An excellent seated experience that should have been brought to newer headsets.
Channel your inner operative to prevent all-out war.
Originally released back in 2020 by nDreams, Phantom: Covert Ops, is one of the early virtual reality (VR) titles that was excellent back then, and still holds up today.
What’s even better is that this is another one of those mythical seated only VR experiences.
Players become a covert operative who is tasked with stopping war. To do this, you are sent out into the icy waters of eastern Europe – in a fancy tactical kayak – to become one with the night and use your stealth to make it through.
Armed with three different weapons – pistol, assault rifle, and a sniper rifle – these are meant to be used only when necessary. Sure, you could go through each level, mowing down those who stand in your way, but there’s limited ammo and the entire point of the kayak is to traverse unseen.
It also helps to stay unseen if you want the highest score for each level.
There’s a lot of good things going on here, but we’ll start by talking about the mechanics of the game.
As mentioned, you’re sitting in a kayak for the duration of the game – and you move around like you would if you were actually in a kayak. Pick up the oar from the left side of your boat and start paddling like you would if you were actually on the water; there also additional actions to learn like sharper turns so you can move across the water like a ghost.
Your weapons are mounted all within easy reach – pistol on the chest, rifles on your back and right side of the boat – and firing them is as natural as you might expect.
Again, it can’t be stressed enough that you’re meant to take a stealth approach during each level; this means keeping the body count to a minimum. There are opportunities to take down high value targets, but these are limited, and you really should stick to avoiding everyone else.
Instead, you’re meant to shoot at things which can distract your enemies, this way you can sneak past without issues. Shoot an alarm, fire extinguisher, and other things to draw enemies attention away from the water, it all helps you in the end.
In addition to the guns, you have a set of binoculars to mark your enemies. This is especially helpful as you work to make your way past.
There’s not much more to the campaign besides thinking tactically and planning ahead, and that’s really what sets the better players apart from the rest.
Graphically this game looks pretty great – especially since it’s five years old. However, playing on a Quest 3, you will probably notice that there haven’t exactly been any enhancements to the game since the latest Meta headset launched.
This doesn’t mean that it’s ugly – this game definitely looks better than most of the slop being released on the Quest store – but seeing the way other developers improved their games for the Quest 3, it’s just a shame that nDreams didn’t take the time to make improvements.
Now while we’re on the topic of things that were never fixed, like the players not being able to save their game. This problem persists not only here, but in another classis Shooty Fruity. With the headset having been out for coming up on two years, it’s a shame that the team has decided to create new games, but not give updates to fix known issues with older ones.
The workaround they’ve listed doesn’t work for everyone, so this issue is really the only one holding back this game.
Overall, Phantom: Covert Ops is an excellent seated experience game that newer Quest users should definitely try out. nDreams did well when the released this game five years ago and it’s a shame that they’ve basically opted to leave some of their older games to the annuls of time; and older headsets.
Sure, they released Fracked last year on Quest – a game that was from the original PlayStation VR. However, they’ve essentially chosen to ignore the save game issues for a few of their older games, leaving players with newer headsets to have to follow a workaround that doesn’t always solve the problem.
It should also be mentioned that Fracked wasn’t that good when it released on the older headsets and this upgraded port was pretty much unnecessary.
Regardless of how the devs have opted to handle their older games, this is one of the experiences that are worth the time – but only when it all works properly.
Phantom: Covert Ops, was reviewed on the Quest 3 after purchasing from the Quest store on sale.
