Discovery: Rogue Planet Review – Ode To A Bygone Era Of Story-Based Shooters

Discovery: Rogue Planet, out now for Quest 3, feels like it was ripped straight from the narrative FPS games of the late ’90s & early aughts, with all the good and bad that comes with that.

Halo. System Shock. Metroid Prime. Turok. GoldenEye. BioShock. Any gamer thirty or older is at least familiar with story-based first-person shooters of yesteryear like these titles. Linear campaigns with a plethora of weapons and limited, highly predictable enemy behavior. That is Discovery: Rogue Planet in a nutshell with a liberal dose of generative AI thrown in.

You play as a stereotypically gruff bounty hunter on the planet Rogax, a frontier planet packed with hostile mercenaries and creatures. The story kicks off with taking a job cleaning vermin out of a farm. This mission doubles as a tutorial on basic weapon handling and customization, the inventory sling over your left shoulder, and a multitool akin to the one in Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge.

This mission also establishes the gameplay loop for the rest of the game. Cutscenes are presented as a series of comic-book-style 2D images on a black screen with some truly bad voice acting. Then off to a mostly contained map to explore, loot, and face loads of enemies with cringeworthily bad AI. Run straight ahead and attack is their single directive.

Each mission requires you to complete a series of tasks (find an item, repair broken equipment, eliminate enemies). Then you are back to a black screen for another few minutes of static image storytelling.

Bad VR Storytelling Powered By Generative AI

These interludes and the voice acting within them are bad. Dialogue is full of stilted delivery, unnatural pauses and word inflections no human actor would ever perform. Ironically, the best realized character in the game is your silver-tongued robot companion Fifi, who sounds more human than the actual humans and humanoid races! The spoken dialogue has mismatches with the written text on screen. All of the images look like they were prompt-generated, including a baffling end credit image sequence that I won’t spoil here.

It’s frustrating, not because this content is AI-generated, as that is a larger discussion than I care to have in this review, but because it’s just bad storytelling in a VR setting. We did not like it in Soul Covenant or System Critical 3 and we do not like it here. Physically removing you from the world and telling you to stand still and listen to mundane, badly delivered exposition while staring at grainy images for several minutes is very boring and the game suffers for it. The story being told is fine, but the delivery lets it down.

Variety Keeps Things Interesting

That said, Rogue Planet wins on variety. The game has well over twenty weapons, a good mix of knives, pistols, shotguns, and rifles that let you make the combat your own. Guns also come with different attachments to choose from. You can also color your weapons with spray cans found in stashes.

The campaign takes you through a mishmash of biomes like deserts, swamps and caves with creatures unique to each area. The level design is pretty good too, with a fair amount of verticality via ladders, loot chests, ammo, and new weapons to find. None of the combat is truly challenging due to the weak enemy AI, but the number of different weapons and environments was enough to keep me engaged and it was still satisfying to clear out a mob.

Occasionally, you drive to your next destination in a massive land rover controlled with two handles. Entire conversations occur during these sequences and it was such a refreshing change from the still images that I wish it happened more often.

Dated Design

Gunplay is functional and responsive aside from grab jank when reloading, but I wish the tablet you use for a map and switching your weapons out wasn’t placed directly behind your ammo pouch and the knife wasn’t above said pouch. Games like Alien: Rogue Incursion, Metro Awakening, and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners series avoid this level of grab jank by never putting two different items in the same general area on your virtual body. It is not unplayable, just a nuisance when it counts. Using the tablet to switch weapons had me begging for a button-press-activated weapon wheel too, even if it would break immersion. I appreciate a virtual body inventory system, but the execution here is clunky.

I complimented the level design, but the graphical fidelity feels like it belongs in the era of those early 2000s shooters. Discovery: Rogue Planet is not a great-looking game, even by Quest standards. A lot gets crammed into these environments and maybe developer Immersmind ran into some overhead issues due to the sheer amount of things on screen, but unfortunately, a lot of the game is an eyesore. Sound design is similarly weak. Weapons don’t sound impactful and would benefit from stronger controller haptics. None of this really hurts the game while playing it, but a coat of polish in all areas would certainly help.

On the upside, I did not have a single performance issue. The only bugs I encountered were the critters in the game and I had guns for those.

Discovery: Rogue Planet – The Final Verdict

Rogue Planet doesn’t outstay its welcome in its four to five hour runtime. At $14.99 with collectibles, in-game achievements, and an optional arena mode, it is priced appropriately for what it offers. It doesn’t stack up with the very best VR has to offer in the genre, falling well short in story and visuals, but the retro-level story FPS formula still holds up, flaws and all.

I will not say whether or not you should buy and play this game solely due to the presence of generative AI, nor am I going to dock the final score simply for its inclusion. That is a personal choice for every gamer and a divisive topic these days. I will just say that the end result hurts the experience.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.