Outpost L5

Outpost L5 is an older game from 2016. It's a venerable 9 years old at the time of this review. It's an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Space Invaders (Copyright Taito, 1978). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Taito against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown. Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Outpost L5 is considerably worse than Space Invaders. The only differentiator here is that it's in VR from a first person perspectic (so the aliens are coming in at you on a flat plane?? Makes no sense). With such a poorly done derivative work, it's unsurprising there's a number of technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers. This seems …

Space Invaders in VR what more could you want.

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Umm, you're buying Space Invaders... but its in VR. That sums up whether you want to buy it or not. My initial response was to not recommend the game except to people that seriously want to play Space Invaders... but looking at the price. It's perfectly fair. It's not deep, its not going to hold your attention for a long time, but its cheap and I'm glad I finally tried it. About the only unique thing worth mentioning is that the controls are set up to mimic an arcade cabinet. Your left hand grabs the joystick and your right hand smacks the fire button. Movement with the virtual joystick feels pretty natural as you fly in and out of cover in classic space invaders fashion. But the same can't be said for the virtual buttons. Remember, waggling the Wiimote? The lack of any physical feedback makes pressing buttons awkward. In the end, I found myself with my right hand extended as I waved up up and down frantically. Nintendo made sure I was prepared for this game. Truth be told, its a neat experience to play Space Invaders in first-person VR. That said, VR isn't a game changer here. It feels the exact same here. They added power-ups but again, nothing that makes it feel differen…

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Many years ago I used to dream about being a little person in the spaceship behind those barriers taking down those invaders. I just lived that dream, thank you VR and thank you whoever made this little gem of a game.