Physics-based puzzler Gadgeteer has launched a free beta demo on Steam alongside a contest to see who can build the coolest chain reaction. As a VR puzzler, Gadgeteer stands out for allowing you to build your own Rube Goldberg-style reaction machines, positing direct physical interaction and creativity at the center of its approach to solving problems, toying around in its sandbox mode, and moving through its campaign.
While it has existed in a pre-alpha or alpha state for some time, managing to land on PC Gamer’s top anticipated VR games of 2019 list, it has only now emerged back into the limelight as it hurtles towards an (estimated) April release window.
In fact, you can play the free beta right now by downloading it on Steam, and enter to win the beta contest. Developer Metanaut is currently hosting a giveaway contest; the top three “chain reaction builders” will win a copy of the full version of Gadgeteer as well as a Klutz LEGO Chain Reactions Kit. Note that the contest entry window ends on March 26.
Image courtesy Metanaut
Metanaut has stated in an official press release that the launch build of Gadgeteer will come with the following features:
Build with freedom. No restrictions on where and how you build your incredible machines.
Create, edit, destroy with 3 powerful toolheads.
Chain together 50+ unique gadgets to build your crazy machines.
Painlessly undo your mistakes.
Two ways to play: Puzzle / Story and Sandbox.
Solve 60 puzzles using your creativity and wit.
Never step on a LEGO brick again!
While its story mode seems contained within narrative limits, the inclusion of a sandbox mode that promises shareable builds could give this title a much longer shelf life for players who burn through its initial 60 puzzles.
Games allowing for custom made levels can sometimes take on a life of their own, fueled by community creativity and sharing. This can be seen both outside of VR (with games like LittleBigPlanet) and even inside VR (with games like Rec Room). Gadgeteer’s sandbox mode has potential to hook a community of passionate players building custom maps for one another.
Expect more information on final details regarding Gadgeteer’s official release over the next several months.
If you’ve been honing your skills in a VR combat simulator but have been waiting to test your skills against swarms of the undead, your wait may soon be over with Undead Citadel, a zombie-filled action adventure title coming to SteamVR, Vive, Oculus and PSVR headsets at an unannounced time this year from developer Dark Curry.
The newly released combat trailer shows off swordplay that seems inspired by ‘The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’, but with a natural fluidity and physics-based approach that’s similar to what we’ve seen so far from games like Blade & Sorcery. Weapons collide with one another in a believable way, but what’s most impressive and satisfying here is how bodies break apart when struck.
The trailer shows how naturally Undead Citadel lets you rip bones and limbs off of your undead adversaries; most notably at the 20 second mark, where the player launches an explosive device at a group of skeletons. Pay attention to how each skeleton goes flying as their legs and arms disintegrate.
The level of graphical fidelity and detail shown in the Undead Citadel trailer stands out, showing off just how good a VR game can look even when forcing the system to calculate a hefty number of physics operations. The shadows and textures presented in the trailer look on-par with those of a high-budget ‘flatscreen’ game from the last three years, but Dark Curry has also clearly put work into animating its undead horde; zombies and skeletons move with intention, making them feel tangible and intimidating. Whether or not the fidelity shown in the trailer is representative of the final product is unclear, but it’s expected that the team would be targeting the usual ‘VR Ready’ hardware specs.
Image courtesy Dark Curry
All weapons shown off in the combat trailer are what you’d expect from any other medieval slasher, showcasing the standard arsenal of bows, blades, and blunt objects with which to enact mayhem. The addition of incendiary weapons like torches and bombs does tease creative possibilities for destroying enemies, as does the slow motion mechanic shown off at 0:45. Two-handed weapons like the mace at 0:40 also appear to have much more weight and handle more ‘correctly’ than two-handers implemented in similar games.
Dark Curry is promising the following features for Undead Citadel:
Innovative hybrid physics-based combat engine.
Smash or cut your enemies down with over 40+ different close combat weapons with real-life movements: swords, axes, war hammers, maces, shields, longswords or even your own fists.
Take the undead down with ranged weaponry like javelins, bow and arrows, or blow them up with powerful explosives.
Engage against dozens of different close combat, ranged or heavily armored enemy types.
Find and use slow motion, strength, invulnerability or freeze magic potions to mutate your power and obliterate the dead ones.
