Today, I will be talking about the VR game Crashland. This game has a very simple premise – one is stranded on a random planet and has to survive alien attacks for a set number of minutes each stage. If at the end of X minutes, you are still alive, a spaceship will beam you up and stage complete! During this period, though, you will be faced with enemies on all sides, each with different abilities. You will probably be at that precarious brink of life and death at times, shooting desperately with your main weapon to down them foes.
There are some mechanics that really boost the impact of this game. One of them is how health works. As you take damage, your screen will turn red!! The redder it is, the closer to game over it is for you. This naturally makes it more difficult for you to see and may cause you to lose your calm and panic. At times like this, you’ll want to get out of combat ASAP to regenerate your health! Yeah, staying out of combat for a bit regenerates your health. And the teleport mechanic is one way to do so, to reposition, gain some distance from all your enemies and shoot them from range before they get to you. That being said, there are some abilities like a spider’s web and that armoured thingy’s drain ability that prevent movement! You probably have to kill the enemy before you’re able to move, for the latter, and the former, you have to either shoot or dodge it.
Besides that main gun, you have something called a boomstick. You can collect upgrades when they literally fall from the sky, and these upgrades will be visible on the radar which reveals enemy location too. So, this radar is one way of looking for your enemies, or you could also use the trusty, old-fashioned way of literally turning your head and looking around. I heard that the radar is locked at some later stage possibly by some enemy, so overreliance is also not recommended! Anyway, the boomstick allows you to kill those pesky aliens in cool ways. One such interaction early on is shooting a mine at the weak spot of an armoured thingy, near its belly area. It’ll just lie on its belly before it explodes! Of course, the boomsticks need recharge time just like the teleports… There are some perks you unlock as you level up independent of stage, and these include simple stuff like increased recharge time, changing teleports to supercharged punch? or whatever. I’m using basic stuff like the increased health and increased charged primary pistol damage, actually (because I like simplicity). So enemies may drop boost orbs, and when you get them and press the grip button while shooting, you do supercharged shots. These are best used, I feel, when an enemy is too close for comfort and you don’t want to risk that potential damage which might end you. By the way, a rather convenient perk is the turret that drops from the sky and assists you in dealing consistent damage for a hundred bullets or so. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s something you could also rely on. I actually think it would be more fun to play without it, but still.
Let’s narrate a bit of the last stage I completed (stage 7). By the way, there are 24 stages and they are pretty challenging. Some will just set casual or super easy mode or whatever, but I prefer a normal difficulty as my standard go-to for games in general. Anyway. There were 2 kinds of underground burrowers. One burrows up to attack you with enough time for you to concentrate fire and slay it. The other, though, is super pesky. It’s like a shark in that it has a fin sticking out from under the sand and then it jumps on you like a piranha. And if you can’t kill it it jumps back into the sand and then repeats the cycle! And you can shoot and kill it through the sand, but it’s pretty fast and you need a good angle. Anyway, it’s like a pesky fly that will keep buzzing around you, keeping you distracted and preventing you from concentrating on the other enemies nearby. Standard strategy dictates that you get rid of it ASAP and focus properly on your other foes!
And I finally found a way to do so. There’s a boomstick weapon like an electric harpoon which allows me to one-shot that enemy. So it was like whenever it was going to piranha!! me, only then would I pay it any attention, one-shotting it with that weapon! That made things so much better because I finally had a way to deal with the pesky things! But then, those mini sand worms which rush you at a super fast speed started coming and I felt overwhelmed! And I had the turret perk, so I just took the easy way out and teleported away before using it. There was a little over a minute left. The turret took quite a bit of pressure off me. I wondered whether it was the best time to have used it, though, as when it ended, there was like a painstaking thirty seconds left at least. Still, this was no time for could-have-beens. It was the make-or-break moment. I actually found myself getting swarmed again. My health turned red. I was forced to teleport around to run away and I even found myself like running a bit low on teleports. My heart was beating fast. I felt like I was dancing on the edge. I glanced at the time remaining once, which read as 8 seconds, but I couldn’t let that distract me. Ultimately, though, that liberating beam of light surrounded me and beamed me up into sweet completion!
Then I attempted stage 8 and encountered new enemies that I had never met before in addition to some old ones. Some floating mantis thing in the air that is like shielded and shoots a ray or something? How am I supposed to deal with that? Luckily, it seems to be quite happy just floating in the air like that most of the time. Some thing that jumps high in the air and lands right in front of you before trying to gobble you up! I must admit, the first time I fought that thing, I was able to kill it in the air before it landed by shooting the weak spot. But I don’t know if it was a fluke or whatever, because I’d be dealing with it only after it landed afterwards. But it’s really nasty. And then there are these old foes, the super big worms which fling rocks at you from far and tries to gobble up your head when near. Without charged shots or boomstick, they’re a real pain if you keep on meeting them early! And then the armoured ticks or whatever the pesky little critters are called… they have shields around them and take so many bullets to down! Zzz! I’m only talking about those irritating enemies here. Some are pretty standard and cute even, like the bomb-dropping sky elephant (my name for it) whose bombs you can actually make use of to kill other aliens. That’s a fun strategy, you may find…
So, that’s about it for the game, as far as I can remember. It’s thrilling honestly.
As I see it, the greatest power of VR lies in its ability to make the impossible possible by placing you in otherwise impossible situations/scenarios. This challenges your brain, forcing it to adapt, hence upping your stats. For example, people playing Beat Saber may start off only with Easy mode. Yet, over time, their brain is adapting to enable them to even keep up with speeds at Expert+ mode eventually!! As human beings age, I guess many would lose brain activity as comes from being stimulated by stuff. This results in a deterioration of function. However, VR changes the story altogether! Even if your body may be deteriorating, VR can ensure that your brain remains eternally active, stimulated, and alive! or something cheesy like that. In this modern age, humans are removed from many situations that our ancestors would have faced. Many are content with life being a dull, safe thing. But as I see it, hey! Life is a gift. Yeah, you could very well waste it… but you shouldn’t! Hot-bloodedness and passion – why are these the objects of romanticism? It’s because they speak to our youth, are best testaments of our flourishing and being alive. With the warmness of human accompaniment added to the mix, that ‘cheesy’ I’m with you affirmation, that makes you feel all fuzzy inside… it culminates in the sublime dish of human experience. Making the impossible possible, getting the blood flowing, VR enables life evergreen, immersing us into this world that we’re apathetically not so immersed in, awakening our buried youth.
Note: Done waxing lyrical, haha. Just wanna say that I’m not saying everything should be in VR. A long rally on the tennis court – now that is also something super fun in its own right! And it can’t be replicated by VR right now, so… it’s the spirit, man, it’s the spirit! Energetically, fully engage all your senses! Mezamerou (awaken)! Unlock your potential – feel fully alive. End.
Edit: You can think of this as unlocking your ‘secret bloodline ability’, turning on a switch and tapping into your slumbering untapped latent potential! Read the linked article to understand better.