In a world devastated by uncontrollable weather conditions, it’s your job to bring life to nature once more. You do so by reflecting the light with a mirror, forcing the beam of light to shine onto the plants. Symphony of the Machine puts you in the middle of the action and forces you to solve the problems you’re facing. Is this one of those typical VR games or is it something special? Time to find out in our review!
Time to start your adventure
Symphony of the Machine is very easy on the eyes. It’s not one of those hyperactive virtual reality games where everything is flying around at high-speed. Instead, the first thing you’ll see when you turn on the game is a wasteland and a small campfire. There’s nothing here to guide you besides some ancient hieroglyphs and a mysterious metal tower standing there in the distance. It’s clear from the start, you’ll need to reach that tower.
Just like in multiple other VR games, you can’t simply walk around in the world, instead, you’ll need to point where you want to go and ‘warp’ your way to there. It’s nothing to worry about since a lot of other VR games use the same system. You’ll reach the tower in a couple of seconds. Once you’ve reached the tower, the real game starts. Walking towards the tower just demonstrated the strong atmosphere in the game, everything looks good and has a relaxing vibe to it. It’s clear from the start, this game is meant to be played at a slower pace.
Reflect the light
Once in the room, it’s clear what you need to do. The room is filled with a giant beam of light shooting from the ground towards the heavens. Quickly after you entered the room, you’ll be given a mirror. With this mirror, you’ll need to change the weather to make a plant grow. But how do you do this? Well, it’s not that hard at first. By reflecting the light on certain panels, you can change the weather from rain to sun, wind or clouds. The trick here is that once you hit a panel with light, a barrier will appear in the room, blocking your way to shine the light on another panel at the same time.
So why are you shining that light anyways? Well, the goal of the game is to grow a plant. Each plant has certain conditions to grow. It starts rather easy with just one weather condition you need to change. The more you advance, the more difficult it all gets. Plants serve as the levels in this game and there’s a total of seven plants so this isn’t a very long game. It’s nothing that bad since a lot of these VR games we’re seeing aren’t actually that long. That being said, the game does offer some challenge the more you advance.
Struggle to make your plant blossom
The longer you play, the more complex things get. Starting with the weather conditions you need to achieve. For example, some plants will need rain and wind while other plants will need all the weather conditions all at once. In order to achieve this, you’ll get a second mirror, later on, splitting the beam into two separate ones. With two beams, you can activate two panels but keep in mind that those barriers will also appear. In the later levels, you’ll be looking around a lot, trying to figure out a way to hit the panels with light while avoiding the barriers. It’s not that easy!
As if this isn’t enough, you’ll need to use condition lenses. Those lenses transform your beam into a cold or warm one. Need snow? Hit a cloud with a cold beam. In my opinion, this wasn’t really necessary since the game was already challenging enough without the extra lenses. It feels like the developers desperately tried to keep the gameplay interesting but it’s important to understand that sometimes, less really is more.
Technical flaws
When everything works as it should, meaning you’re able to look around and reflect the light with your controllers without any flaws, this game actually is very enjoyable. The atmosphere is strong and you’ll forget you’re playing a game rather fast. The game has a relaxing vibe to it that really sucks you deep into its world if everything works that is. The biggest flaw is walking around while carrying an item.
As said earlier, you can’t really walk around, instead, you point and warp to a place, making it impossible to carry your mirror with you. No need to worry! The developers created a robot that can carry those things for you! Extremely useful, right? Well, think again. This little robot certainly has a mind of its own and rarely does what you want it to do. Resulting in frustrating minutes where you can’t seem to get the mirror to the place you want to have it. I’m sure this can be fixed with some kind of patch in the future but for now, it’s a shame the developers didn’t invest a little more time in making this robot actually function the way it should.
Conclusion:
Symphony of the Machines is another example of a typical VR game. The idea is great and when it works, it offers a lot of fun. But, it struggles with technical flaws. Not being able to carry your items while the robot that should do this for you doesn’t respond, is frustrating. Combine this with the rather short length of the game and it’s really hard to recommend it to everybody. This is a game for those who are looking for a relaxing yet challenging puzzle game. The ideas are already here but the developers need to polish it a little more to really justify a purchase.
6/10
