Every single time I got into a groove and started having even a little bit of fun with FoxNext’s cheap franchise tie-in Crisis on The Planet of The Apes VR on PSVR, something would grind the good times to a screeching halt. Sometimes it was the start and stop movement that requires precision room positioning and arm swinging. Sometimes it was poor tracking that could result in either an unfair fall from upon high or a dimension-warping tumble through the game’s geometry that, on more than one occasion, stranded me outside of the playable area with no way back. Other times it was simply the dull, unskippable cinematic moments that play out in real time and ask very little of the player.
It’s obvious now that the real “crisis” of Crisis on The Planet of The Apes VR is not the daring three ape prison break that makes up the entirety of the story, it’s the game itself; an irredeemably janky, poorly optimized and unrepentant mess that turns what could’ve been a nice breezy hour of content into five interminable ones. If I sound bitter it’s because the developers could’ve made it easy to recover time lost due to shortcomings in the design but they didn’t. Get stuck in a shelf after a fall and you can kiss 10-20 minutes goodbye as your only option is to reset the game and start the chapter over. For a game with as many game-breaking bugs as this one has, no one thought it was a good idea to give the player the option of restarting from the last checkpoint? I just powered through a climbing section and my arms are jelly. I don’t want to have to do that again.
I really earned my game journalist stripes with this one, folks. Also, these diesel arms. Thank you FoxNext, …I guess?
It’s a shame because the base game behind all the frustrating flaws has a lot going for it. As the story begins, you assume control of a nameless ape captured by militant humans whose barely masked hostility towards you lends a level of gravitas on par with the most recent film trilogy. I was legitimately upset about how this ape, whose thick hairy hands had replaced my own in-game, was being mistreated by his captors. First I was threatened at gun point, then branded like cattle before being marched off to a cage by a particularly sadistic soldier. I beat my chest and grunted in solidarity with an ape in the adjacent cage (something that, as a VR actor, I was thinking about doing even before the ape signaled for me to do this.) The thrill was short-lived, however, as the game refused to acknowledge my chest actions and I ended up exhausting myself trying to find the exact behavior it wanted me to mimic. There are a few more transcendent moments like this sprinkled throughout (a heart pounding ride down a zip line stands out) but most of the game is standard VR climbing, VR shooting, and VR walking.
At first, aping the loping style of a, well, ape by swinging your arms low to move forward is a neat bit of immersion but the more I did it, the more I realized it was mostly just busywork. These sections are doled out in frustratingly short bursts. In any given section you could be tasked to do this 5 or 6 times with nary to gaze at but the same drab, gun metal grey military sets. Even if free motion wasn’t an option, breaking up these sections in this manner is dreadfully tedious even when they switch things up with a jump or two.
VR climbing fares better. Grabbing pipes and ledges with the Move controllers as your hands is intuitive and exciting, that is, when the PSVR’s faux room scale or the baffling choice to use the move button and not the triggers as your grip doesn’t screw it all up. There’s one part early on where you’re working your way along the pipes in the rafters while doctors examine an ape below you that startles as you pass over. This well executed bit of theater gave me a real sense of danger that the rest of the game unfortunately lacks.
VR shooting also works pretty well. Taking down guards with either the assault rifle or the shotgun feels right though a bit video game-y. The guns are responsive, manual loading is reliable, duck and cover which is done by grabbing a wall and adjusting your height is easy to do and killshots are fun to execute. It’s typical shooting gallery stuff with dumb AI and little variation in enemy type or environment but it’s functional and satisfying. If only that were enough.
IN CONCLUSION
So how did a game with so much going right for it and so much potential still rub me the wrong way? It all comes down to a lack of refinement. If the developers had polished what they have, kept up the early promise of those creative, dramatically dense opening scenes, or explored the untapped potential of an ape with a machine-gun as they do during a brief section where you must shoot while climbing, Crisis might’ve been something special. But as released, it’s just another in a long tradition of bad tie-in games, generic and, worse, an aggressive waste of the player’s time. Wait for a deep sale or a meaty patch even if you’re a fan of the franchise. These apes don’t deserve to escape… our criticism.
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
