Space Marine: Defenders of Avarax review

The Apple’s Vision Pro aside, VR is much easier to get into than it once was.

The hardware needed is increasingly affordable and the software tends to be more accessible. Still, if you don’t have a headset at home, I can't say I blame you. For all the promises to free you from the tethers of the real world, the quality of even the best VR experience is always going to be contingent on the physical space you have to work with. For those on the wrong side of that divide, Zero Latency is a great option. The dedicated VR venue recently launched its most ambitious VR experience yet, Space Marine VR: Defenders of Avarax.

As someone who has spent a lot of time falling down the Warhammer money pit this year, I jumped at the chance to try it out with a few friends. I went with Zero Latency’s Parramatta location, as it was the most convenient location for me. However, the company also has a presence in Alexandria and other Australian states. You can find the full list on the website.

While the titular planet of Avarax is featured in the Saber Interactive's Space Marine 2, the amount of crossover between what's going on in that game and this VR experience is minimal. Both depict a futuristic science-fiction planet under siege from ravenous aliens, but there’s not much in the way of shared characters and story-lines. 

As a fan of the specific setting depicted in Defenders of Avarax, I appreciated the attention to detail it presented. However, at the same time, I wouldn’t say the plot here gets much more complicated than scary aliens plus big guns. Even if you’re not all that well acquainted with the Games Workshop’s grimdark vision of a future that knows only war, I doubt you’ll struggle to keep up. 

The setup is as simple as they come, with you and up to eight friends playing as a squad of Space Marines (clad in classic blue-and-gold) that are sent in to repel an attack by the alien Tyranid swarm. That mission has a few fun moments in it, but it’s relatively light on surprises. Most of what’s here feels like a highlight reel for the source material.

If there’s anything that I came away from after playing through Defenders or Avarax, it’s that Warhammer 40,000 is a great wrapper for virtual reality experiences. If you know the world, it’s cool to see it rendered in such an immersive way. If you don’t, the sci-fi gothic aesthetic involved is easy to grapple with but packed with much more flavor than the many more generic pretenders out there. 

It doesn’t hurt that it felt liberating to walk around and explore levels with the degree of freedom that Zero Latency’s venue allows for. Even if you have a really nice setup at home you almost certainly don't have one this spacious. There are plenty of limitations to this largess, of course. If you get too close to another player, you’ll both hear a hard-to-ignore warning siren until you move away from one another. Some of the levels in Defenders or Avarax are so narrow that triggering this safeguard seems like a matter of when rather than if. Otherwise, the layout of the adventure is varied enough to propel you forward without feeling too repetitive or overly on-rails.

Over the course of the adventure, you’re constantly being given new stuff to do and see. It all culminates in a big flashy boss fight, which at moments feels like a distant cousin to raid encounters from a game like Destiny or World of Warcraft. It’s unfortunate that the Defenders of Avarax never really becomes more complex than this because it whet my appetite for something a little meatier right as the experience was nearing its climax. 

While you’ll spend the bulk of Defenders of Avarax firing away with a standard bolter rifle, you’ll periodically find drop pods with additional weapons like flamers and melta-guns. Once you’ve tired of the basic gunplay mechanics, this arsenal injects much needed variety into the experience. That said, I quickly found myself wishing there was a little bit more diversity when it came to what I was shooting at. 

The absence of any sort of melee weapon was also somewhat disappointing. Whenever our in-game positions were overrun, it felt jarring to have to continue to fire away rather than use any sort of close-quarters weapon. Both the original Space Marine and Space Marine 2 find a great balance between gunplay and swordplay.  Defenders or Avarax falls short here in a way that feels like a missed opportunity by contrast, though I am sympathetic to the possibility that asking players to hack away at virtual foes with an imaginary chainsword might present a few practical issues.

Still, I would have loved to see what a slightly more ambitious version of this experience looks like. Again, the highest highs that you’ll find in the thirty to forty minutes it takes to run through Defenders of Avarax are those where it graduates from asking you to do basic tasks to more advanced mechanics.

In terms of the visuals and sound, there’s more to chew on than what you’d get from a similar VR experience even a few years ago. When it comes to the mechanics and design, I came away from Defenders of Avarax wanting just a little bit more. I wasn’t unhappy with it, but I was vaguely unsatisfied. 

For instance, take the in-game scoring system. It’s an attempt to cultivate some friendly competition by awarding the player with the most points (which are scored by shooting enemies) with a halo above their name. In principle and concept, this is a good idea. Unfortunately, the act of holding your gun up to see your score and then comparing it with your friends one by one is awkward, clunky and slow. Sacrificing some of the immersion here and just using an in-game sound cue to let players know when someone has taken the lead is just one minor change that could go a long way towards making Defenders of Avarax the kind of experience you’d want to play a second time over to settle the score.

On a related note, it feels odd that the game divides you into two teams but doesn’t do much with it beyond putting you on different paths through each level. A post-game breakdown of each team's final scores in addition to individual players seems an obvious oversight.

Another aspect of Defenders of Avarax that I was a little disappointed by was the limits it places on your ability to express yourself. While you can wave your gun around to get someone’s attention when the in-game action becomes a little too chaotic to communicate over voice chat, I constantly found myself wishing I could rely on my off-hand or body language to communicate with my teammates. 

Even if it required an extra tracking sensor for each player or didn’t have any gameplay ramifications, there’s so much untapped potential in letting players make their own fun. One of the memorable moments of my session was as simple as me trying to sit on an in-game chair. Even a little more room to goof around and play within the virtual spaces that Defenders of Avarax gives you would go a long way towards making the experience feel less like a janky rollercoaster and more like a quirky theme park.

While the on-boarding experience was largely smoother than I remembered it being at my last Zero Latency experience this isn’t to say that there wasn't the odd technical issues. Myself and another player both dropped out during one firefight before loading back in after about thirty or so seconds. In the moment it was fun to lean in and joke about it being “a trick of the warp”, but I don’t doubt my experience would have been improved without the interruption. The headsets were clean, the venue was nice and the staff were friendly. However, if the tech doesn’t work reliably, it really punches a hole through the experience.

On one hand, Defenders of Avarax ends right when it feels like you’re really getting into the swing of things. The bones of the experience are solid, but the skeleton they constitute could stand to be a little more adventurous.

On the other hand, a version of this that ran for another twenty minutes might risk overstaying its welcome. If there was a mode aimed at more advanced players or a second set of levels that asked or expected a little bit more of you, that might be something. As it is, Defenders of Avarax often ends up feeling like just another room-scale VR experience. It’s a fun enough Space Marine simulator to jump into for an afternoon, but it doesn’t quite go far enough when it comes to giving you reasons to return for more. 

Even if it is a particularly fun and lavishly realized one of those, Defenders of Avarax rarely transcended the expectations I walked in the door with. It merely met them. For the asking price (and especially for those with an affinity for all things Warhammer), maybe that’s fine. For what it’s worth though, it’s tragically easy to see how the courage to go that little bit further could have made Defenders of Avarax that much easier to recommend.