Full-size campaign: find your way through a huge apocalyptic fantasy environment, with 10+ levels to explore, including exterior and interior scenery.
Horde mode: Survive through endless armies of foes and reach the top leaderboards.
Customizable movement options, including locomotion(smooth movement) and teleport.
Undead Citadel due to release some time in 2019 on Steam (Vive, Rift, WMR), Oculus (Rift), and PlayStation (PSVR). Until then, you can follow the official website for more information.
ChromaGun VR is so transparent about being a parody of Valve’s Portal that its creator, Pixel Maniacs, went out of its way to highlight direct references to Portal’s iconic Aperture Science corporation in the original game’s console launch trailer. But since a Portal game doesn’t exist on PSVR, ChromaGun VR is a perfectly decent puzzler for time-hungry players. So if you’re looking to dive into another sprawling laboratory full of mazes and traps built by a predictably Machiavellian “science” corp, look no further.
In ChromaGun VR, you play as a volunteer test subject equipped with an experimental isotope-loaded paint cannon. Your job is to move Worker Droids around intricately-crafted test chambers until the way to each exit is cleared so you can move on to the next level. You accomplish this by painting panels and droids with the correct corresponding colors.
Colored panels magnetically attract Worker Droids of the same color, but not every panel or droid can be painted, making it vital to coordinate your color order strategically. It’s a deceptively simple gameplay loop that makes for a relaxing time, especially when paired with the game’s downtempo electronica soundtrack.
Your paint cannon can shoot primary colors (red, blue, yellow) which you can also mix together on surfaces to create secondary colors (orange, purple, green) where necessary. Trying to mix tertiary colors lands you with black, which no droids will connect to. As you’re not ever given white-out to clear accidental miscolorings, it’s easy to render a test chamber incompletable by mistake. Thus, there are a handful of moments when you’ll need to attempt a level over again until it clicks.
In addition to regular (benign) Worker Droids, there are spiked droids that will follow and attempt to kill you. At times, walking those killer Worker Droids to a floor trigger will be central to solving a puzzle; but they never really pose a threat unless you get yourself cornered or you stop moving. There are also electric floor traps which, if you’re like me, you can accidentally trip over if you find yourself carelessly moseying about.
ChromaGun VR is set into eight chapters, with about five levels per chapter. Each chapter has at least two or three major “aha!” moments, and ChromaGun VR is at its best when you’re zipping from one “aha!” moment to another. The test chamber lengths are quite generous across the board, albeit pandering at times between underwhelmingly short and needlessly long. The latter of which made the lack of a sprint toggle tauntingly apparent in my four-hour playthrough.
ChromaGun VR’s control scheme is comfortable and versatile, offering options between snap and smooth turning. You can play with either a DualShock 4 or PlayStation Aim Controller, but it’s clearly meant to work best with the Aim Controller. I played ChromaGun VR with one, and I thoroughly appreciated getting some use out of the peripheral in a context that wasn’t just shooting humans, demons, or aliens.
Overall, ChromaGun VR’s optimization felt smooth on the PSVR headset; I didn’t run into any game-breaking bugs or considerable setbacks to note. The graphical style, while minimalistic, provided the perfect amount of visual information in each frame to key me in on what to do or where to go next. At times, I would spawn into a level with my character model clipping into the ground, forcing me to be stuck in place until I restarted, but that issue was rare and inconsequential, and Pixel Maniacs could easily patch it out.
Because ChromaGun VR’s assets are virtually the same in each level, it’s difficult to look back and remember any specific part of the game, apart from a handful of nighttime chambers and the mid-point where you’re supposed to believe that the testing facility is burning down around you. After which, the second half of the game unfolds as if the writers forgot it ever happened. Suffice to say, ChromaGun VR’s writing and world feels hammy, if not particularly cheap.
On that note, the male voiced narrator/antagonist does a half GLaDOS, half Handsome Jack impression that’s so cringeworthy and forced that it fails to work even in a parody context. Luckily, the game progresses without much narrative context or voice acting at all, leaving a solid two thirds of ChromaGun VR’s campaign nice and quiet for you to go about solving its puzzles in peace.
