Apex Construct review: ho-hum ‘after the fact’ drama

Apex Construct is yet another VR game in which almost everything of dramatic import has occured before we start playing. I call this “after the fact drama.” Like in other sci-fi games including Red Matter and Hubris, we roam around ghost town-like settings with a feeling that we’ve arrived too late, after the shit has gone down. To be fair, this is baked into the premise: in Apex Construct we’re the last human being alive, navigating a world patrolled by robots that are defeatable—like in Horizon: Call of the Mountain—by using a trusty old bow and arrow. This archery element is the game’s most satisfying. 

There’s a heaving sense of lifelessness: a feeling of being somewhere time forgot. A couple of additions make the experience a little less lonely: the aforementioned robots, which scurry around like giant insects and attack us with lasers, and a sleepy male voice who speaks to us from more or less the start, introducing this world, explaining how things function, and pushing the narrative forward. 

This character is an AI entity named Father, who “found a way to bring you back from the void,” in the hope, he says, of “returning the world to what it once was.” Continuing a long tradition of games in which the player is accompanied, remotely, by another character, who acts as a kind of counsel or tour guide, Father walks us through various elements including our home, which includes a map of the world that we can use to venture outside. The game’s interior settings are mostly bland, but externally they can be quite interesting—with collapsed buildings falling weirdly and illogically into each other, not quite Escher-esque but getting there.

In this wider world you’ll encounter an ungodly amount of doors positioned next to computer terminals, and machines that require tube-like batteries conveniently located nearby—elements that’ll be very familiar to gamers, as will the proliferation of handwritten notes proclaiming important facts, clues and backstory elements. Everything feels rather boilerplate.

The developers at Fast Travel Games, which was founded in 2016, perhaps deserve some credit for entering the space early and playing around with how conventional video game elements look and feel in VR. But where’s their big ideas, their vision, their idea of VR’s key modalities and strengths? Apex Construct never feels uniquely suited to the medium; one can easily imagine a flat screen version of the game. 

Some of the puzzles are easy, in the style of simple escape room elements—for instance, early in the game, the year 1996 is mentioned several times, clearly emphasising its importance. So when we encounter a terminal that needs a pass code, guess which four digit number works? An even easier puzzle occurs when, next to a computer terminal connected to a locked door, we pick up a piece of paper that reads: “First day at work eh Casper? The password to get in is 5517.” Cripes, that’s not exactly a noodle scratcher. But other puzzles were, for me, frustrating roadblocks; sometimes I felt like I was missing something obvious. 

After a while, it struck me that Father—a rather long-winded and pushy fellow—might be an unreliable narrator. He despises another, very powerful AI named Mother, begging the question of whether he might be using us for political purposes, which provides some level of dramatic intrigue. Not enough, however, to keep me interested. After a few hours, I’d had enough.