The Burst [Meta Quest 3]

If you’ve been following the site, you’ll know that we have been looking forward to The Burst for a long time. The game looked pretty cool from its initial trailer, but our interview with the developers boosted that hype up to critical levels. It seemed to promise a lot, so all that remained to be seen was whether or not they could actually deliver.

Many thanks to the publisher for the review code.

Interested in The Burst? Get 15% off with our discount referral code. Check back on the 9th August for the link.

BURSTING AT THE SEAMS
The penal colony planet Damag is, as you can imagine, a dangerous and hellish shithole. Full of abandoned cities and harsh deserts, the criminals that have been left there have now formed warring gangs. The main threat there are the shelldogs, who worship a tyrannical warlord known ironically as Utopia. She rules with an iron first, and the UCE want her dead and order restored to the planet.

And how do they plan to do that? By sending you, Hornet, to the planet to take care of business. You’re here to do a job, but it won’t be an easy one. Not only do you land pretty far from the target, but there’s something about the UCE’s intentions that seem far from noble…

The Burst does a great job at setting the scene of this Max Max style dystopian world. Even though the game isn’t open-world, it certainly feels huge with its sprawling deserts and abandoned civilizations. There are signs of traditional structures, but they’re mostly abandoned and collapsed, being replaced instead by outposts that have been thrown together by the criminally insane. As you can imagine, they look fitting for the maniacs that occupy them. and I rather dug the overall art-style too – even if the occasional pop-in threatens to ruin the atmosphere.

To get around the wasteland, you’ll typically have to parkour your way around using the game’s immersive locomotion system. Like with Venture’s Gauntlet and Stride, you’ll need to swing your arms to sprint – however, the stick will also allow you to move around at normal speed to ensure that it isn’t quite as exhausting as those titles. Crouching and turning can be done physically or using the right stick, with vertical stick movement controlling the crouch. It’s an unusual crouching system, and it took me a while to realise due to the game’s poor explanation, but it works really well since it allows you to adjust your height as required.

To aid your movement, you’ll also have access to a grappling hook that initially can only move small objects towards you, but later will allow you to swing or pull yourself towards ledges. It’s a lot of fun to use, even if I found some of the grapple points to be only just in reach. It’s a fun addition to the parkour movement and makes for some exhilarating sequences. However, it’s most useful function is to disarm enemies so that you can steal their gun and use it against them. Considering how quickly you can get overwhelmed by gunfire from these thugs, it’s a great way to put the odds in your favour.

The psychopaths that  inhabit the wasteland aren’t exactly the most varied, but each chapter presents you with new ones to deal with. You’ll get a taste of some of the variants in the prologue, with jet-pack goons and flame-throwing brutes, but that’s only really a tease for what you’re going to face later. One thing that they do all have in common though is that they’re all incredibly dumb. Don’t get me wrong, fighting them is a lot of fun – especially once you gain that upgraded grapple – but their AI is all over the place. In general, they’ll either be in a stationary state until you get really close or start shooting, at which point they’ll just go full aggro and maybe come towards you. It’s simple behaviour, but even that breaks every now and then. I experienced bosses that just stood there doing nothing, kart-riding foes constantly crashing into each other, grenade-throwers that dropped grenades at their own feet, and much more.

Regardless of the poor enemy AI, it’s more than made up for by the enjoyable gunplay. There’s a large range of guns to choose from, most of which are acquired from enemies and bosses and they all feel distinctly unique. There’s a make-shift revolver that blows heads clean off, a powerful machine fun that is laughably inaccurate, a sniper rifle than is ridiculously fun to use, amongst many more. Many of these guns have their own type of ammunition, and require you to reload and cock them in different ways, so you need to get yourself acquainted with anything new when you pick it up. I loved the designs, and they all feel and sound really meaty to use – which makes the gunplay particularly enjoyable. Probably the weakest gun at your disposal is your default pistol, which fires off a rather puny-sounding laser – but given its unlimited ammunition, you’ll still grow to be rather fond of it as a useful way to take down enemies in a pinch.

Your pistol is always holstered to your side, with two additional weapons being placed on your shoulder and ammunition at your waist. It’s a traditional setup, but unfortunately the positioning is way off in the game. The pistol is way too far back, and the secondary weapons are too high. It makes reaching for them in a firefight difficult as you’ll often just be grabbing at thin air. I really wish you could calibrate it manually like in the Espire games, as currently it’s such a pain to use.

That’s not all there is to the game though. Damag is a huge sprawling planet, and psychopaths don’t make for good next-door neighbours. As such, you’ll often have to traverse between areas by using a buggy known as the Mirage – which feels a lot like the Scout Car from Half-Life 2. It’s speedy, and turns sharply making it hard to control at times, but it also feels like something that’s just been cobbled together by the inhabitants of this planet too.

These driving sequences are largely transitional, taking you from one main area to another, but that doesn’t mean it’s straightforward. Oftentimes you’ll be blocked by enemy outposts and you’ll need to navigate them in order to open the way through. These sections do include special set-pieces now and then to help mix things up, but I’ll leave you to discover those on your own.

The game’s physics make the Mirage feel rather bouncy, and that can also result in you getting your ride stuck every now and then too, which makes progressing slightly more difficult as you’re forced to try and make it on foot (often you can’t), or restart from the last checkpoint. It feels like there should be more karts lying around to aid you in such situations, especially as before you get the upgraded grapple, there’s no real way to get your kart unstuck.

You’ve probably noticed a quite common thread throughout the review, and that’s the presence of quite a few bugs – both big and small – and that’s something that’s apparent pretty much all the way through the game. Whether it’s textures that don’t appear, floating ammunition, or any of the problems I’ve already mentioned, the game certainly doesn’t feel as polished as it should be in its present state.

The good thing is that GoRapid Studio are already aware of many of these bugs and are looking to address them in their first post-launch patch. I enjoyed my time with the game a lot, but it’s definitely a little rough around the edges. Assuming that they deliver on their intended continued support after the game releases, hopefully The Burst will eventually end up being the great experience that it deserves to be.

VERDICT
The Burst is more than a little rough around the edges, but I still enjoyed my time with it. There’s something compelling about Damag and it’s psychotic residents that make you want to push through its problems. The good thing is that most of its issues can be resolved in a patch, so fingers crossed that they get rectified to ensure that it becomes a much smoother experience.