Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck VR Review - A Wacky Breathedge VR Sci Fi Experience
Today we’re reviewing another VR game, and today it's time to get in depth with a Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck review.
The flatscreen game Breathedge, which this game is loosely based on, was fully released in 2021, and according to steam reviews has been very well received.
Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck is a Virtual Reality take on the original game for the Meta Quest, and unfortunately it doesn't quite make the cut to really be called Breathedge VR. If that’s what you’re looking for here, then you’ll be disappointed.
Not Quite Breathedge VR
The sci fi space future of Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck looks pretty great
Why? Well, mostly because it's clear that a lot of the features and progression systems that made the flatscreen game interesting and challenging are just straight up gone in Cosmic Cluck.
There's technically crafting, but instead of the Subnautica style progression present in the flatscreen game where you improve your tools and spacesuit so that you can go further into the expanses of a space junkyard, in the VR version you're really just crafting items that are needed to progress the main story.
Outside of building your original multiool gun in the first twenty minutes or so, that's about it as far as creating things that give you more capabilities. From there on out you're just gathering what you need to craft the next item that progresses the story, and so there's really no need to explore or think about what you would like to gather or build next for yourself. The game tells you exactly where to go and what to do the entire way through.
You start the game, check for what mission you are doing, and then do it. Usually this means gathering crafting materials, maybe solving a light puzzle, or just traveling to the next mission marker. Then every now and then you craft an item with one of these crafting machines and put the crafted item somewhere to continue the game.
Crafting in this Breathedge VR game is almost purely to create items that just advance you to the next objective.
Therefore, you never get that feeling of incrementally improving yourself so that you can go further and further into space. You just keep doing what the game tells you to do, follow the next objective marker, until you’ve followed and done them all and the game ends.
Stuck Between A Family And A Corporation in VR Breathedge
Fighting a robot in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck.
Still, that doesn't mean there's no merit in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck. This isn’t a bad game just because it doesn’t give you much freedom.
I actually found a few things to be quite enjoyable and unique in this experience, and its tongue and cheek humor is just as prevalent as in the original flatscreen game. For instance, you take the role of a man named... Man. You're on your way to meet up with your Grandfather, who you haven't seen in a very long time.
You've got a delivery for him, and things aren't going well at your job. Unfortunately, things quickly go wrong when you end up crash landed inside of a junkyard. Fortunately, you've got a helpful and talkative chicken to guide your way.
Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck - The Good
From there you quickly assemble all of the tools that you will need to do accomplish all of the space work and space fighting you will need to do to make your way to your grandfather.
That's most of what you do in VR Breathedge, space gathering, space traveling, and occasionally space puzzling. Here's where I can finally talk about my absolute favorite part of this entire game, and that is how you travel.
You start with a sort of EVA pack setup, you can slowly scoot in any direction you like, up down, sideways, forwards, backwards, but you quickly find that when you're outside you'll run out of oxygen before you can really get anywhere.
That's what makes this game more interesting and challenging than it would be otherwise, the simple fact that wherever you go you have a very limited amount of time before you will run out of oxygen, and you'll need to enter an oxygenated area or find an oxy candle to refill your suit before that happens.
This adds a constant low level of tension to any of the tasks that you do in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck. Making tasks that otherwise would be entirely without risk or tension always inherently dangerous.
An Oxy Candle in this VR Breathedge game. Used to refill your oxygen.
That's why you'll need a way to get around quickly, because areas where oxy candles can be found can be very far apart, and that's where the grabber comes in.
With it you can pull items towards you from far away, and more impressively pull yourself towards far away objects. I have to say, this is now one of my absolute favorite ways to travel inside of a Virtual Reality game.
If there's one huge positive that you should take away from this Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck Review it's that pulling yourself around these huge ridiculous sci fi environments is an absolute blast, which is only occasionally cut short when you try to pull yourself towards an object that is too far away and have to scramble to find something that is close enough for your beam to latch on to.
There are many sights to see on the way to your next objective marker.
Unlike most methods of movement in Virtual Reality titles, this one isn't immersion breaking and makes sense in the game’s universe. The world of Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck is definitely one in which a handheld beam can pull you towards distant large objects, or pull small objects towards you.
It's wacky sci fi technology in a wacky VR sci fi world. You're using an ingame item that requires some skill to use efficiently and correctly to slingshot yourself around the environment. It's not only a very engaging way to travel quickly, but also one that is in harmony with the world around you.
