Details :
Platform : Meta Quest – SteamVR
Was it ever on Quest + : No
Type : Shooter Survival – PVPVE
Regular Price : 19.99$US (Meta / Steam)
Get 10% off Ghosts of Tabor on Quest!
Reviewed on Quest 3
Quick Review (for those who don’t like to read)
This game is in development. Expect plenty of bugs from dissapearing items, audio dead zones, fake full mags, and stuck items in walls.
Graphically, get ready for one ugly looking game. Resolution is really bad. Can’t read text in my face bad.
But the game is definitely well designed. The gameplay is fun, yet challenging. There are many aspects taken into account for the looting raids and the base management.
Buy this game if you don’t mind bugs, can overcome failure and loosing all your gear, and like getting killed by more experienced players. It’s still a lot of fun and completing raids are on of the most rewarding experience in VR.
First Warning – Getting over the frustration and bugs
Let’s break it plain and simple, you’ll feel frustrated by this game at first. I thought about asking a refund myself after a little over 1h of playtime. This may take several hours to several days to get over it, depending on your adaptation to the game. Bugs (there are many) is also a major pain point : Dissapearing objects and attachement, other players Laser sight not aligned to their real position, items that rotates rapidly when taken, empty clips that looks full… I’m sure I’m not over them either.
You’ll be greeted with the tutorial that will get you throught the basic of interacting with guns, gathering equipments, gun attachements, and exctracting. Unfortunately, all this training won’t help you survive in game and lacks all the informations about much of the game.
If you really want to enjoy this game, you’ll need to embrace failure, loosing all your gear, and starting from scratch all over again. At some point, it should become an enjoyable experience. It is currently in my Top 3 games on Quest.
The bugs are hard to miss. While I have not stumble into game breaking bugs, they do hinder the experience. Dissapearing attachement are one of the most frequent bug I face. I often switch them in Raids when finding better guns, but once in a while, it just dissapears when I try to grab them. Other bugs go from full food cans that can’t be eaten , rotating item that can’t be handled, fake full clips, grabbing issues and many more.
What is an Exctraction PVPVE
Ghost of Tabor drop you on one of the 3 available maps with up to 11 other players (depending on the map size) and you must reach one of the exctraction point alive. You can squad up with 2 other friends (the word friend is important here) to help you survive. If you succeed, you will exctract to your personal bunker with everything you manage to gather during the mission : weapons, clips, attachment, food and even junk.
While you might first struggle to kill the simple Fenix guard (PVE), the real threat is the other players. It is, after all, a PVP before a PVE. In this game, you must TRUST NO ONE! Do not trust those shouting “Friendly”, don’t trust those waving hands at your, and do not trust your squad mates if you don’t know them personally. Everyone will shoot you in the back at the first occasion. I’ve tried trusting people, I really did, but in the end it’s not worth the risk. If someone sees you, the best thing to do is turn back and run away at first, and shoot as fast as possible once you have some decent gear.
The last key element of this game is the gathering. You’ll stumble on many crates of different shapes and size. Each one will spark up hopes of great new gears and weapon attachement. While you can only carry one pistol and one larger weapon on you, backpacks can hold pretty much everything else… if you can make it fit. Chest Rig and bullet proof vests can also attach pouch for grenades and magazines. Loot will be your main source of revenue.
Gameplay Mechanics – Bunker
Most of the game mechanics will take place in your bunker and where you’ll encounter the most bugs. That is also part of the frustrating experience you’ll eventually overcome and find how to deal with them. Rest assure, dissapearing items will turn back in the trade room eventually.
Inventory Management
Exctraction mission has one goal : Gather equipement to keep or sell to upgrade your bunker. The bunker has many facilities, including an Armory, Shooting Range, Kitchen and many more. You’ll want to upgrade them to add space to manage your weapons and gear or to generate extra passive income. Everything in your bunker is safe and won’t be lost if you die in a mission.
Armory – Guns and Bullets
It’s probably the room you’ll spend the most time in. At Level 2, you’ll get an ammo making machine that will be essential in keeping your guns fully loaded. There’s also a Clip loader, but this tool is buggy as hell. If it fills a clip but don’t reduce the ammo it holds, empty the clip and reload it if you don’t want to end up with an empty clip when you launch your mission.
Since you’ll stumble on a large variety of guns from small pipe SMG to highly customisable Assault Rifle, you’ll use the armory to customise them with attachement you will find. Many types of scopes and grips, a flashlight and a laser sight can be attached to rail systems. AK type weapons can also recieve attachement throught a rail attachement, but that is about it.
Every gun has it’s own clip, and usually their own bullets. It’s not as easy as “Pistol Ammo” and “Rifle Ammo”. For example the AK5C uses 5,56X45mm bullets, while the AK74 uses 5,45X39mm ammo. Many pistols and SMG uses 9X19mm ammo, but then again they have their own clip.
Trade Room
This is the place you’ll sell your extra loot. The mechanic is quite simple : Drop it on the conveyor belt, go to the screen and select the buyer. You can sell all at once, but the extensive reduce price is never worth it.
It’s also in that room that you will collect items you bought at the market, as well as any item you dropped in an unsafe bunker space, including empty gas cans and used water filters and health seringes. Make sure to throw those in the garbage when done or it will reappears here all the time.
