Developed and published by DB Creations, Crystal Commanders is an RTS game created especially for VR headsets, offering both Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality gameplay options. This is the first time that we have seen a full RTS title come to a VR headset, and after playing Crystal Commanders, we are astonished that no other developer thought about this earlier. Come to think of it, having to fight virtual battles and commanding your troops across your living room may sound enticing, and now, thanks to Crystal Commanders, this is a reality. This is our review of Crystal Commanders on the Meta Quest 3, in which we fight some battles on our office floor and create some cool bases on our work desks.
Crystal Commanders jumps straight into action when you boot the game, with the option of choosing a game mode and jumping straight into action. The normal Campaign mode currently offers a single campaign for the Crystal Vanguard faction, which is somewhat inspired by Tiberian Sun’s GDI, while the villain faction is called Crimson Blade, which looks like Nod. At this point, there is only Crystal Vanguard’s faction, which spans over multiple Acts, complete with text-based cutscenes and fully voiced dialogue.
The campaign takes around 6-7 hours to complete based on your RTS skills and the amount of time you spend on the missions. Some missions are time-sensitive, but most will depend on your own speed and skill. The missions are designed in traditional RTS fashion, where some will require you to protect a certain unit, some missions will require you to hold and guard specific locations, while some will require you to find and take out the enemy’s base. The story is nothing to write paragraphs about, but it gives you a sense of purpose for jumping into the next mission. The game also has a few tutorial missions that get you up to speed on all in-game mechanics and different game modes.
One of our favourite elements of Crystal Commanders is its intuitive UI. There is no traditional RTS menu on the right side of the screen where you can see your resources, build tabs, and other useful info. The entire screen is clutter-free, with everything sitting on your left-hand side. When you hold and move around the left controller, your UI moves around with it. Here, a radial dial-type menu is sitting where you will see all of the building tabs for your base, including base buildings, defense structures, support structures, and everything else. Selecting a production facility, such as a Factory or Airfield, will add another layer to the production tab, which shows you icons for unit production. You can move your left arm around, and the entire UI will move with it as well, and it looks really cool, like you are some sort of giant robot and can build your troops on demand anywhere.
Unit production is also not limited to one space. You can build units anywhere on the map and decide how many units you want at the same time, as well as using the right joystick. Once the production is complete, the unit will exit the production facility and move to the location where you gave the production command. Your resource count is also present right below the production tabs, along with the current mission’s objective. You only need to collect Crystals as your main resource in the game. The overall gameplay of Crystal Commanders is fairly straightforward, where you place down your HQ, start resource collection, and then build your base with production facilities and defend it against incoming attacks while completing your mission objectives. There is no infantry in the game, and there are no Power Plants in the game as well. However, we did find the building radius to be a little limiting because the battlefields are otherwise huge. The HQ only gives a small amount of radius around it where you can place structures. This might not be a problem for some people because there are not a lot of buildings to place down in the game, but if you are a player who loves creating wide and open bases, this might be an issue for you.
The visuals of Crystal Commanders will depend on your playing area because in MR, the background is the place where you are playing. On the other hand, the unit design is pretty good, but the structures could have been a little better. Certain structures, like the HQ and the defense structures, are too tall for some reason, with factories and other production facilities too small in comparison. Both factions have unique units and structures, so you have something new to look forward to with each faction. Both factions have their own strengths and weaknesses as well, so you have to adjust your gameplay accordingly, but most of the time, the bigger the army, the easier it is to win works like a charm in this case. The air units are fairly limited and weak compared to ground units, and the lack of infantry leaves the action to tanks and artillery. Speed also comes into play, so the faster player will easily control the battlefield and eventually emerge victorious in Crystal Commanders.
Crystal Commanders supports a VR mode, which uses built-in maps suitable for playing the game in VR, and this mode is recommended if you own Quest 2 or older headsets or if you have a small playing area. Quest 2’s black and white passthrough is also a problem because, in MR, you will not really like seeing a dull background for your battles. If you have Meta Quest 3 and a large playing area, you will love Mixed Reality or MR mode, which scans your entire room and then converts it into a battlefield. Since it uses the stored room scans, it switches up the area for every battle as well to keep things fresh. This means that during our playthrough, sometimes we were duking it out at the top of a toy car, the next time on our office desks, and another time at the top of our printer table. The game does such an amazing job of registering furniture and other things and uses the height differences to create battlefields with verticality, which is hardly seen in normal RTS titles.
To make use of this verticality, the game has a structure in the game called Elevator that you will need to build to move your ground units from one level to a higher one or a lower one. Normal RTS titles do not offer this level of verticality, and it is refreshing to see it happening in Crystal Commanders. You would expect that air units would normally move around the map, but they move up and down according to their destination as well. This is most common with Crystal Collectors, as sometimes the Crystal deposits are at a higher or lower level, and they will adjust their height according to their destination. They do not dynamically adjust their height, instead, they determine their height according to their destination.
Having such dynamically different battlefields does not affect the unit’s movement patterns as well. Their movement logic is very well-designed, and they move around obstacles fairly well. We did not really notice any hard obstacles during the MR mode playthrough, as the playable area is usually determined between the obstacles, but the units moved around buildings and any other obstacles that came in their way just fine. Unit selection is a little problematic on elevated surfaces, but it works fine when you are selecting units on the ground level.
If you move your units on an elevated circle and press and hold the trigger to create a circle to select multiple units, the circle does not form properly, and this causes issues in selecting units and giving them commands. During normal scenarios, you can take some time adjusting to this, but this becomes a problem during battles when you quickly need to select units and move them around for better attacking or retreating. This is something that needs to be fixed because this problem directly hinders gameplay.
Crystal Commanders has more good than bad, and with free updates promised by the developers, we can only expect this brilliant RTS to get better with time. At this point, the game offers a decent number of gameplay modes, so you will not get bored when it comes to maps and game modes, but the factions have a low number of units to play around with. It would be great if future updates could bring more units to each faction and give them specific roles, so that you will need to play around with additional strategies to win battles. In its current launch state, it is still one of the best RTS titles we have played this year because of the MR alone, and it sets the bar for future RTS games on the VR platforms.
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Final Verdict:
Crystal Commanders shows how the VR headsets can change the RTS genre in the best possible way. While it lacks content at the moment when it comes to units, campaign missions, and maps but it sets a great foundation for something great to come in the future. With its Mixed Reality support, the game transforms any location into a virtual battlefield, and it will surely blow away the minds of any RTS fan. With satisfying battles and cool gameplay mechanics, Crystal Commanders is a pioneer for RTS titles on VR platforms. If you love playing RTS games and own a VR headset, preferably a Quest 3, then you should definitely give Crystal Commanders a shot.
Final Score: 8.0/10
