If you love flight simulators, have experience with HOTAS controls and have an absolutely strong stomach, you will love this game
Space Docker VR is a hardcore spaceflight simulator that you will either hate cause you cannot play without barfing or absolutely love if you manage to master the controls and well, play it without barfing.
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This is a really really hard spaceflight game. The way you control your spaceship is unique as it emulates HOTAS controls with the Quest controllers. The left stick controls the acceleration and the right one controls the pitch, yaw and roll of the spaceship.
But here’s the thing, to accelerate with the left stick you don’t just use the left analog stick, you need to twist or pivot the entire controller forward or back. The same for controlling the pitch, roll and yaw. You physically pivot, twist and rotate the entire right controller.
It’s hard to explain or to even fully grasp but if you’ve ever used a hands on throttle-and-stick (HOTAS) to play a flight sim game, that’s exactly how you play Space Docker VR. And if you’re still failing to understand, imagine how pilots fly real planes in real life.
So what do you do in Space Docker VR? Well, the gameplay loop is fairly simple to explain. Your task is fairly simple, find crates or bombs that are floating in space, carefully dock with them, transport and carefully release them to the docking area inside massive spaceships. Sounds easy, right?
Well, wrong. Just flying your spaceship around in zero-G with no resistance at all is hard. Carefully approaching these floating crates and bombs without bumping into them is harder. Carefully correcting your pitch, roll and yaw with tiny slight movements of your controllers so that your spaceship can dock with them is even harder. Transporting the objects back to the bigger spaceships while avoiding asteroids and other space debris, with a time limit for the bombs specifically, is even harder.
But wait, cause it gets even harder. Some of these crates will be spinning so you need to fire special rockets at them that stop their spinning. Oh and I almost forgot, you will encounter tiny black holes that have a gravitational field around them and some crates might be locked in their orbit so you will need to account for the orbital speed and rotation to be able to dock with them. And you will have to do all of that without getting motion sick.
This is an extremely hard game, but it’s this insane level of difficulty combined with the insane level of motion sickness that makes Space Docker VR one of the most immersive and coolest VR games I’ve ever played.
I don’t really get any motion sickness while playing in VR no matter what I do. I can run, jump, slide while looking at whatever direction even though IRL I’m standing still without any problems. But while flying my spaceship in Space Docker VR, there are moments where I would get extremely nauseous very quickly just flying straight let alone pulling off crazy maneuvers.
However, I did not stop playing. Instead I just took a couple of seconds to collect myself and breathe exactly like jet pilots do when they are pulling off crazy Gs while flying their jets. This whole thing, as crazy as it might sounds, only added to the whole “I’m flying a spaceship” immersion and I absolutely love it.
Currently, there are a handful of curated missions along with weekly randomly generated missions, but the goals are always the same “X number of crates or bombs to be collected and retrieved”. I wish there was more variety in terms of objects you need to dock with and maybe once you dock with them they can debuff or limit your spaceship/flight in some creative ways. I would love to see some space dogfights added, but that would defeat the whole “chill” space docking nature of the game. That’s why I also don’t like the races missions where you have to fly through checkpoints in space not only cause they are a motion sickness fest, but also kinda feel out of place in the game.
In the end, I feel like Space Docker VR is a game made only for a very specific type of people. If you love flight simulators, have experience with HOTAS controls and have an absolutely strong stomach, you will love this game and enjoy the sh*t out of it as you dock with crates orbiting next to a black hole while Hans Zimmer's No Time For Caution plays in the background. If you are not one of these people, spend your money somewhere else. Thanks for reading!
The game was reviewed on a Quest 3 using a review copy provided by the developer. Space Docker VR is available now on Meta Quest, PSVR2 PCVR.