If you are lucky, items that just dissapeared in thin air (yes it happens) might also end up here.
Kitchen – Food and Drink
The kitchen will be overlooked at first because dying resets your hunger and thirst. When you’ll get better thought, you will need to eat and drink before going in a mission. The kitchen is the place to store foods and refill your water bottle. It requires water filters.
This mechanic is somewhat unbalanced. You can go for about 15 minutes before hunger and thirst are completely depleted and starts hurting you. While you can go full with about 2 cans of most foods, it usually raise thirst. A regular bottle of water takes a huge ammount of space in a backpack and only refills about 1/3 of thirst, making it a real pain to manage.
Other rooms
There are many other rooms you can find that add space to store items, or use to craft items or gain passive income.
Mission Gameplay – Run, jump and gun
Gun Handling
Personally I had to adapt to the shooting angle. Even after a while, without a scope, I found myself shooting lower to what I think I’m aiming at (compared to other shooters). Guns also punch quite a recoil and don’t expect to hit anyone if you go full automatic. Grips are really helpful in that matter.
Guns (and all items) also responds to collision. Not only they can get in the way, especally in stairs and wall corners, they also make noise when colliding with other objects and walls. Keep that in mind, as it can warn other players of your presence since those sound are never made by the Fenix enemies.
You can also cycle through firing modes, including the safety. While many guns has a visual cues on what mode is selected, it is not always properly aligned. Other guns just don’t have anything to tell apart what mode is on and you could find yourself face to face with an enemy while the safety’s on!
Moving
It’s everything you’d expect from a shooter. Movement is done naturally thorught the thumbsticks. You can also jump with a click of the right thumstick. Crouching must be done in real life, no button for that. Climbing is also simple, and can only be done on ladders. Unfortunately, you cannot grab on ledges or walls and are limited to jump height to go over obstacles.
One thing I wish was added was a run button. Although it might be tweaked with deadzone in the settings, it is still really sensitive. Running (and making noise) is automatic. It also drains your Stamina and while it recharges, it would be great to have grater flexibility in the speed we walk. It’s really not easy to keep a steady walking speed with the basic settings.
Looting
The backpack mechanic is one of the best feature of this game. It is quite similar to Into the Radius. There are small and big ones. Bags cannot store guns, at the exception of smaller ones like pistols. Bigger bags can handle bigger weapons, but don’t expect to find them often, and to buy them you’ll need a lot of mission grinding.
The limited space requires strategic placements of items and can become a burden when you found an object you want to keep, but need to reorganise your backpack for it to fit. You shouldn’t run in any problems if you take that few extra second to align properly the items in smaller runs.
In the end, you leave with everything you hold on you and your hands.
Levelling up and faction missions
One thing you’ll notice when you go in the market is that merchants don’t have much to sell. Most of their items are requiring Leveling up. It’s not your regular character levels that is taken into account, except for the bunker upgrades.
On the raid deployment screen, you’ll find a Mission tab. This allows you to take missions from the different vendors. That is what will level you up. Keep in mind that you not only need to reach the XP requirements, but also the Korunas ($) exchange ammount. You can raise this last one by selling your stuff to those specific merchant at the trade station, or buy buying from them in the Market.
First missions you should look into are those as simple as “Survive 5 Raids” without restriction and “Kill X Fenix with Y gun”. They give little XP, but you’ll be able to complete them over a few raids each time. A good trick is to take Survive 5 – 10 – 15 raids at the same time as each successful raids will count toward those 3 objectives.
Graphics – The uglyness is real
Graphics ain’t a strong point of this game. In fact it’s one of the worst I’ve seen in any Quest shooters so far.
Not only in terms of resolution, but draw distance, details and visual glitch. Resolution is bad. I can’t say for the PC version, but the current state for the Quest version is that it’s worts than what I had with my Oculus Rift. Texts are unreadable from more than 30 cm, and still blurry and pixelated when close enough.
Unfortunately, this also happens in missions where doors suddently appears, invisible crates block shots on distant enemies, and many other objects. Trees looks grainy, far objects are hardly identifiable. Other players and enemies are just a bunch of moving pixel. In fact, this game is the reason I decided to get Quest Game Optimiser.
Models also takes time to load. Gun models, for example, looked like they were straight out of Golden Eye (from the N64 era) for a few seconds making it impossible to identify for a few precious seconds.
I could go on with other examples, but just keep in mind that it could easily be optimised in the future. A simple bump in resolution would make a huge difference, but what it could really gain for is the draw distance.
Audio
Audio does the job. Don’t expect any music, except at launch and in the market. That’s ok though, you want to hear everything, especially during the raids.
Turn that sound way up high because you need to hear every little clues of enemy presence. You’ll learn to differentiate Fenix footsteps from player’s one after a while. The Quest spacial audio is good at identifying the direction it comes from as well.
Gunshots are also a good clue on other players position. Walls, hills and other obstacles seems to play a role in sound attenuation, but not everywhere. I’ve found a few spots in Tabor Island where all the sound goes really low when standing on specific spots.
Most of the time, you can evaluate enemy distance with their gunshot sound. You’ll also know if their shooting at you by the sound of bullet impacts around you.
What to expect in a Run
To complete this review, here is a small run I made to see what to expect.