Epic Games’ Fortnite is steadily moving from ‘just’ a massively popular battle royale game to a cultural touchstone for hundreds of millions of players. On Saturday, February 2nd, the title was host to an in-game performance by world-class EDM DJ Marshmello; attended by some 10 million concurrent users, the virtual concert offers a potent glimpse of what virtual events and virtual reality will mean for the future.
Lasting for just over 10 minutes, the concert simultaneously attracted over 10 million concurrent players worldwide (across simultaneous instanced performances of less than 100 players each) For comparison, Guinness World Records holds that the largest ever concert was attended by 4.2 million people. The event also boosted Marshmello & Bastille’s collaboration track, “Happier”, from #8 to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 list.
The production was quite a spectacle, boasting a virtual lighting system that could rival the complexity of top EDM stages from real events such as Insomniac Events’ Electric Daisy Carnival. And it was all surprisingly lifelike for something rendered in the Unreal Engine, led by a motion captured performance of Marshmello behind the turntable. You can watch it below.
While Fortnite players happily shot off their favorite emotes and dance moves from behind ‘flat’ gaming devices (like PC and Xbox), it’s transparent that similar virtual events could be deeply enhanced with the addition of VR.
Imagine feeling the electricity of Marshmello’s live performance flowing through your veins as you dance and fly around Pleasant Park. But instead of sitting behind a screen while holding a controller, you’re moving and shaking your entire body with friends from around the world. And when you look around, you’re treated with a rich visual landscape that fills your entire field of view. You aren’t looking through a window: you’re there. Such an experience is already possible with today’s VR technology.
Players in VR apps like VRChat are already hooking up body tracking accessories to bring their real-life dancing into VR in real-time.
VR events have not taken off in any meaningful way yet, but the potential for their popularity in the future is as ripe as the circumstance that allowed Epic Games to hold a concert in Fortnite in the first place: the gaming industry now fosters a massive audience of young people who are regular inhabitants of social virtual worlds. Epic Games has both proved and improved that notion through its consistently smart integration of pop culture trends, for which the company has now confirmed over 200 million Fortnite players (as of November 2018).
And as the VR headset adoption rate grows in the coming decade, notable developers will likely follow suit and provide experiences of high production value to players who don headsets and take the next step up in immersion when visiting their virtual world of choice.
Social VR platform AltspaceVR is already providing a clear example of what live celebrity events could look and feel like when experienced from a VR headset. Last month, on January 18th, Reggie Watts returned to perform live in AltspaceVR for his latest stand-up comedy show on the platform. In the past, he’s also performed alongside Rick & Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, including performances with his own sort of live music:
Though it doesn’t come anywhere remotely close to matching Fortnite’s sheer player count, AltspaceVR successfully offers a sense of presence that allows users to feel physical nearness with other avatars in a 3D environment—something that games played from 2D, including Fortnite, simply cannot accomplish.
But at what point will such live events proliferate across the broader VR platform?
Things are still extremely early for live virtual events in general. Even considering Fortnite’s popularity, the Marshmello concert was the first of its kind, and Epic Games currently hasn’t stated whether or not it’s planning another.
That said, it’s currently impossible to know what the landscape of virtual events will look like as it begins to take shape. Apart from hardware and imagination limits, digital creators are unrestricted by the mundane; thus, this space is rife with a wealth of unexplored possibilities. And if these preliminary events are any indicator, we’re in for a future that will allow us to connect with other humans in ways (and at scales) that our predecessors could have never imagined.
In the future, people of all ages could be one click away from any variety of live shows in existence, all from the comfort and safety of their own homes. The most isolated members of society will finally have an opportunity to build and maintain social bonds as if they were physically near to others, sharing the same skies and riding the same wavelengths with thousands of others in real-time.
Fortnite is a beloved title that has pushed its way into the hands of (notably younger) players at an unprecedented rate. Similarly beloved in the EDM universe, Marshmello is the perfect complement. No matter how long it takes for live virtual events and virtual reality to marinate, one thing is for sure: as long as popular brands and creators continue to promote the cultural icons of gaming and VR, players will demand more live experiences with which to share them.
The first chunk of February came with good news for those with Windows VR headsets. On February 1st, Microsoft released a preview version of Windows which comes with a slew of new features including the ability to run regular desktop apps in VR; it’s been possible to run apps from the Windows Store with Windows VR headsets but, until now, apps from outside the store—like Photoshop, Spotify, Chrome, and others—were excluded.
