From Other Suns is finally releasing to the public today! Developed by Gunfire Games for Oculus Rift with Touch, From Other Suns is a tense, cooperative, first-person action game set in a galaxy where a deadly alien species is bent on destroying the Earth. It’s up to you and your crew to get to the Earth before they do and mount a final stand. By combining ship-based combat and strategic battles with fast-paced first-person shooter missions, it’s unlike any other VR game out right now.
You can read our full review on the game right here, watch over an hour of footage from our pre-launch livestream, and see a ton of gameplay videos over on our YouTube. But now that the game is finally coming out for the public today, we wanted to run down a list of our best tips to get you started!
How to Get Started
From Other Suns includes a relatively lengthy tutorial that covers everything from aiming, shooting, and moving in the game, but it drops the ball in terms of actually showing you what to do. Since From Other Suns is basically a big, procedural sandbox for you to go out and explore, there isn’t really a right or wrong way to play. However, this is what we usually do each time we start a new game.
Once you load up a new game head to the teleport bay and grab a second pistol off the rack on the right, as well as a stimpack and hackatron. The stimpacks are for healing and the hackatrons let you hack into ship computers and steal cargo. Now head to the bridge and open up the Star Chart (covered in more detail down below) to plot your course. The general goal is to make your way towards the right side of the map hitting other ships, space stations, and small quests along the way.
When a pirate attacks you and disables your FTL drive you can either blow up the ship to escape with a small amount of its salvage in tow, or you can disable their tactical systems (rendering them unable to attack) and board the ship before they get a chance to repair it. This way you get all of their cargo and salvage, but also loot the captain, who usually is carrying some really powerful weapons.
Just keep doing that until you die and restart (this is a roguelike after all!) or reach Earth itself.
Understand How to Use the Star Chart
The Star Chart is a tiny bit confusing at first. Basically, all of those little dots are like waypoints that you can visit. The ones that are just dots by themselves have a random chance of being any one of numerous different types of encounters. You might run into pirates, you might come across some aliens, you could encounter a Trader looking to do business, or something else entirely.
The horizontal, circular icons are space stations where you can buy and sell gear, as well as upgrade your ship’s various systems. And the vertical spiral icons are other large ships. Usually these have longer, more difficult missions that involve clearing out hostiles from a ship, rescuing crew, or hacking into a faulty computer system. The risks are often higher, but so are the rewards.
Swap Weapons Frequently
Similar in some ways to Borderlands, you’ll find new guns all the time in From Other Suns. After you kill ship captains they’ll drop their guns, some low-level enemies drop guns and other items, and you’ll even find guns on racks and recharge stations all over the place.
The deeper you get into the game, the better the gear is that you find. That’s why that auto pistol you love so much should be discarded ASAP when you come across a laser rifle that does twice the damage. Difficulty spikes are a real issue in From Other Suns so the better gear you can get, the better off you’re gonna be. There is only a limited amount of inventory space so don’t get attached to any guns.
Don’t Neglect Crew Members
NPC crew members serve two core functions in From Other Suns: they can be given orders and they serve as your extra lives for respawning. From the Bridge in your ship you can select crew members to assign to different rooms during a battle with another ship. If an enemy is destroying your engines, disabling your tactical capabilities, or wreaking havoc on you in some way, then you can send a crew member to a specific area of the ship for repairs — that way you don’t have to go do it yourself.
Also, if (actually it’s more like when) you die, then you assume the role of one of your crew members. You’re a blank slate once again and need to go back to where you died to retrieve all of your guns and items. That’s why recruiting new crew members is always a focus anytime I play when visiting trading posts.
Stand Up While Playing
Finally, you should really try and stand up as much as possible when you’re playing From Other Suns. The most obvious reason is because you can more easily move your body to dodge enemy fire and get behind cover, but it goes a bit further than that too. If you’re standing up then that means you can crouch down behind boxes and consoles in the environment, making it even harder to hit you.
Standing up also helps aid with the immersion factor, but you should be careful if you’re sensitive to motion sickness. When I play I use the full, smooth locomotion system with smooth rotation so I can twist, move, and aim as quickly as possible. This may not work for everyone though.
Let us know what you think of our tips and the game itself down in the comments below!
