Gadgeteer Rapid Review

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Fast Facts

Title: Gadgeteer
Developer: Metanaut
Publisher: Metanaut
Website: https://www.gadgeteergame.com
Genre: Educational, Puzzle, Simulation
Platform: Oculus Quest
Audience: PEGI 3
Release Date: 24/10/2019
Price: £10.99 – This title was purchased by the reviewer.

The room is your oyster

Gadgeteer is a physics-based VR game where your main objective is to get a ball from point A to point B in solving a puzzle and triggering the goal box. In the game, you can choose between Puzzle Mode or Sandbox Mode engineering your way through your Rube Goldberg-esque room.

In your hand is your toolbox of rails, ramps, blocks, and more in which you will need to place around the room in a way that will cause a chain reaction leading to the endpoint. The journey in which you take to get to the end is completely up to you and it’s doubtful that no two people will solve the puzzle the same way.

In puzzle mode, you will move along sixty puzzles slowly incorporating more items to your repertoire in which you can use to get to the end. The progression in the puzzle aspect of the game is nice in how it slowly adds new items with complexity as well as challenges along the way as you incorporate more motion into each area.

In Gadgeteer, you literally move around a huge room placing your blocks and rails along the way, one puzzle to the next. In many ways the room you are placing your pieces in becomes one giant engineered puzzle, reminiscent of the game Mouse Trap.

Clean up your toys

Gadgeteer gives you a toolkit on your left hand which lets you employ a building tool for creating, a duplicator wand, for quickly copying pieces, and a suction wand to clean up your puzzle or fix unwanted areas of your machine. It wasn’t long before I was quickly accessing my pieces, cloning them, or cleaning them up and the quick button presses and realistic reach out and grab mechanic in the VR space was a joy to play with. 

There’s also a unique freeze mechanic which can be applied to various pieces and ‘stick’ them in the air frozen in time and space. While this does take out some of the physics aspects of the game, it does allow for creative placement of pieces while you build.

A million ideas to build

Gadgeteer is clearly a front runner for creative game spaces in VR on the Oculus Quest. The sandbox room you can build in is creatively laid out, without being restrictive. You can move around the space without issue and place pieces where you see fit. One area that I really liked was fairly early on and consisted of a bookshelf section where placing pieces around the books, or interacting with pieces up a wall was fun to position and see work together.

The game won me over as a unique, and chill, experience on the Oculus Quest. Experiences like Gadgeteer become more fun to play with the longer you spend with it. Once you figure out the world of Gadgeteer there really are endless possibilities within the objects within the game. Seeing how pieces interact with each other and being able to quickly test a creation and reset it was fun. If you are looking for a fun puzzle game where you can create your way, then look no further than the physics-based puzzler, Gadgeteer.

Rapid Reviews Rating

You can purchase Gadgeteer from the Oculus Store on the following link, https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2567395559960697/?locale=en_GB