While WMR only previously supported apps purchased from the Windows Store, the new integration of Win32 desktop apps opens the way for users to access standard software inside the Windows Mixed Reality Portal, the default virtual ‘home’ environment for Windows VR headsets.
The umbrella category of ‘Win32 desktop apps’ includes software that most Windows 10 users are accustomed to running on their computers, including Photoshop, Spotify, Google Chrome, and Steam, among others. To get to your desktop apps inside of Win32, navigate to the Pins Panel, all apps, and then to the folder titled “Classic Apps (Beta)”.
Windows Central broke down this and a handful of other recently release features in the video below:
The new feature came as part of the Windows Insider Preview build 18329. As is the case with all Insider builds, Microsoft is warning users that there will be many bugs to squash before the new features are ready for prime time. In the meanwhile, they are encouraging testers to submit as much feedback as possible. Because it’s still a preview build, features that are being tested right now may not make it all the way to the public Windows release in their current form.
With Insider build 18329 and the upcoming 19H1 public update in April, WMR moves closer to strengthening its position as a productivity tool, something Microsoft has been angling toward since the launch of the Windows VR headsets at the end of 2017. However, headset resolutions have not caught up fast enough to make working inside of VR palatable for long periods of time. Though that might not be the case for long though as HP recently revealed a new headset that’s a huge jump in resolution over even the highest fidelity Windows VR headsets available today.
Along with native support for regular desktop apps inside of Windows , the new Windows Insider build also includes non-VR Windows improvements like a Top Apps bar in the Search Home, ADLaM and Osage font support, better dark mode support for Mail & Calendar, and the ability to set a default font.
Contractors VR, a fresh FPS that originally launched in early-access back in December, is quickly rising in popularity thanks to its superb graphical fidelity and fluid controls. If you’re sick of Onward and Pavlov, Contractors VR blends the two together into something that lets you enjoy the best of Onward’s tactical pliability and Pavlov’s snappy cadence in a cleaner, better curated package.
When you first start up Contractors, you might have a few questions about how it operates. That’s why I’ve picked out the best tips and tricks for brand new beginners to get a leg up in learning how to play.
Party Up
From the main menu, you can party with other players on your Steam friends list and matchmake together as a group. It beats the process that you’d normally go through in other VR FPS games to designate a server as a meetup point for you and your friends.
Play Around With The Customization System
Contractors divides its primary weapon categories between Assault Rifle, Carbine, SMG, Shotgun, and Sniper Rifle. You also get a slew of gadgets, melee weapons, and secondaries to choose from. Finally, you can switch between Light, Medium and Heavy armor which come with different loadout slots and benefits.
Note: Light armor lets you equip two primaries, while medium armor has the most gadget slots.
Use the Target Practice Courses in the Main Lobby
There are a series of training courses available to complete, which run you through each of the weapon types and score you based on performance. You can run through each of them as many times as you’d like, and it’s a great way to test out new weapons and loadouts. Outside of the training courses, you can also use the targets for practice with unlimited ammo and explore the warehouse as you please.
Don’t (Always) Leave Customization Points On The Table
If you have extra customization points after you’ve finished building your loadout, you might as well allocate them and experiment with the different outcomes. Fiddle with Contractors’ array of attachments, gadgets, and weapon types until you have 0 customization points left over in your loadout. You can create some truly interesting builds while doing so. It’s not always the best winning strategy, however, if you don’t use 100% of the gear that you put into your loadout. This is explained below.
Keep Track of Your Mobility and Armor Scores
Each item and armor type in Contractors VR carries a certain weight with it, decreasing mobility as you stack up your loadout. Pay attention to the Armor and Mobility bars on the bottom left section of the loadout menu as you choose your gear. Contrary to my previous tip, when you opt to leave customization points on the table, you take on less weight and maintain better mobility overall.
Grip Your Weapons From Multiple Points
If you’re using a rifle, you can choose whether to grip it from the magazine or from the forestock. Gripping from the magazine is better for from-the-hip shooting while gripping from the forestock offers pretty much what you’d expect in terms of balanced aiming and recoil control.
You Can Dual-Wield
Dual-wielding is a nice feature in VR FPS games because frankly, who doesn’t want to feel like a badass with two weapons? Unfortunately, while you can dual-wield, you really shouldn’t try to build your loadout for dual-wielding unless you go for high mobility. Dual uzis with light armor is a simple short-range loadout that you can use to overtake enemies in tight spaces.
