Megaton Rainfall

Megaton Rainfall
Information
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Developer	Pentadimensional Games
Publisher	Pentadimensional Games
Platform	PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift (Platform), SteamVR
Device	PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, Oculus Rift S, HTC Vive
Operating System	PlayStation 4, Windows
Type	Game
Genre	Action, Shooter
Input Device	DualShock 4, Oculus Touch, Gamepad
Game Mode	Single-player
Release Date	October 17, 2017 (PS4 and PS VR); August 9, 2018 (Rift and SteamVR)
Price	US$15.99
App Store	PlayStation Store, Steam, Oculus Store (now Meta Horizon Store)
Website	http://megatonrainfall.com/

See also: VR Apps, VR Games and PSVR Games

Megaton Rainfall is a first-person superhero action game developed and self-published by Pentadimensional Games, an independent studio in Madrid, Spain. The player is an invulnerable superbeing who flies around a full-sized Earth to stop an alien invasion, and missions are lost through civilian casualties rather than damage to the player. It launched on PlayStation 4 on 17 October 2017 with optional PlayStation VR support, came to Steam without VR in November 2017, and received Oculus Rift and SteamVR support on 9 August 2018.

The game was started in 2012 by programmer and designer Alfonso del Cerro, working alone in his spare time. The whole campaign can be played in the headset. UploadVR gave the PlayStation VR version 8/10 and called it "one of the best games to hit PSVR in a while" in terms of playability, while the PS4 version holds a Metascore of 72 on Metacritic.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Developer, studio origin, development history, PS VR delay and per-platform release dates, VR modes and controls, prices, sales figure, Intel award, current Steam and Meta store listings, Metacritic scores and quotes from the UploadVR, PSU, GameSpot, Push Square and Hardcore Gamer reviews. About review dates.

Gameplay

The player controls a superpowered being, called the Offspring in GameSpot's review, created by a mysterious cube to stop an alien invasion of Earth. Each mission starts with a marker showing where the aliens will strike; the player flies there, destroys the attackers and brings their harvested energy back to the cube, which turns it into new powers. The Earth is the size of the real planet and is populated with procedurally generated cities and terrain. The player can fly from the sea floor to the stratosphere and later travel to the Moon and walk on the surface of the Sun. Push Square noted that, in PlayStation VR, the player can fly from street level to another solar system without a loading screen.

The player cannot be hurt. Instead, the life bar measures the health of the city being defended, and both alien attacks and the player's own missed shots can collapse buildings and kill civilians. In the Rift launch post, del Cerro said the team gave the city a health bar to balance the player's power, adding that "letting the player kill thousands of civilians without consequences would give us bad karma". Leaderboards rank players by completion time and by human casualties, with fewer casualties ranking higher.

Enemies have weak points that destroy them in a single hit. Hardcore Gamer described red weak points that need an energy blast and green ones that need the dash attack, and listed enemy types such as squid-like creatures that tear buildings from the ground, robotic worms that burrow through skyscrapers and motherships that send out shockwaves. Some enemies, called morphers, disguise themselves as buildings. Later missions add small nuclear bombs that the player must carry away from the city before they detonate. Powers unlocked during the campaign include stopping time, a heat ray, telekinesis, a super dash and drilling underground; each has a cooldown. The campaign has nine main missions. After it, score attack and a Hard mode remain. The PC VR update added a Free Roam mode that unlocks when the main game is finished.

Virtual reality

On PS4 the VR mode is optional: the full game can be played on a television or in PlayStation VR, which requires the PlayStation Camera. When the PS VR version launched, the DualShock 4 was the only supported controller. Before launch, del Cerro stated that the game targets 60 frames per second in every mode (2D, VR, PS4 Pro and PS4 Pro with VR) and that PS4 Pro owners get 4K resolution (3840 x 2160).

The game has optional field-of-view restrictions for comfort. GameSpot found a "rather impressive amount of options to tweak the VR experience", but wrote that hectic stages still felt disorienting with most of the safety features turned on. UploadVR advised that strong simulator sickness sufferers would probably not find it a good choice.

UploadVR's reviewer, playing on a standard PS4, wrote that the complete game was intact in the headset but that it made "a few cuts" to run on PlayStation VR. He saw what he described as "a very generous example of foveated rendering", with the world fully rendered only in a large circle at the center of the view.

