Scientific and technological progress does not stand still – every day humanity invents more and more new devices and machines, improves existing ones and does not think of stopping on this path. One of the flagships of this development is computer technology – three decades ago it was believed that “640 kilobytes is enough for everyone,” and today a small smartphone is not inferior in performance to an average office PC.

Oddly enough, the rapid development of computer technologies accessible to the average user is a great merit of video games. Don’t demand the next hit of ever-increasing computing power, which the consumer is ready to fork out for, you see, and now there would not be such productive machines, which are not available to institutions and organizations, as half a century ago, but to almost any person.

However, over the past decade and a half, in this regard, we have observed only quantitative development – processor frequencies increased, the amount of RAM and the power of video accelerators grew, and until recently no one could offer anything new. And then crowdfunding came into play – direct financing of individual enthusiasts who could not find a publisher or did not want to contact him. Someone collected money for games or music, and Oculus VR took aim at the long-standing dream of all fans of “virtual reality” – those same “glasses” that allow you to see what is happening in the game literally with your own eyes, and not on a small monitor screen. On March 28 of this year, sales of the commercial version of the helmet started, and along with it came a pack of games “tailored” for the use of Oculus Rift. ADR1FT among them, perhaps the brightest (both literally and figuratively) representative.

Earth in the porthole

The game makes full use of the recently popular theme of space, and the plot is suspiciously reminiscent of the film “Gravity” from three years ago: the main character, a female astronaut, after an accident on a space station, is left completely alone and forced to fight for survival, using any available means. If anyone went to see this film in the cinema, then they must surely remember the sensation of the amazing beauty of what was happening on the screen. ADR1FT evokes similar feelings – even without the Oculus Rift, everything here is so beautiful that at first you simply admire your surroundings. You can take screenshots of cosmic landscapes, flavored with the wreckage of a destroyed station, almost without interruption, without even bothering with choosing the exposure and posing the image (here, every frame is a small masterpiece).

Without a doubt, there is little https://nonukcasinosites.co.uk/about-us/ that compares to the graphics here – and it’s not just a matter of technology. The designers know their business no worse than the developers of Unreal Engine 4, which was used to create ADR1FT. Snow-white surfaces of the station elements, the endless depth of space, the huge Earth, on the night side of which city lights and stripes of the aurora are visible, mirror drops of water in zero gravity… The laurels of the most beautiful game depicting space technology will go to ADR1FT for a long time.

The station is quite large – even in a destroyed state, the scale of orbital construction is impressive.

What’s nice is that all these beauties do not put forward any exorbitant demands on the hardware, and among the blots we can only remember the occasional noticeable “loading” of objects on the verge of visibility.

Oxygen starvation

Having recovered from the first delight and taken a breath, you can proceed directly to the game. From the very beginning, the rather unusual controls make themselves felt – even using a gamepad, you will have to spend some time to adapt. In zero gravity, it is not at all necessary to keep the spacesuit engines on all the time – short pulses are enough to start slowly but surely moving towards the goal. It is also not recommended to “gas” excessively because the amount of oxygen for breathing is directly related to the fuel for engines. I almost didn’t follow it – the reserve drops to critical levels, the heroine begins to choke convulsively and has to be “restarted”. The lack of oxygen is felt all the time; It’s good that among the wreckage of the station there are always small capsules, thanks to which we manage to hold out a little longer.

After a while, the constant pursuit of air begins to irritate. There is no time to admire the beauty – you need to look for flashing beacons indicating oxygen capsules, and frantically click on the scanner button so that it highlights on the screen and radar the place where you can replenish supplies. Over time, the volume of the respiratory mixture stored in the spacesuit can be increased, but even then its search remains the priority task of our astronaut.

The threat of suffocation is far from the only one – the main character can be electrocuted from pieces of a power cable or hit by spinning debris from the station. However, these dangers are not particularly annoying – they are too easy to avoid.

Of course, we are traveling through the ruins of a spaceship for a reason – we need to find a way to get back. To do this, you need to fix some systems, get to the rescue shuttle and try not to die along the way. Well, just like in “Gravity”, really? But no – I have to disappoint everyone who is looking forward to gameplay that is not inferior to the film in terms of intensity of passions. Nothing like this in ADR1FT no – there will be no desperate attempts to get to the station receding into the infinity of space, no massive bombardment of the remains of the station with space debris, no special difficulties with launching the equipment. Instead – a journey full of despondency from one oxygen cylinder to another, attempts to understand the local navigation system (the radar is extremely inconvenient) and growing irritation from the snail’s pace of the main character. The travel route is no less stressful – flights like “go through a long corridor, press one button and come back the same way” are more the rule than the exception here.

On top of everything else, the developers did not dare to take a rather bold step taken by the creators of the same “Gravity”, in which there are no sounds in a vacuum (they should not exist in reality) – only music, breathing sounds, radio communications and noise from the contact of the spacesuit with various materials. IN ADR1FT But everything is as usual – you can hear the crackling of electrical discharges, the electronic squeaking of equipment, the sounds of impacts and other effects. Beautiful, but never atmospheric. I don’t even want to talk about the musical accompaniment: the game’s composers apparently decided that escalating the situation by playing some kind of cacophony at full volume was a great idea.

For the first half hour you admire what’s happening on the screen, then you wait for the game to finally start, for the next hour you’re frankly bored, and then you can’t wait for it to end. The only good thing is that somewhere at this moment ADR1FT and is coming to an end (everything will take about three hours at most).

ADR1FT can’t be called a full-fledged game. This is a demonstration of the capabilities of the Oculus Rift and the Unreal Engine 4 – very impressive, I must say, but nothing more. Gameplay in creation THREE ONE ZERO a little more than in Dear Esther, and less plot. A primitive simulator of a space oxygen bottle collector – unfortunately, this is all that the developers were able to squeeze out of a promising concept.

Pros: great graphics and design; even without using a virtual reality helmet, what is happening is impressive.
Cons: absolutely primitive gameplay; unsuccessful musical accompaniment; annoying slowness of the main character.