You Can Reload Holstered & Off-Hand Weapons
Just slide your clip or magazine into the weapon while it’s holstered and it’ll fit snugly. This can be useful for reloading weapons while moving, or if you don’t want to stow your current weapon to switch to the unloaded one.
If you’re holding a gun in your off-hand, you can reload it. Ambidextrous reloading also works if you’re holding a gun by its forestock.
Physically Duck While Sprinting to Slide
The running slide is one of the cooler features of Contractors VR that we haven’t seen in other major multiplayer FPS titles. When sprinting, duck rapidly to initiate the slide. If you don’t duck fast enough, you will engage crouching mode instead of sliding. This is useful for quickly moving down slopes and into/out of cover.
Experiment With Firing Modes
Many of Contractors’ weapons come with two or three different firing modes. In order to get a good feel for a given weapon, try out each of its different firing modes. Semi-auto is always the most accurate while full-auto is always the best for close quarters combat.
Always Fortify the Control Point
The maps in Contractors are built to be wide open, with many different potential angles of attack in each heat zone where a control point might appear. The control points have big targets overhead in the form of HUD markers, and they’re completely fair game—even if you capture a point, you need to wait for it to transmit its valuable data contents.
Meanwhile, enemy players can hide in the shadows and get the jump on you if you don’t know where they’re coming from. Once you’ve captured a control point, you and your squadmates should always cover each and every entrance to the area surrounding it while it transmits data.
Turn off IK and Tactical Vest to Enhance Performance
Go into Settings -> Controls and switch “full-player body” to “hands only”. While in the settings menu, swing over to Presentation and turn off the visible tactical vest which can sometimes get in the way of your weapon and gear visibility. Turning both options off should make it easier for your system to render the game. This is especially handy if you use heavy armor which, when rendered, eats up a lot of visual space whenever you look down.
Run Over Data Orbs That Dead Players Drop
Both teammates and enemies will drop bright blue or orange orbs which contain useful data, the primary resource that both teams need to amass in order to win a Control match. Killing enemies and taking their data will not yield nearly as much data as capturing a control point, but it still contributes to your team’s score.
Figure Out Where the Ammo Caches Are
Each map has a handful of ammo caches where you can restock your munitions mid-round. These can be useful spots to consider when you’re deciding which lanes to tackle as you move towards the next control point.
Remember that other players drop their items when they die, so you don’t need to come back to an ammo cache if you run out of ammo. Grabbing your downed opponent’s gun and spare mags can save you an unnecessary trip away from the objective.
Contractors VR is in early-access release now on Steam. While it is still a new game with only a few maps to play so far, it is quite polished and a total blast to play. As a new player, hopefully these snappy tips give you insight that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Oculus Rift exclusive Echo VR is one of the more interesting VR games out there for its unique usage of hand presence. You can climb or grab practically any object and propel yourself around in zero gravity. I haven’t played too many other games that use zero-g to make themselves as immersive as Echo VR does, but it stands out because you aren’t just using a thumbstick to move around in the game’s world.
SinceEcho Arena(Echo VR’s original title) first came out, I always wanted to play a laser tag variant with the same zero-g VR mechanics present in the existing game. Apparently I wasn’t alone in wishing for one, and Echo Combat(a $9.99 expansion pack to Echo VR, sold on the Oculus Store) is the direct answer to that itch.
As a new player, how should you go about playing Echo Combat if your primary interest is competing and winning rounds? There are actually a few important mechanics to the game that you need to be aware of if you want to have any hope of annihilating other players.
Grab Cover
You can literally grab and/or climb anything in Echo’s environment, making it a viable tactic to grab a nearby surface and pull yourself behind it for cover. Echo Combat can be difficult if inertia gets the best of you when you find yourself out in the line of fire. Instead, always focus on staying near walls, floors, and other surfaces that you can use to quickly propel yourself around.
Wait For Your Teammates To Spawn
This is a big one. Respawns happen at various intervals and the last thing you want is your team to drip into the arena, where individual teammates can be picked off one-by-one. When you die and respawn, wait for at least one other teammate to respawn before you pop back onto the field and start shooting again. You can also use the acceleration of your other teammates to move onto the field faster if you launch yourself off of them at full velocity, or vice versa.