This isn't using a joystick to slide around the world, it's using a piece of the world to fling yourself around it. The grabber is fitting for this game and also very entertaining to use. Not to mention a fantastic way to incorporate movement with the use of VR hand controls.
You can also use the tool for combat, which is less impressive but also unique. Instead of just shooting laser bolts or something, you actually have to grab items with your tractor beam and shoot them at enemies to deal damage.
Fighting a group of robots in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck.
This is also a pretty creative approach that leans into the inherit wackiness of the world of Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck. The only downside to combat in this Virtual Reality game is that the designers didn't take it much farther than this.
While shooting junk items with your handheld multitool gun thing is a fun concept, the enemies you face just orbit around you and shoot at you from close range. There's not much tactical consideration to take during each combat encounter, and really it ends up just being a somewhat repetitive game of grabbing and flinging items accurately as quickly as you can.
The combat, like a lot of this game, is creative, fun, and innovative on the surface, but quickly reveals itself to lack sufficient depth or variance to stay interesting for long.
There are some missile turrets later on in the game that switch things up a little bit, but they don't stay intersting for long either, because they just devolve into standing still and grabbing and flinging missiles back to it. The turrets are even less engaging than the bots.
Launching a rocket back at a turret in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck.
Now there is one combat encounter in this game that was actually extremely superb, and while I don't want to spoil the game by telling you what it is, I will say that it exists and was very fun.
The downside of playing a single interesting, varied, and complicated combat encounter is that ultimately it revealed that Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck is a game where combat could have been more interesting, but the end product was cut short of being all that it could be.
Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck - The Bad
You need to keep an eye on your oxygen all of the time.
Though, shooting the junk items that you find is also a good way to tie in many of the bits and bobs floating around that you will be gathering to craft story items. That's their only use, just pick them up when the game tells you to, otherwise they're good for shooting at hostile robots and nothing else.
That's one of my main gripes with Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck, it feels like the developers started off with the idea of making a full survival crafting experience like the flatscreen game, but ended up making a linear story driven game instead with just the veneer of survival crafting on top.
You don't really make interesting decisions on where to go and what to do in Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck, and that's another important takeaway from this review. While you gather resources, and occasionally craft things, and there is a big world to fly around and explore, this isn't a game you can build interesting things in, or improve your character to take on greater challenges in, it just seems on the surface like it would be.
This VR game is about following the objective markers on your HUD and doing what your mission tracker tells you to do while you receive phone calls and listen to them. Actually, you mostly listen to your chicken companion, who I personally found to be extremely annoying and sometimes very reptitive, it would just say the same voicelines over and over sometimes.
That's kind of part of the tongue in cheek humor of this game though, and also leans into the rugged individualist vs greedy corporation story that is also a big part of the game.
Humor is really subjective and that part of this game also may or may not be for you. If you don't like the sort of tongue in cheek humor of Breathedge then you will probably not enjoy this game, but if you like that sort of humor you'll find a lot of laughs.
The chicken can be obnoxious, and funny.
I laughed out loud a few times while playing this game, and only found the chicken to be overly annoying occasionally. There's some puns, and overall the world and its characters are ridiculous, but in a fun way.
It's a shame there's not more of them. Really, it's a shame that there isn't more of this game in general. I'll end this VR Breathedge review and leave you with the number one biggest issue with this game, and that's that it is just way too short. I completed the entire experience in about two hours.
Even for a VR title that is extremely, unacceptably short for the price of 24.99$. During the entirety of these two hours you also only make a single choice that actually affects the game, and so if you want to play it twice you could get maybe four to five hours out of this experience to get both endings. Though both endings are almost exactly the same.
The story of this Breathedge VR game is mostly given to you through phone calls.
That being said the gameplay itself was getting repetitive, because it lacks depth, and so I was already about ready to finish my time with this Breathedge VR game regardless. Still, I can't help but feel that there was so much lost potential here, and there are a few parts of this game that absolutely shine with creativity, and will stick with me for a very long time.
I don't regret my time with Breathedge: Cosmic Cluck, but I do regret the incredibly high asking price of 25 dollars for admission. As it stands there just isn't enough game to justify that cost.
If I had to guess it seems the developers cut a lot of planned content for this game, and that's just such a real shame, because with some more features and freedom I could see this being a classic.
As it stands it's just overpriced. If this game sounds interesting to you, then wait for a sale.
