Review: Proton Pulse

The Good: Excellent gameplay, great concept.
The Bad: High potential for nausea without a head-strap.

Proton Pulse combines simple, retro-style, brightly colored graphics and addictive, intuitive gameplay to deliver classic arcade fun to virtual reality.

Readers of a certain age will undoubtedly recognize in Proton Pulse the influence of the classic 1972 Atari game Breakout. Like Breakout, the game involves controlling a rectangular paddle, and whacking a ball into a bunch of bricks to destroy them, while avoiding having the ball fall past the paddle. Unlike Breakout, all of this takes place in three dimensions, with the player controlling the ball through movements of the head.

The plot has a somewhat silly sci-fi premise—a mysterious and sinister organization known as M.O.A.I. has set out to destroy the universe, and you, the humble proton, are the only thing standing between the enemy and his objective. Really the plot is unimportant here, this is a game about quickness, reflexes, and most of all the satisfaction of breaking stuff!

More advanced mechanics come into play as the game progresses, including a second ball to juggle at the same time as the first, and blocks that move around rather than helpfully standing still to be broken. The game starts out easy and scales up in difficulty quite gradually. Even as things get a little more complicated, fundamentally the game remains about moving your head around to move a paddle and whack a ball.

Here is a quick point of advice before playing. You really need to jury-rig a head strap of some kind to keep Google Cardboard firmly in place over your face. Holding the headset with your hands results in a slight jittering that, while not such a big deal for some VR experiences, combines here with the rapid motion of the ball to quickly become nausea inducing. It also results in the inevitable temptation to move the headset with your hands to respond to the ball instead of moving your head, which distorts the view and, again, barf city. I ended up using a pair of suspenders which worked just fine for the time being.

Proton Pulse is simple, fun, addictive, and I highly recommend trying it out!