Fission Map Tips
Fission is a map that should feel a bit reminiscent of Overwatch, where one team is pushing a payload across the map while the other team is trying to defend the checkpoints.
As attackers:
When you’re first coming out of the spawn zone, don’t let yourself get pinned down by the opposite team. Rush them as soon as you can and get a foothold on the payload. While you’re moving up, huddle on the payload and use it for cover as you push towards each gate.
As defenders:
Try to draw individual enemy players away from the payload. The more time they waste, the better shot you have at winning the match. It’s your objective to keep them stalled, so have at least one teammate sniping from a remote position. Your team should be getting on the payload to push it backwards as well.
Combustion Map Tips
Combustion is a king of the hill map, with a central capture point that your team must stay near long enough to win. If you’re currently on the capture point, it provides cover. But it’s also exposed from all sides and enemies can maneuver their way around the nearby tunnels to flank you. If you’re attempting to take the capture point away from the opposite team, watch for blind spots around its central pillar where hiding enemies can isolate and kill you at short range.
Dyson Map Tips
Dyson is another king of the hill map, but significantly larger and more open. This is the only map in Echo Combat with multiple spawn points. You can opt in for instant spawns that are much further away from the capture point, or you can wait for a timer to countdown on the Back Pad, which puts you right next to the capture point. You should spawn at the Back Pad or the Tunnel whenever possible, because you might as well wait for your teammates to respawn anyway.
The capture point on this map is much more exposed than Combustion, but it’s defensible if you’re willing to huddle your team around the point and use the glass railing for thin cover. You might find yourself needing to move from cover to cover far more often, but you’ll want to keep all 360 degrees accounted for.
Equipment Tips
Weapons
Pulsar: Your standard automatic weapon, great for short-medium range battles and for providing suppressing fire at longer ranges. This is the one that’s easiest to learn and use.
Nova: A shotgun which overheats quickly and takes its time to cool down. Definitely use it for short range combat where you can quickly get in and land a headshot or a few solid body shots.
Comet: A laser-pointed sniper pistol which you can charge up for maximum damage. Use this one from long range.
Meteor: This is basically a handheld rocket launcher. Use it at short-medium range, but be careful to land your shots carefully because of the hefty cooldown timer on each.
Ordinance
Arc Mine: When you throw this, it automatically activates midair and generates a boundary. When that boundary is crossed, the Arc Mine ignites and stuns nearby enemies. While it’s obvious when an Arc Mine is ready to blow, as it shows a visible boundary, you should use the Arc Mine to create access denial areas inside of important chokeholds.
Stun Field: A projectile that stuns enemies that it touches. This is almost like a get out of jail free card if you find yourself up close with an enemy and your gun is overheated. It activates as soon as you throw it, and can be used to immobilize enemies just long enough for you to eliminate them. Many players like to use the Stun Field because of how simple, easy and effective it is to deploy.
Detonator: A remotely detonated grenade that you can throw and/or use like a mine if you’d like. If it takes damage, it ignites on its own. However, you can bounce it off of surfaces to get it behind an enemy position, and then remotely detonate it for maximum damage.
Instant Repair: A device that instantly repairs your chassis, as the name suggests.
Tac-Mods
Phase Shift: This makes you unable to take or dish out any damage, but you still have the full functionality of movement. Use this to get into or out of tight corners very quickly, or even to distract your enemies.
Repair Matrix: This is an area of effect heal, which at least one team member should always carry on them for large-scale healing across the entire team. If a teammate is outside of the device’s range, they will not receive healing from it.
Threat Scanner: This is also an essential tac-mod for at least one teammate to use at all times. It instantly scans the map for each enemy position, and then tags that position for your entire team. Anybody on your team can also see enemies through walls when they’ve been tagged.
Force Field: This allows you to set up a stationary shield that you can get behind and use as cover. Use this when you’d like to fortify a mid-air position with a long range weapon.
Echo Combat is a lovely zero-G FPS that you can grab from the Oculus Store for $9.99. If we left out any useful tips today, please let us know in the comments!
