Tethered Review

Good looking graphics and a decent core but repetitive and simple gameplay make for a boring game.

Reviewed by Griffin on 20th June 2022 on HTC Vive

Review

Tethered is a VR God sim RTS type game where you command these little creatures called Peeps to build farms and buildings necessary to survive on their little islands to defend against slugs.

To beat all the levels took me about 7 hours in total, however there is not really much of a story it is just 13 varying islands all with the same objective.

The game does not list WMR as supported however apart from needing controller bindings I played the whole thing on WMR without issue.

I played the game on the following Specs

Intel I7 7700k

GTX 1080 Ti

HP Reverb G2

Graphics & Presentation

Visually the game looks excellent the graphics are on the more simple side but work effectively for the game, and the style is cohesive and colourful and cute.

The only issue I had with the game was Anti-aliasing. I tried maxing out the ingame settings and the Steam VR settings but always seems to see a little aliasing.

Sound FX & Music

The music and sound effects are also quite good. The music is quite effective at setting the tone for the enemies encroaching or when you have survived a night. The Peep voices are also good but lack a little variety after 7 hours of play.

Gameplay & Immersion

Gameplay is really the biggest letdown for this game from almost every angle. The goal of each level is to collect enough faith and the level automatically ends. You can collect faith over time or speed it up by building churches but you cannot complete this objective in a single day-night cycle so you also need to build farms and barracks to build soldiers and that's it for all thirteen levels. You have the same goal and you tackle the problem the same way every time. The levels look different but never play any different at all.

The game gives a few different building types to build however most are locked behind as an upgrade for an existing building and the problem with that is that more often than not the level 1 building is always better, in fact, I beat every single level with the exact same strategy - Build 1 or 2 farms early then a barracks, then churches, then maybe one more barracks, if I had any spare resources then upgrade the resource collection. That's It I never used any of the other level 1 buildings or Level 2 buildings they simply aren't needed as the levels all have way too low goals and you will beat them long before you need them.

The other factor is that I don't even think this game could handle any more complexity as the world interaction, especially with peeps is so basic you only guide one peep at a time, and once engaged in combat cannot exit until complete. Your resource management makes it awkward to even see how many resources you have without first trying to build something.

One aspect I did like however was the ability to change scale at a whim it did nothing for gameplay but was neat to get all the way down to peep scale.

Controls

Controls by default didn't work for me however I did post a set of fixed community bindings for the Reverb the only thing I couldn't figure out was the time speed control mappings but they are not really needed.

Value & Replayability

If you are interested in this game I would recommend waiting for a sale rather than full price as given how repetitive the levels are I find there to be very little replay value.

Final Thoughts

While I think the concept and visuals of Tethered are good, I think the game struggles to make use of its gameplay mechanics in any deep or meaningful way paired with the lack of any story makes it hard to recommend.