Spatial Ops Hands-On: Make Some Space For This Shooter

Spatial Ops delivers an inventive mixed reality FPS on Quest and Pico, and we went hands-on. Read on for our full impressions.

There’s no shortage of shooting gallery games on any VR headset if you’ve got an itchy trigger finger. You can defeat zombie hordes in Arizona Sunshine, faceless marauders in Superhot VR, or even killer produce in Shooty Fruity. Spatial Ops might look like another mixed reality shooter with an undescriptive cyberpunk dystopia, yet two-dimensional screenshots can be deceiving.

Spatial Ops by Resolution Games (Demeo, Racket Club) turns your play space into a time-jumping action adventure. Instead of directing your gaze to the action, Spatial Ops force you to get up – or put an office chair in the middle of the boundary – and stay on your toes as new scenes and enemies appear from every direction. You’ll need plenty of clear space and that’s especially true when playing with others or a team of bots.  

The main campaign puts a giant, time-peeling dock in your virtual boundary. You play as a special forces agent trying to save the world from another mad scientist in a lab coat with dreams of global domination and male pattern baldness. He also has a small army that’s armed to the teeth with the latest weapons that shoot bullets a lot slower than they should move, depending on your difficulty level. The story isn’t terribly important but it provides depth that keeps the experience from being an ordinary shooting match. Some clever moments help it stand out from the usual world domination exposition.

Your time jumper opens portals all around you, like you’re infiltrating an evil scientist’s futuristic lair as a freelancer working from home. A set of revolvers are your initial weapons and you can add more to your arsenal as you advance, like a Tommy gun, an RPG, and a sniper rifle. The guns are very responsive and fun to wield while shooting and aiming are accurate.

What makes Spatial Ops worth playing is the multiplayer “Arena” mode, which can be played in-person with friends or online with a four digital code in solo mode or four on four. Failing that, you can play with up to seven bots and this comes with the usual set of multiplayer modes you’d expect in a shooter, including Capture the Flag, Domination, and a straight-up Deathmatch. It’s still in beta mode and isn’t open to public sessions, so you’ll need a couple of friends to share a room code with to play against others. Still, the bots are fun to dodge and snipe even if they have the intelligence level of multiplayer bots.

You must set up an arena in your space with virtual walls, obstacles, and objects for cover like crates and barriers in various shapes and objectives. Each round starts with no weapons, forcing you to find them quickly. Spatial Ops does a great job placing and moving mixed-reality environments to your location so you can crouch or duck behind stuff before you take your shot. If you’ve got a sofa in your room, that can provide cover from fire with shorter walls or objects, while playing alone lets you plot a grid for the bots’ movements.

Spatial Ops is an inventive twist on the standard VR shooter we’ve come to expect across the years. Seeing the action unfold around you makes for an enveloping experience that keeps you moving and guessing as you try to cover dimensions that bend space and time to their will. If you’ve got the space and a few friends nearby, it’s worth a look.

Spatial Ops is available now on the Meta Quest platform, and a ‘Campaign Edition’ is also out now on Pico.