Megaton Rainfall checks the immense power of a god with the civil responsibility of an altruist. It's a strong pairing, and one that only fails through the volatile application of its singularity. Playing god can be exhausting when you're only capable of indistinct destruction.
Limiting power feels like the enforcement of a penalty. Controlling that power, however, starts to coalesce into a proper objective. Megaton Rainfall works through this principle by outfitting the player with the destructive abilities of a god and challenging them not indulge in collateral damage. Scale, speed, and virtual reality conspire to make Megaton Rainfall into a suitable blend between old and new testaments.
You’re a god. More specifically you’re the offspring—a non-gendered but still awkward word Megaton Rainfall is in love with—of an even more powerful god, presently taking the shape of a cube. The father god apologizes that you’re no longer human, but reasserts that you must be his vessel to prevent invaders from wreaking havoc on modern day Earth.
Senses of scale and speed inside of Megaton Rainfall are immediately impressive. A cursory approximation of the planet can be skimmed at supersonic speed. Certain cities like Dubai and Sydney have visible landmarks, but most populated areas are filled with standard city models. A street view even has visible, albeit crudely animated, pedestrians and traffic. You can also quickly elevate to outer space and go even faster to get to the other side of the planet even quicker. Our full solar system is available, too, although don’t expect to find much out there.
Megaton Rainfall tries its best to makes the simple act of movement a poetic experience. Trance music with distinct vocals highlight level transitions and act in stark contrast to the chaos of direct challenges. Transitioning from the surface to space is also nearly seamless experience, with only a tiny bit of texture shuffling when you approach a city. If Megaton Rainfall is one of the first games you play in virtual reality, it would almost be suitable for Zen-inducing amble through an idle planet.
Travel is an interlude. Destruction is your action. Initially outfitted with an energy shot, you’re charged with annihilating waves of invaders as they seek to destroy a large city. Challenge arrives neither by strength nor numbers, but by minimizing the damage to the local populace. A meter on the side of the screen measures your casualty levels. If it gets too high—if you blow up buildings with errant shots or are too careless—then you’re sent back to a checkpoint.
Most of Megaton Rainfall follows a safe pattern. Defend a city, meet back up with your father cube, receive a new power, and then repeat. This happens quickly. Over the first six missions, you’ve given a charged shot, an energy beam, throwing objects, the ability to pause time, and a melee-like full bore attack. Each are fixed to different recharge timers, ensuring they’re not used recklessly. There’s a bit of nuance to some of the weapons; it’s not advised, for example, to use a charged shot when firing down at an enemy because the imminent fallout will also level the city.
Invaders follow a similar path of evolution. Razor blade saucers that slice through buildings, jagged metal snake-things pulled from a Transformers movie, War of the Worlds style tripods, and giant motherships with Independence Day lasers, among them. Most invaders feature a glowing red spot that acts as a weak point. Manipulating 3D space and positioning yourself to seek and destroy those spots is the key to demolishing invader waves with efficiency.
A bit of creativity finds its way into some of the invaders. A chameleon type will copy the designs of buildings and hide inside of them, challenging the player to find one that looks out of place (and gives off an unnatural light). Near the end, yellow-top enemies can be destroyed with the drilling melee attack more quickly than they could with lasers. Motherships feature a Simon-like rotation of weak points, forcing the player to nail the timing to hit the right segment.
Trouble arrives when Megaton Rainfall starts demanding too many steps. One particular mid-game enemy drops two green bombs. It’s only susceptible to either the energy beam or telepathically picking up and hurling its own bombs back at it. The problem is that this doesn’t always work as intended, and the larger of the two bombs is always a nuke that provides you with a game over. Fiddling with these bombs and trying to toss them back (or up in the air, away from the city) in a timely manner is annoying, and trying to do with two of those things simultaneously zipping around a level is a chore.
Image captured through PlayStation VR on a launch PS4
While only nine missions deep, fussy sequences like bomb-throwing highlight Megaton Rainfall’s shortcomings. The drilling technique is tough to use, and doesn’t always initiate on command. Tracking down mission 8’s subterranean enemy and ejecting it from the earth is a frustrating exercise in failed commands and wishful thinking. The intended challenge of Megaton Rainfall—zipping around and cleverly managing destruction—submits to a mixture of luck and brute force. I stopped caring about getting a good rating, I just wanted the level to be over with.
Megaton Rainfall’s chatty narrative also feels incongruous with its objectives. Your cube father talks at great length in between each mission. Some of it is instructional, but the rest is vague prophesy that culminates into a chagrin heavy finale. Ambition isn’t at fault here, Megaton Rainfall has big ideas on its mind, and it’s just not outfitted with the science fiction chops necessary to take it there. The serene, hyper-fast traveling and composed demolition would have been enough to communicate a similar message.
I played 100% of the game via PlayStation VR. Aiming with your view (and with all the comfort assists turned off) was intuitive and effective. The sense of realism was undermined by the preponderance of blog-like points of interaction and low-textures surfaces, though perhaps this would have been easier if I were playing the game on a television. Still, much like Gnog earlier this year, it feels like VR can only add to Megaton Rainfall’s stated objectives.
The transition between objective and execution is where Megaton Rainfall most frequently falls short. It’s fun to be an all-powerful being who shoots various forms of energy at hostile forces. Too often, however, Megaton Rainfall obscures or obstructs the player’s desire to get it all done efficiently. Whether it’s a maze of buildings, a failure of mechanics, or droning narrative, there always seems to be something in the way.
Megaton Rainfall checks the immense power of a god with the civil responsibility of an altruist. It’s a strong pairing, and one that only fails through the volatile application of its singularity. Playing god can be exhausting when you’re only capable of indistinct destruction.
