Ubisoft is bringing Star Trek to virtual reality, and it's a sort-of-exciting simulation of pressing buttons on a control panel.
Having played the demo of Star Trek: Bridge Crew at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles this week, I'm feeling ambivalent. On one hand, I kind of see the appeal: As a member of the bridge crew of a Starfleet ship that looks exactly like but definitely is not the Enterprise, you must communicate with the rest of the flight deck to control the ship's functions without dying.
On the other hand, my experience amounted to waiting to being told that I had to press a certain button, and then pressing said button. Not exactly riveting, although perhaps Ubisoft is slow-rolling the demo so newbies don't explode here at E3.
Bridge Crew arrives for the Rift, the Vive, and PlayStation VR this fall. I played the Oculus Rift version, which uses the Touch motion controllers. It's an online game for one to four players, each of whom occupies a different position: The captain gives orders (being privy to information other players don't know), engineering controls the ship's power levels, the tactician controls weapons and shields, and the helm navigates.
The captain must be played by a human, but the computer can play the others. If you want more granular control over those roles, the captain can hot-swap into them and carry out precise actions.
I played the "engineering" role. As the game started, I had a console's touch screen in front of me and could move my hands all about with the Touch controllers. I didn't have much to do until the captain told me to raise power and engage warp drive to go flitting across the universe. I accomplished this with simple presses of the virtual screen.
That's pretty much how things went. As the engineer, I didn't face any real decisions. I simply adjusted the relative power levels of the engine, shields, and phasers based on our needs at the time: Did we need to move? Were we being fired on? I did what the captain told me, which required no problem solving or dexterity. At times, the job required pressing a sequence of buttons to load an escape pod of survivors onto the ship, but it was just that: Pressing a simple sequence of buttons that appeared when I needed to press them, no earlier.
I see potential here. There certainly was something cool about sitting on the bridge of a spacecraft, looking out at planets, stars, enemy ships, and other galactic miscellany. There's even a button that makes the spaceship disappear so you can just be floating in space so you can take it all in without the furniture blocking your line of sight.
If the game raises the challenge, requiring you to think on your feet and juggle multiple tasks or decide where to allocate resources, I can see it being more engaging. But I can only comment on what I experienced, and it was pretty bare-bones.
That said, an interesting moment stuck with me: At one point, another player wasn't sure what to do and turned her palms up in exasperation while staring at the console. I looked over and saw her what-do-I-do pose clearly mimicked in the virtual world, since the Oculus and the Touch controllers were tracking our head and hand movements. You could visually interpret the emotions of a real person in virtual space.
But "Wow, VR is cool" moments like that will carry the medium only so far. Games need a reason for being beyond "Wow, VR is cool." Hopefully, Star Trek can figure that out.
