It seems Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures is rounding the bend, as the promising VR cockpit adventure has released its final teaser trailer, showing off more of its madcap ship management and action-arcade combat.
In Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures you pilot your own starship, which not only tasks you with maneuvering the craft around manually (as you do), but also keeping all of the ship’s systems in check, including shields, weapons, life support, thrusters, stabilizers—all of which are powered by a bank of constantly depleting batteries.
Meanwhile, you’re being chased through the galaxy with a little alien pal in tow, something the developers Stardust Collective say you “may or may not have stolen from the evil Empire.”
There’s no release date yet for the plucky ship simulator, although it now has a big ‘coming soon’ appended to both its Steam and new Quest Store pages.
In the game’s Discord, the developers say in an update that they’ve now crossed into the “hardening’ phase, saying that both features and content are now complete.
You can’t just blast away at enemies and zoom around in Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures, an upcoming Quest 2 and SteamVR title from indie studio Stardust Collective. While that’s a pretty important chunk of the game, a new video shows off just how demanding the job of space bounty hunter can be.
As a pilot of your own ship, you not only have to maneuver it around manually, but you also have to keep an eye on the ship’s systems—shields, weapons, life support, thrusters, stabilizers—all of which are powered by a bank of constantly depleting batteries. If one of those vital systems fails, you might be in big trouble.
There’s a few ways to fill up batteries though, Stardust Collective shows in a new gameplay video featuring developer commentary. Since combat seems to be fairly arcadey, you’ll find battery pickups throughout the game’s levels, but you can’t really rely on found batteries alone once the action really starts heating up, so there are a few methods for making your own power.
You can ‘print’ a copy of Ziggy and unceremoniously sacrifice the game’s squishy little pal as you extract its power into an empty battery. This essentially turns your cockpit into more of a flying, room-scale Job Simulator that has you actively managing so your systems are always topped up whilst you dish out your best against enemy combatants.
Oh, and don’t forget to blow Ziggy’s rotting corpse out of the airlock, lest you want a face-full of toxic fumes.
In the video, we also get a good look at a fairly linear level which has you flying towards a warp station that you need to reach to continue onwards. In a subsequent level, Stardust reveals, you’ll also be able to defend the station. The game is said to feature branching story paths so playthrough of the game will take you through “a unique path in the solar system, with a unique story for each path you take,” the studios says on the game’s website.
Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures is slated to launch on Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets sometime this year. There’s no precise release date yet, although we’ll have our eyes peeled on Stardust Collective’s Twitter for more info as it arrives.
Elden Ring might be out tomorrow but who cares when you got all these virtual reality (VR) videogames on Steam Next Fest to play! Next to catch gmw3’s eye was Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures by Stardust Collective, a title mixing roomscale sci-fi management with some space-based combat.
Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures takes place entirely inside a very snug cockpit that’s very light on luxuries – there’s not even a seat for those long intergalactic journeys – but heavy on buttons, switches and levers. Excellent then for some immersive VR gameplay, where you have to main your little ship to keep yourself alive by managing power levels to systems including life support and flight control.
The demo treats you to the first level and one crucial component of Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures, a strange green alien with unquantifiable power – no not Mooncake. This little guy quite literally powers your ship, although doing so seems to kill the poor little guy so you have to eject the corpse into space. So there are some dark undertones to what initially seemed like a fairly colourful adventure.
The demo doesn’t give you much time to play with all the bells and whistles the cockpit has to offer but there are certainly plenty of them. You can 3D print your little green pal Ziggy, swap batteries between stations and then blast off to your next destination. The cockpit is very compact but not claustrophobic, with everything nicely within reach, with the studio claiming you only need a 2m x 1.5m area.
After feeling like a kid in a candy store thanks to all those buttons it was time to try the space combat. Depending on your flying preference, I found it useful popping into the settings to tweak the invert options as you can swap them all for pitch, yaw and roll. With HOTAS-like controls you’ve got to make it through an asteroid field, shooting any that get too close followed by a few enemy ships that want Ziggy for themselves.
All the mechanics were easy to grasp with the combat section being the trickiest purely because you have to stand up – it is roomscale after all – so spinning around could get a bit jarring for less experienced players.
Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures looks awesome and offers another great example of VR gameplay during the Steam Next Fest, well worth a download. For more updates keep reading gmw3.
