.
This is because with a typical video game, all you have to worry about is the system that it’s running on. With VR, you have several other factors to consider.
- Is it properly calibrated with your headset?
- Are the motion controllers being detected by the game?
- Is the movement being picked up properly?
- Is the image inside the VR headset clear or is it blurry?
- Is the frame rate acceptable and consistent?
- Is the sound clear and consistent?
The truth of the matter is that with VR technology, there are a ton of different moving parts that all need to work in harmony for the experience to be worthwhile. If a VR game is not well-optimized, there’s a high chance that one or more sections will not work as expected.
If this happens, instead of actually playing the game, much of your time will be spent troubleshooting the issue. By the time you’re actually able to figure out what the issue is and fix it, you might not even feel like playing the game anymore.
A well-optimized VR game is just plug-and-play.
That’s what every VR game should strive to be. If you’re able to simply plug in your controller and get into the gameplay without having to tinker or troubleshoot, that’s the hallmark of a great VR game.
Platform Compatibility
We really did not feel that this is something that needs to be explicitly talked about but recently, we’ve seen many people that don’t take this into account at all.
It’s strange to see because it’s something that should be entirely obvious. However, it’s also true that there are a lot of consumers for VR that aren’t very tech-savvy. You often meet many VR enthusiasts that don’t necessarily play traditional video games.
This can be a reason why many of them don’t check what platform a certain game is available on.
The game needs to be available on your platform of choice.
For example, if you have a Meta Quest 2 VR headset, then obviously, you’ll browse games on the Oculus Store. If you hear about a VR game from somewhere else, the very first thing you should check is if it’s available on your particular platform or not.
Hence, first assess what platform(s) you have access to. Do you have a mobile-based VR headset? An Oculus Quest? An HTC Vive?
Once you figure that out, you can begin to browse games that are available on those particular platforms.
Nausea and Motion Sickness
With VR still being a technology that’s being improved upon, nausea and motion sickness issues can be fairly common in games.
The reason why many players feel nausea and motion sickness within VR can be for a number of different reasons, though. Depending on what the reason is, these issues may be solvable or not.
For example, many people feel nauseous when they first load a VR game because the display settings are not properly set. Once you tinker with things like the field of view (FOV), lens distance, pupil distance, etc., you might feel better.
On the other hand, with other games, you might not feel any difference even after you tinker with these settings. For such games, there can be two different reasons:
- The game is poorly optimized and will cause motion sickness issues for just about everyone
- The nature of the game simply causes certain individuals to be motion sick during gameplay
The former is the fault of the game developers and there’s really nothing you can do in that case except wait for an update from them. We’d recommend avoiding such games entirely. At least until some sort of update or patch comes out that fixes such nausea issues.
The latter isn’t really the developer’s fault because sometimes, experiences in VR will cause motion sickness no matter what.
For example, let’s say a VR game involves you being in a car crash where the car flips several times. Now, if that were to happen to you in real life, we can safely say that you’d feel nauseous, right?
Hence, that’s not really something that you can avoid. With such games, it’s really your choice if you want to subject yourself to that or not.
Genre
If you don’t know what genres of games you like, that’s something you have to sit down and think about before you buy any VR game.
Obviously, you have to first think about what type of game you want to play and what kind of VR experience you would most likely enjoy.
If you have no idea what you want and you don’t look into what type of an experience a game offers, you’re taking a huge gamble. If you end up with a game that’s a genre you don’t really enjoy, then that’s not really the fault of the game developers now, is it?
Figure out what you like.
Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll have a much easier time checking out the types of VR games that you’d actually enjoy.
Wrapping Things Up
That’s it for our End Space VR review.
Overall, it’s a great time if you’re looking for an arcade space-fighting simulator in VR. The gameplay is fun enough to keep you entertained for quite a while. Furthermore, it doesn’t cost a whole lot either.
What do you think of End Space VR? Let us know in the comments section below.