Man, as time goes on, we keep seeing some pretty unique ideas out there, and this one is no exception! So grab yourself a fanny pack full of quarters, and see if this arcade experience is a token muncher, or a walk in the park.

Airspace Defender is coming out today, October 18th on Meta Quest in Early Access and is compatible with the Quest 2, Pro, 3 and 3S. But I would recommend to play this one with the 3 family because this is a Mixed Reality title after all. The developers are Not Suspicious and I believe that this is their second title with the first one being a game called Tablecraft.

Gameplay

If you were a kid that grew up in the 80s, this game will remind you right away of Missile Command from the arcade and the Atari 2600. You are basically the commander of 2 turrets and your one and only goal is to prevent any missile from destroying your city.

If your middle headquarter is hit twice, then it's gameover and you have to start from the very beginning. The buildings that surrounds your HQ can be very useful to distract the missiles from hitting your main building, but it definitely gets harder when they get destroyed, so it's best to keep everything safe as long as possible.

You are presented with levels throughout your run. There's a timer for each one, and as soon as the countdown is done, you've finished the level! One other reason to keep your buildings is to gain a bigger score at the end of the level.

When the level is done, you are then presented with an important decision. You have 3 options to pick before proceeding. You can either install a new building that was destroyed, or you can select a new weapon to upgrade one of your turrets. I personally really like the machine gun and laser upgrade. They're the ones that made my run go the smoothest.

Tutorial

When you start the game, you have the ability to do a tutorial, and this is very useful to get introduced mostly on getting a hang of the controls. You also slowly get introduced to all enemy types that you'll be seeing during your regular runs.

The way the game works is kind of interesting, you need to use your hands to pinch at the location you want your missile to launch, and that's pretty much the only ability that you have. It's definitely not easy though! The 3D and 360 degree of the map makes it so you have to be very precise to where you're pinching. It's super easy to choke when you're in a pickle and that's what usually ends a run for me.

Currently, there are 2 modes in the game. Pretty much normal and hard mode. The difference between both is that in normal, you will get a lot less missiles when you start. On hard, you get more missile and more variety a lot quicker. Some of the missile types are super hard to hit, so I'm grateful to have some upgrades most of the time.

Future Updates / Feedback

So since the game is in early access, the developers have confirmed that we should expect a new game update every month starting in November. So it's kind of a good investment to buy the game now, and then follow along the developers and try new fresh content every month. Also, make sure to check out their Discord server to give feedback and help on improving the game.

Since this is a review I'd like to give a little bit of my feedback on things that I would like in hope that the developers are watching this.

So the game use handtracking only, and i've seen this on many games where the tracking can be lost, or not registered properly. It's not a perfect mechanic. It can be kind of frustrating when you're trying to be fast, and the command doesn't register, and it could be the one command that's a make or break for the situation. So I'd like to see the implementation of the controllers at some point. This would make it a lot more precise and make it more fair on my end.

I believe that there's only one song when you start the level. The song is really good, but when you play 1 or 2 hours, I'd like to see some more songs added in the mix.

Last thing that I've noticed is after playing more than one hour, the game became very janky and I had to reset it. I think that there's some memory that's not being dumped as you keep playing, so I would like the devs to investigate that.

Last Thoughts

Here's a few more things that I'd like to talk about the game. Yeah I know that it's a simple one, but when you enjoy a game, you just like to talk about it.

You have the ability to move the dome wherever you want. I like this feature since the original position was a little too low to my taste.

And I just love how the game looks! It's very simplistic, but the green and black pallet really makes it look like a game in the past. They really nailed the old school arcade aspect. Every time I failed, I kept going for one more, and another one, and another one. There is a public leaderboard available and I just wanted to keep trying to make it higher. The developers even noticed my score on the leaderboard, so that was kind of cool.

So guys this is what I had to say about Airspace Defender, a fun little game! Don't expect something super deep, but man you will get an addicting experience that you can bring on the go with your headset if you enjoy any type of Atari games from the past. It's cranks that feeling up to the max.