Farpoint is the perfect crossover between arcade light gun shooters à la The House of the Dead and old-school First Person Shooters. The result is a jaw-dropping experience that truly becomes unparalleled thanks to the power of VR and to the quality of the Aim Controller peripheral: this might be the first full blown traditional game 100% built around VR, and despite a few shortcomings you literally won't believe your eyes. In its own ways, Farpoint truly takes the shooter genre to a whole new level: if this is not a killer application, we're pretty close to that.

Judged as a shooter, Farpoint is as generic as they get; thankfully, Impulse Gear’s effort has other things going for it. The side-story is rewarding, even if some of it goes without resolution, and its immersive visuals alone make it a treat to play.

The most complete PlayStation VR title yet. If you play Farpoint, make sure to play with the Aim; don’t just play with the Move controller, because it’s not nearly as engaging.

The single player campaign is a decent five to six hour haul, and considering most PSVR players will struggle to play solidly for more than a couple of hours, it feels longer than that overall. It’s well balanced too with moments of intense, nail-biting shooting, broken up with quiet sections where you can just survey your alien environment. Farpoint does an admirable job of delivering a sense of scale, and character models and animations are some of the better I’ve seen in the PSVR space to date. The game also includes some co-op levels where you can team up with another player online to wipe out waves of aliens together (thankfully there is friendly fire). For those who aren’t sure about which version of Farpoint to buy, I would strongly suggest you get the Aim Controller bundle. There’s around a $50 price difference, but I can’t help but feel that Farpoint is saved by the use of a proper gun controller.

Farpoint is a basic shooter that we suggest only to the owners of PlayStation VR that are desperately looking for something to play.

Farpoint leans on novelty to make up for its shortcomings elsewhere, but wielding the PlayStation VR Aim Controller is such a unique experience that it papers over some dated game design. The story is cheesy but has some nice moments, and the action really ramps up towards the tail of the campaign. With an arcade mode and co-op included, Impulse Gear’s inaugural outing is a fulfilling offering, and while there are obvious improvements that could be made, there’s enough here to prove that blockbuster first-person shooters could find a home on PlayStation VR yet.

When set against the non-VR first-person shooters, a genre in which only those games that have benefitted persistent, focused iteration and a king’s ransom of investment can now compete, Farpoint seems embryonic and amateurish. Its thrills are short-lived, but the lessons that can be drawn from its struggles in trying to transpose the genre into VR will surely echo for a long time to come.