With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Megaton Rainfall describes itself as a “First Person Superhero Simulator.”
Don’t believe me? Here’s the official blurb:
For those of you that still don’t know what is Megaton Rainfall, it’s a first person superhero simulator. You are indestructible and extremely powerful, and you have to save Earth from an alien invasion. The point is that you’re so powerful that every time you miss your targets, you can unintentionally destroy buildings and skyscrapers!
See? You can trust me from now on can’t you?
Unintentionally destroy buildings? Pah! I took out an entire city the other day. Purely by accident I hasten to add. Oh the destruction! The noise. The terrible screams of hundreds of thousands of people as they were incinerated or crushed by falling skyscrapers. Don’t think I’ll be doing that again in a hurry.
Oh for pity’s sake mankind. Stop getting all blown-up!
The scale of this game is epic. You have the entire planet Earth at your fingertips. You can fly anywhere, to any city; see famous landmarks; watch the people go about their everyday activities; watch and listen to the cars passing by. In fact, head down to street level and everyone will stop what they’re doing and stare at you? Haven’t you guys seen an inter-dimensional superbeing before?!
Need some peace and quiet? Why not head into the depths of the sea? Look at all those fish! Head back out of the sea, through the flocks of birds, up into space. Wait. What? Yes, space. Hell, if you really like, you can fly off to another planet entirely.
I can see my house from up here!
Now I’ve checked my PS4, it hasn’t got any fatter, and yet I can’t quite fathom how such a massively detailed game fits inside it?
Anyway, I digress. I should really tell you the aim of the game. You see, you are a superhero after all. Well, you’re a supehero in training anyway. Your dad likes to pop in occasionally to teach you new stuff. Fair enough.
So your job is to protect the human race from evil alien invaders. Why are they always evil? Well, you know how grouchy you feel after a long train journey? Scale that up to travelling several billion light years across the infinite stretches of space. Yeah, you’re gonna want to let off some steam by wiping out the odd planet or two aren’t you?
Chillax guys!
So defend your precious citizens from the marauding hordes, which incidentally have glowing red spots on them for you to aim at and shoot them down in flames. Handy that. The thing is, I’m a bit rubbish at it. I spend so much time concentrating on one enemy that the rest of the city is going to pot. And before too long, the population has been wiped out. The beauty of this game though, is you just keep coming back for more.
Here’s why: you can play it in VR mode. That’s right. You probably guessed it anyway, since this is a PSVR blog. And VR mode is currently exclusive to the PS4. Which is nice.
And it’s stunning. There’s plenty settings to tweak, especially if you’re like me and start feeling nauseous almost as soon as you put the headset on. At first I could only manage about 10 or 15 minutes, but I’m managing a lot longer now without getting that horrible hot car-sick feeling. Probably through sheer stubborness because I don’t want to leave this virtual world.
Now, I did expect this game to use the Move Controllers, and it’s a shame it doesn’t. I was gonna do that whole Superman one arm in front of me, fist clenched, one arm behind me flying thing. But it matters not. The Dualshock controller is more than adequate and very intuitive. Which is a good job, because I always forget how to control things within about 5 minutes of turning a game off.
So what are you waiting for? Go and buy it and get saving the world. It really is thrilling flying around the place, protecting your inherited planet from those pesky aliens. And it’s utterly heart-wrenching to hear the screams as your people are being attacked, or when you miss an alien and blow a few unsuspecting souls to kingdom-come.
Tsk. Suppose I’d better go and save the world again.