For the PC VR release on 9 August 2018, the frame rate was raised to a consistent 90 frames per second on Rift, and gesture controls were added so that players can fly and fire energy blasts by making superhero moves with Oculus Touch or the HTC Vive controllers. On Steam the VR mode arrived as a free update to the Windows version, playable with a gamepad or the new gesture controls. The developer also announced a free patch adding PlayStation Move support to the PS VR version, which UploadVR reported was due later in August 2018.

Development

Pentadimensional Games was formed in Madrid by Alfonso del Cerro after ten years of experience in the games industry. In an October 2015 post on the PlayStation Blog, del Cerro wrote that he had been working on the game for three years. He said that he had wanted a superhero game with total freedom of movement since seeing Richard Donner's Superman films as a child, and that he decided to make one himself. The same post announced the game for PS4 and PlayStation VR, and said that players had tried the VR version at GDC, EGX and MGW.

By August 2017 the team, which del Cerro said had been "only me in my free time back in 2012", had grown. Four artists made the enemy ships and city landmarks, and the music was redone by composer David Garcia, whose credits include Rime and Hellblade. Del Cerro wrote that the launch had been delayed several times to raise quality.

The game was shown at EGX in September 2017, where UploadVR played the non-VR version a week before the planned launch. It won Best Action Game in Intel's Level Up 2017 game developer contest.

Release

In August 2017 Pentadimensional set the PS4 and PS VR release for 26 September 2017. The date was then moved to 17 October 2017. The game launched on PS4 and PS VR on that date at US$15.99, as a timed exclusive. A Windows version followed on Steam on 17 November 2017, for monitors only.

On 22 July 2018, UploadVR reported that the game would come to Rift and Vive on 9 August, and that Pentadimensional said it had sold nearly 100,000 units in the nine months since launch. The Rift version launched on the Oculus Store on 9 August 2018, and the same day a free update added VR mode for Rift and HTC Vive to the Steam version. Versions for Nintendo Switch and Xbox One, without VR, were announced at the same time, with 4K support on Xbox One X.

Platform	Release date	VR	Notes
PlayStation 4 (PlayStation Store)	17 October 2017	Optional PlayStation VR	US$15.99 at launch; DualShock 4
Windows (Steam)	17 November 2017	None at launch	Monitor-only release
Oculus Rift (Oculus Store) and SteamVR	9 August 2018	Yes	Free VR update on Steam; gesture controls and Free Roam mode added
Nintendo Switch	9 August 2018	No	Announced July 2018
Xbox One	10 August 2018 (Xbox Store listing)	No	Announced in July 2018 for 5 September 2018; 4K on Xbox One X

As of October 2026, the Steam version is listed as "VR Supported" at US$15.99, and the Meta Horizon Store sells the Rift version at US$15.99 with Oculus Rift and Oculus Rift S listed as supported headsets.

Reception

On Metacritic, the PS4 version has a Metascore of 72 ("mixed or average") from 28 critic reviews. The non-VR Xbox One and Switch versions scored 64 and 63.

Publication	Platform	Score
Metacritic (aggregate)	PS4	72/100 (28 reviews)
PlayStation Universe	PS4 / PS VR	8.5/10
UploadVR	PS VR	8/10
GameSpot	PS4 / PS VR	70/100, as listed by Metacritic
Push Square	PS4 / PS VR	5/10

Jamie Feltham of UploadVR called it "a new type of superhero game" with "an elegant solution to the problem of giving the player too much power", and praised the steady stream of new enemy types and powers. He found the flight controls slippery, as if "you move like you're on flying ice skates", criticized the plain landscapes, low-detail street-level characters and soundtrack, and wrote that the game did not especially benefit from VR because of the gap between the flying avatar and a seated player holding a DualShock 4. He concluded that it "may not be the most immersive VR experience out there, but it's a heck of a lot of fun to play and often jaw-dropping to behold".

John-Paul Jones of PlayStation Universe wrote that the game offers "some of the finest 'VR moments' to date on PSVR" and called its DualShock 4 and head-tracking controls responsive and intuitive, while criticizing the low-detail textures and the lack of content after the 4-7 hour campaign. Justin Clark of GameSpot praised the sense of scale, speed and power, especially in VR, but criticized the sparse textures, the lack of a lock-on for fast targets and movement that could feel too slippery; his review ends: "To play Megaton Rainfall is to inhabit a flying superhero like nothing else in VR." Sammy Barker of Push Square called the optional PlayStation VR support "extremely impressive" and the sense of scale unprecedented, but found the combat slow and the story weak. In a review that did not focus on VR, Hardcore Gamer praised the destruction and enemy variety but noted pop-in and simple landscapes outside the cities.