Megaton Rainfall asks a simple question and then hands you the power to ignore it. You are an interdimensional superbeing, unkillable, able to cross the galaxy in seconds. Your job is to save Earth from an alien invasion. Your problem is that you keep missing.
Trailer, via Pentadimensional Games.
An Intergalactic Superbeing and One Bad Aim
Megaton Rainfall is an action game from Pentadimensional Games, a studio that developed and published the thing itself. It came out on October 17, 2017, for PlayStation 4 as a timed exclusive, then on November 17, 2017, for Microsoft Windows. The Nintendo Switch and Xbox One versions followed on August 9, 2018. It also runs on PlayStation VR, and the same August 2018 date brought compatibility with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
That release schedule tells you something about the game’s ambitions. A small studio shipped a full-scale Earth, then brought it to every headset and console it could reach.
The premise is a gift. Your creator entrusted you with protecting the planet from an imminent alien invasion. You cannot die. Alien attacks do nothing to you. What can die is everything else.
The genre labels on the store page are shooter, simulator and indie, and the themes are action and sandbox. Only one of those words gets at what the game actually is. Sandbox is the honest one. This is a toy first and a fight second, and the fights exist to give the toy somewhere to go.
Cities Can Be Destroyed, You Cannot
Here is the central tension, and it is a good one. The player must protect human cities from hordes of attacking aliens while avoiding collateral damage. The protagonist is invulnerable. Entire cities are not.
Miss your otherworldly target and you can take out a skyscraper. Not as a scripted failure state. As a consequence of your own aim.
That inversion is the smartest thing in Megaton Rainfall. Most superhero games make you fragile and the world indestructible. This one makes you untouchable and the world made of paper. The threat never comes from the aliens. It comes from you.
Environments are fully destructible. Buildings and other items are procedurally generated and destructible, and you have several attacks that tear through surrounding buildings and enemy spaceships alike. The developer invented a new system for the realistic rendering of explosions, which he said allows for more realistic damage to buildings and other objects.
Flying from the Atlantic to the Milky Way
The scale is the other headline. Earth is represented in full scale. Not every city is on the map, but the planet is the planet.
You can fly at supersonic speed. You can reach mach 8 in five seconds. You can drop to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, climb outside the atmosphere, and keep going until you leave the Milky Way Galaxy. Other planets are reachable too.
That is a lot of empty space, and the game knows it. The open universe is the setting, and the first-person perspective is how you see it. Combat happens in the same frame as the travel. You spot a threat over a city, cross a continent to reach it, and try not to level the block you were defending.
The enemies give you a break here. Their weak spots are marked by red lights, which turns each engagement into a targeting problem rather than a brawl. Find the light. Hit the light. Do not hit the office tower behind it.
What the Headsets Add
Megaton Rainfall supports flat play and virtual reality play. The list of supported hardware is longer than most games of its size manage: PlayStation VR at launch, then SteamVR, the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive.
| Platform | Release date | VR support |
|---|---|---|
| PlayStation 4 | October 17, 2017 | PlayStation VR |
| Microsoft Windows | November 17, 2017 | SteamVR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive from August 9, 2018 |
| Nintendo Switch | August 9, 2018 | None |
| Xbox One | August 9, 2018 | None |
The two console ports that arrived last are the two with no VR path at all. That is the hardware story in one line. The mode is single player throughout, on every platform, so there is no co-op version of the fantasy and no shared city to wreck with a friend.
The Order of What Matters
Ranked by what actually changes the experience:
- Invulnerability plus destructible cities. This is the design idea. Everything else serves it.
- Full-scale Earth and free flight to other planets. The scale sells the power.
- VR support. The first-person view gains the most from a headset.
- Red-light weak spots on enemies. A clean, readable combat rule.
- The explosion rendering system. A technical claim from the developer that the destruction does look better for it.
Where the Power Runs Out
Nine years of distance has not made Megaton Rainfall’s central idea any less strange. It is a superhero game where the hero is the hazard, and it commits to that without hedging.
The weaknesses are structural, not cosmetic. Full-scale Earth means long stretches of nothing between the fights. Procedural buildings mean the cities you are defending are interchangeable, which drains the weight out of flattening one. You mourn a city in the abstract because you never learned its streets.
The aliens are the least interesting part of an alien invasion. Marked weak spots make them a puzzle to solve rather than a threat to fear. The protagonist cannot die from alien attacks, so the pressure in any encounter comes from somewhere other than survival.
The explosion system is the detail that dates the game in a good way. A small studio building its own damage rendering is the kind of decision that produces a game nobody else would have made.
7.0 of 10
Megaton Rainfall is a 7.0 out of 10. The published critical aggregate across six outlets lands at exactly that number.
What you get for the score is one genuinely original idea, executed with real technical ambition, wrapped in a game that runs out of things to do with it. The invulnerable hero and the fragile world are worth the price of entry on their own. The flight from the ocean floor to the edge of the galaxy is worth seeing once. The combat and the procedural cities are not worth seeing twice.
The score is fair. What matters more is that the design idea here is still unmatched nearly a decade on.
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