ADR1FT

Three One Zero's game atmosphere invites us to live a gaming experience where ingravity and spacewalks are its main gameplay mechanic, which is weighed down by a feeling of constant repetition that makes the game lose many points. VR is its main allure and it has been put down for now on PS4.

Adr1ft has everything that a walking simulator should have and gives us the entire outer space to dive into. This game will reach its true potential when PlayStation VR comes out.

It's a short game and doesn't get everything perfect, but it's also quite unique and has a strong narrative to it. And I do love a game with a strong female lead. This is also a game that feels that it has been released a little early, and by that I mean Adr1ft badly needs to be a strong VR experience when PlayStation VR lands. Then it will truly will be a game that will stick with me for a long time to come.

Adr1ft on PS4 is a unique experience that can captivate your imagination if you’re yearning for space adventures. Too bad for the current lack of a VR solution.

Adr1ft mixes simulation, survival and a first person view to give you an immersive experience in outer space. Its repetitive gameplay mechanics and slow pace makes it less attractive to "standard" players, but still is an original title from indie devs Three One Zero.

Quotation forthcoming.

A first-person experience that nails the experience part, but - despite flashes of brilliance - reminds you all too often that an astronaut's job can be...well, a bit dull. [Sept 2016, p.109]

Initially exhilarating, but ultimately deflating, its sensational setup is disappointingly squandered. [October 2016, p77]

A experience tailored for VR that without it feels shallow in almost every possible way.

ADR1FT is a beautiful take on the space disaster genre, but ultimately one that not everyone will get pulled into. It’s subtle, slow, and crawling at times, instead of intense, bold, or peppered with action moments.

Adr1ft is by no means a bad game, but it comes with a few key caveats. Its opening hour is fantastic, as you begin to piece together what has happened and perilously search for the next oxygen canister, but it's the back half of the game that severely lets this intergalactic adventure down. And despite the story and its setting being so intriguing, it's not enough to paper over the glaring flaws present.

A limited frame rate and the fact that the Playstation VR is still unreleased deprive Adr1ft of its main quality: that of being an artistically sound experiment built around virtual reality. The game is still a sight to behold, but also remains incredibly slow, and the crashes of the Playstation 4 version can be truly irritating. Definitely not an upgrade from the original.

Half of Adr1ft is a fantastic experience. The spacewalking segments are like nothing I’ve ever encountered in a game before—freeing yet claustrophobic, beautiful and terrifying. If it was judged solely by how well it captures the mystery of and fascination with the great emptiness beyond the earth, it would be a success. This isn’t just a floating sim, though, and once simply being in zero-G gets old, there isn’t a compelling reason to get through the rest.

Adr1ft just doesn’t bring enough to the table to make it a great outer space survival experience.

ADR1FT is truly a great simulation experience and a frightening look at what can happen when things go wrong in space, but it could have released as a 30 minute playable VR demo and I would have thoroughly enjoyed it. As it stands now, with 5+ hours of aimlessly floating around doing the same tasks over and over, and without the VR aspect to really drive some of the visuals home it is a miss.

The work done by Three One Zero is not very convincing: the good technical engine and suggestive setting stand next to a poor ludic experience. We only recommend Adr1ft to players looking for a purely visual experience.

Regardless of the setting and the fantastic visuals, Adr1ft feels like an also-ran walking simulator with more rules and less explanation along the way. It’s a good distillation of the limits and how the genre both does and doesn’t work. It may have been a cool idea but it’s unable to deliver on the promise inherent in being trapped in space, resulting in something too slow, too tedious, and too unsatisfying when you reach the end of its too-long running time.

Without virtual reality support to increase the novelty this this would-be walking sim proves a disappointingly bland experience.

ADR1FT may have atmosphere, but it doesn’t have much else.