If you’re new to (or just about to enter)War Dust, the massive 32 vs 32 player FPS by Stand Out: VR Battle Royale developer Raptor Lab, you might be thrown off by some things that aren’t immediately obvious. That said, War Dust is very simple in its current early access state despite a few non-intuitive elements to basic gameplay, which aren’t entirely spelled out for you as a new player.
You could always ask the other players in your squad for advice, but I’ve gone ahead and listed out some of the essential things you should know how to do in War Dust before you can expect to start dominating the enemy team.
Choose the Right Class
Each of War Dust’s 4 unique classes are varied in such a way that you’ll have a pretty different experience with each one.
Assault – Comes with your standard assault rifle, handgun and grenade combo. Extremely versatile and probably best for new players to start with.
Engineer – Has a rocket launcher and a handgun. The rocket launcher automatically reloads over time, and the initial one you get has a built-in target lock feature which you can use to take down helicopters and tanks
Support – Gets a submachine gun, a medi-kit, a placeable barricade and a grenade. Take note that this is the only class that can heal other players.
Sniper – Gets a sniper rifle, a handgun, and a smoke grenade.
Customize Your Loadout
You can slowly unlock additional tools and toys for each class as you gain XP and level them up. However, you do start off with a single additional option for both the Assault and the Support classes that offer you a very small sense of variation but also help you out in a big way.
The first thing you should do before playing either class is select the Red Dot sight as a default sight option. It makes shooting infinitely easier at the very beginning of your experience in War Dust and should pave the way to help you gain XP much faster.
Beyond that, there really isn’t much customization happening at the very beginning of the game. As you progress, and as the game receives more updates, that should hopefully change.
Spawn on Your Squadmates
War Dust is the type of game where you will ultimately spend the most time running around with your squad across its super large maps, jumping from point to point and defending or manning vehicles against members of the other team.
Spawning on your squadmates isn’t only a great way to give them a little bit of XP, it’s also pivotal for sticking together with your squad. If you haven’t played this type of large-scale conquest game before, squads are your lifeline and you’ll find it much simpler to succeed if you each work together to hone your unique abilities.
You Can Dual Wield
This isn’t so much a tip, as it is something you might want to be aware of for tight situations. Off the bat, you’ll want to aim down your sights as often as possible to conserve ammo and shoot more accurately. However, there might come a time when you’re surrounded by enemies in a very short range and you need to use as much firepower as you possibly can.
Luckily, recoil is practically non-existent in this current iteration of War Dust and you can fire weapons however you’d like to. From the hip, down the sights, or otherwise. Unless you’re playing Support (which only gets the SMG- no handgun), you can use both your primary and your handgun at the same time to quickly neutralize anybody who gets too close to your face before you have a chance to aim.
Climb Basically Everything
On the Oculus Rift, you can use your bottom and top facing buttons (A+B and Y+X) to “grip” an object and pull yourself up onto it. Using this function, you’re able to climb practically anything you’d be able to logically climb in real life. You can vault through windows, leap over barricades, even climb onto the back of somebody’s ATV and hold onto their shoulders while they ride.
Instead of pressing a button to hop onto a helicopter as a passenger, you will literally hoist yourself up into the interior and hold onto the grips of the miniguns. You can also use this function to climb ladders and climb up onto tanks as a passenger. I’ve even made a quick escape through a window using War Dust’s climb function, which felt pretty great in practice.
Practice Piloting Often
War Dust doesn’t really give you much time and space to learn its mechanics. You’re immediately thrust into battle, with the heat of battle set directly ahead of you. Luckily, the game gives you plenty of chances to fail, as spawn points and vehicles are plentiful across each map.
What you will benefit from spending a lot of time doing is trying and failing at driving and piloting vehicles in War Dust. I didn’t immediately understand it when I first picked it up, and I used the grip buttons too often while fiddling with the controls despite them ejecting me from my vehicle each time. That said, do not use the grip buttons once you’re in the driver’s (or pilot’s seat) unless you’re looking to exit your vehicle.
Everything important is controlled with the left and right triggers, and you actually will maneuver the vehicle around by moving your headset and controllers around. For example, you turn the helicopter around with your controllers like you’re pulling on a rudder.
Use Smooth Turning
I personally find it easier to do well in FPS games with smooth turning enabled, and this is because it gives me a more consistent spatial sense. Snap turning makes aiming jittery if you’re going for precision and you don’t always want to turn around in your physical space. That said, ignore this one if smooth turning makes you motion sick.
