Space Marine VR Defenders of Avarax is a brand new experience from Zero Latency which launches very soon on 25th September.

We were recently invited down to Meetspace VR Manchester to check out an early build of the new game and share our thoughts on the awesome experience!

In this full review we’ll be chatting about our day out, what we thought of the Space Marine VR experience and letting you know if its worth checking out and if we’d go again!

We’ve also filmed some behind the scenes footage of our little adventure which you can see just below, or over on YouTube

If you would like to support the site, then why not order your Warhammer goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

It’s safe to say we were more than a little excited when we got invited to check out Space Marine VR! We’re all massive Warhammer 40k fans, and the recent release of Space Marine 2 has also left us all eager to play out our dreams of being Space Marines! It’s all well and good doing it on a games console though, but what about walking around an entire room as one and facing off against Tyranid threats?

The experience supports up to 8 players, so team Sprues & Brews gathered together with a party of 6 to see if we could enact The Emperor’s vengeance on the Tyranid menace!

Meetspace VR has locations all over the country (Including the home of Warhammer World in Nottingham), but with Manchester being our closest we headed down after work to check out what the game had in store.

Upon getting there, we signed in quickly and soon got ready to don our VR headsets and guns, and get ready to face whatever was ready to take us on!

I’ve played a lot of home VR, having had both PlayStation headsets and an Oculus Rift, but I’ve never dabbled with a room scale experience. And it is on an entirely different level to anything you may have experienced in the home!

The big difference is the sheer scale of the room you are able to walk around in, completely untethered and able to explore as you please. I was a little dubious at first that the arena would be able to support 8 players all geared up with headsets and guns, but as we’ll chat about later, the game does some really clever things with making sure the space is being used as well as possible.

Upon signing in, you’re moved into a briefing room after putting any valuables in lockers – I’d recommend following the advice and locking away your phones, as you really don’t want anything to happen to them, or fall out of your pocket while you’re traversing the space.

The party is given an introductory video that walks you through how to gear up and play, and it is put together with the same asthetic of Space Marine 2 with some great animation and voice acting. Once briefed, it’s time to suit up – each player takes a VR headset and gun (which is impressively weighty, and even has a working grenade loading mechanism) and each take their place around the arena.

The headsets are very easy to set up to your vision with lots of comfort and focus settings available that easily run you through getting your picture perfect (I wear glasses, but had no issues calibrating the headset to suit my eyes). Next up the players are put into 2 teams – you play together throughout the game, but the teams will determine who you are playing with when the larger group is split into smaller squads during the game.

The Space Marine VR Experience

So its worth prefacing this section with a little disclaimer that we played an early pre-release version (with an update loading into the game just before we started) – so what we saw were not the final visuals (and we did encounter a couple of graphical glitches that should be fixed before release) – We are very much looking forward to playing again on launch and seeing the final experience!

Even if you’ve played VR games before, nothing quite prepares you for the sight of seeing the rest of your party stood around you in full power armour. As people moved their heads and weapons, all these motions were reflected in the game, and it really did feel like you were a 7 foot tall Space Marine.

Combat was fun and brutal as you use your bolter to mow down Tyranids, or even load a grenade and lob it into the approaching horde. Special weapons exist too, and operate much like they do in Space Marine 2, giving you a limited amount of ammo, with you reverting back to your bolt rifle once they run out. These are very fun however from the flamer incinerating nids, to the THWOOSH of a Melta, all the weapons felt like they should feel, and were really satisfying to use!

Gameplay takes you through a series of encounters, sometimes moving together as a team, but often splitting into groups of 3 and offering players two different routes to the next location. The game actually uses some technical wizardary to use this in order to keep players away from each other in the arena, making as much use of the space as possible to allow the players to feel they have space without walking into another player.

If you’ve ever felt motion sickness from VR then I would still give this a try, the fact that you are walking around the room, combined with the visuals tricks your brain into thinking you are actually exploring this environment. Dave often suffers from VR sickness, but felt absolutely fine after coming out.

The entire experience lasts 30 mins, but it was action packed with a nice variety of environments and enemy types – I don’t want to spoil too much here, but there are some jaw dropping moments. Some of these are just awesome fights against some enemies that look ridiculously impressive in VR (More so when you are actually running across the room to avoid their attacks while trying to pump as much firepower into them to drop them). Others are mindbending and impressive from a technical standpoint as you warp across psychically induced dimensional space.

Be ready for a bit of a work out, as there is a lot of walking, and even running as the experience continues – and for younger guests there might even be some scary moments as waves of alien horrors charge towards you wanting blood!

After playing, each and every one of us wanted to play again – and we’re already trying to get the band back together to replay the experience once it goes live!

Summary

So what did we think of the experience and is it worth the money? At first £20 per person for a 30 min experience sounds a lot of money – but believe me, if you are a Warhammer fan this is worth every penny! The gameplay experience you get here is unlike anything I’ve ever had before – you feel like you are a Space Marine, and the VR is so good that everything just becomes second nature as you move around the arena and blast down waves of enemies

The technology does amazing work at making you feel like you are going on a journey and exploring different locations (With some impressive tricks to make it feel like you are navigating multiple levels too, and seeing your party further below you) while back in reality you’re simply making circles around the large gaming space.

This really is the ultimate VR experience and is on another level to what you can do at home, and even for newcomers it was easy to get into and find you “VR feet”

If you’ve enjoyed Space Marine 2 and want to play the role of a Space Marine again, and alongside your friends then there is nothing at all like this anywhere else!

I highly recommend trying to get a full group of 8 people together and defending Avarax together from endless hordes of Tyranids!

Space Marine VR Defenders of Avarax opens at MeetSpace VR locations from 25th September 2024. Tickets start at £20 and can be booked here

MeetSpace VR invited Sprues & Brews to try out the game for review purposes.

Published by Matt Crowther

View all posts by Matt Crowther