One of the great things about a platform like VR is that it’s still in its growing period. Whilst mainline consoles have more or less carved out their genres, with even indie games mostly following a similar pattern, VR is full of experimentation. The eager fanbase and low selling prices for games allow developers to make small-scale projects designed to basically see what works.

Galactic Traffic Control is one such project, and it takes advantage of one of my favourite features of the Meta Quest 3: its passthrough mode. There have been some great games in mixed reality this year, and this aims to be another one to add to that list.

Let’s see how it fares.

Many thanks to the developer for the review code.

THE GALACTIC SPACE HIGHWAY
Congratulations! You have been promoted to Galactic Traffic Controller! Your duties as an omnipresent officer are to guide all the spaceships arriving from their hyperjump into the appropriate portal. Each ship has a certain classification, meaning that the huge orange ships will need to go to a different portal to the small and speedy red ones; however, guiding them is a cinch as you simply drag out a pathway for each ship via either your controller or your hand.

What starts as a simple task soon becomes far more complicated. Should too many vehicles crash, you’ll fail – and as more and more vehicles appear, the harder it will get. Depending on where they spawn may necessitate drawing out a longer path just to ensure that they don’t crash into another coming in from a longer distance. It requires quick thinking on the fly, otherwise you’ll end up failing.

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As if that wasn’t stressful enough, there are also a number of other hazards to content with too. Whether it’s asteroids that you need to grab out of the air, or black holes that you need to navigate around, there’s more than a few obstacles to contend with. It all sounds overwhelming, but it never feels that way due to how well the game signposts everything. Any ships out of viewpoint are indicated on your periphery, and they even use symbols above the ships to help you quickly distinguish what needs to go where – something that will no doubt prove useful for those who have trouble with certain colours.

To top things off, the game also has a few other unlockable modes to help shake things up. Wall mode is my favourite as it allows you to integrate your room into the portal placement, but the ‘one portal’ and ‘black hole’ modes are also good for an additional challenge. They still play out largely the same way, but the slight tweak does help to make things tougher for more seasoned players.

All in all, it’s a rather polished arcade experience for the cheap price. I was honestly expecting something that would be good for a quick session but would then get rather boring after a while, but it actually proves to be a lot of fun. Sure, the style of game means that you’ll likely want to play it in short bursts – but most importantly, you’ll want to keep coming back for more.

VERDICT
Galactic Traffic Control is an addictive intergalactic highway management game, that is simple and intuitive – yet also provides a fair challenge as time goes on. Perfect for that ‘one more try’ session!