Sunday, 20 April, 2025 UTC
Summary
Starship Drift is an exceedingly simple game on Apple Vision Pro that shows how developers are figuring out how to make the most of the platform.
Starship Drift puts the player in command of a tiny spaceship dodging asteroids with head or hand movements. The premise is familiar, but the implementation seems to take as much inspiration from the original Asteroids as from Pistol Whip. Directing the ship is intuitively handled by moving your head or hand with slight movements of your pinched fingers.
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Asteroids and the ship itself are rendered with incredible clarity and rock-solid frame rates. Set against a star field, developer Mark Kinoshita chose to fade in the physical world on all sides. That means you can’t adjust how much of the physical environment you see while playing. You also can’t use other apps while Starship Drift is running.
There are some power ups to find like shields, health and a gun, but otherwise this is just a very simple endless runner in space. Altogether, the game fills out the headset's field of view perfectly with a VR game that's made for either head or hand tracking and passthrough environmental views available with a momentary glance.
I can’t recommend people buy this game who have an Apple Vision Pro - there’s not enough depth or variety to the content yet - though if Kinoshita is reading this, I encourage them to keep updating the game. What’s interesting is that this genre works at all in standalone with both head and hand tracking.
I can’t recommend people buy this game who have an Apple Vision Pro - there’s not enough depth or variety to the content yet - though if Kinoshita is reading this, I encourage them to keep updating the game. What’s interesting is that this genre works at all in standalone with both head and hand tracking.
It’s easy to forget how much money games like Temple Run have made over the years with the same basic mechanic as this. Meanwhile, the challenges to making a comfortable VR game anyone can use haven’t been solved in a decade. Kinoshita’s app is simple, yes, but flying that ship is as accessible to non-gamers as an endless runner you might have on your phone while still leaning into the benefits of spatial computing.