Reloading Handguns vs. Primary Weapons
Your handgun is probably the easiest weapon to reload in War Dust. This is because it (seems to) drop the clip on its own when it’s empty, and slide back on its own when you enter a new clip, making it simple and quick to reload.
On the other hand, every primary weapon except for the Engineer’s missile launcher might seem difficult to reload if you’re new to VR FPS games. When you’re using either an assault rifle or submachine gun, you will want to grip the magazine to remove it from its locked position. You will then need to insert a new magazine and pull the slider back on the weapon. For the sniper’s beginning rifle, the AWP, you will need to pull the bolt all the way back each time you fire.
War Dust is a grand-scale, 64 player VR FPS that you can now find in Early Access on Steam for $24.99. It’s currently quite underdeveloped in execution, but the core loop is fun if you’re willing to overlook polish. If you’re interested in seeing our livestream of War Dust gameplay, check it out here.
In Scraper: First Strike you take on the role of mute protagonist Casey Maxwell, a hoverpod pilot who is relentlessly called upon to serve the plot for no other reason than, “You’re our only hope!” As such, you’re thrown from objective to objective without much of a motivation other than being told to do so. The narrative context boils down to these robots are bad, and we’re good, so we’re here to stop them. And you never get secondhand insight into Maxwell’s perspective other than him being a ragdoll for the plot. The few NPC characters you meet only appear to serve binary roles that motion you to move from one rote task to another with no additional interactivity, which would be fine if they were dynamic and appeared frequently enough to make you care about them. But they aren’t and they don’t. As a result, not once do you truly feel like the world comes together as a believable place, which is even more noticeable in VR.
With a beginning that directly drops you into the center of its narrative, both literally (you land on a dropship) and conceptually, it’s beyond difficult to identify with the world or its conflicts. Even past the cliffhanger ending, the story simply does not pick up in time for its beats to impart anything resembling an emotional or intellectual impact. Its heroes are heroes for no other reason than the plot commands it, and its villains are equally trite. Meanwhile it constantly refers back to, and doggedly expects you to have read through Scraper: The Rise of Cifer, the full-length prequel novel written by Ryder Wyndham; where virtually all of the game’s world-building has been swept into.
And while Scraper does offer a codex and conveniently scattered bits of lore at different terminals, they do not add up to more than pieces of forgettable flavor text where the vast majority of players will have no tangible narrative foundation to build upon.
Unfortunately, Scraper’s lack of a compelling story is not eased nor forgiven by its presentation.
You play the game from inside of your hoverpod, which is essentially a moving chair with a window that everything important happens outside of. And instead of feeling like you’re maneuvering a vehicle, handling the hoverpod feels far more like you’re playing a regular 2D game with the added benefit of being able to swivel your head around and see outside.
You use your thumbsticks to move around and while the comfort options are robust, Scraper can’t seem to decide whether you need to be in VR or not. Unlike a game which does vehicle controls much more decisively — such as Vox Machinae with its fully physicalized steering and acceleration toggles — Scraper posits a glaring identity issue that gets directly in the way of its own design.
At best, the auxiliary control functions within the hoverpod’s cockpit allow you to access user-interface implements like inventory menus and tooltips that you can grab and move around — on the rare occasions you need to consult them. At worst, finicky button placements for basic hoverpod actions (like healing your shields and activating your special abilities) actively frustrate otherwise frantic combat encounters.
And while it is certainly cool that you can equip different weapons on your pod’s left and right robotic arms and wield them remotely with your hands, they feel clunky — perhaps even laughably so — in practice. That said, because of their existence, you at least have some meaningful interaction with the immediate gameplay environment (happening outside of the cockpit), to remind you that moving Scraper’s campaign forward is determinant on using the full reach of your arms.
There’s plenty of shooting, looting and crafting to be done in Scraper: First Strike. You can craft up to about seven or eight different weapons to equip freely onto your robot arms, each with their own flavors of gunplay. You can only carry six at a given time, but you can carry as many permutations of the same weapon as you’d like; any extra weapons you craft can be stored in your stash. On the topic of weapons: Scraper: First Strike has everything from a shotgun to a flamethrower to a bog-standard missile launcher, but nothing pops out as original or unique. To facilitate the weapon crafting loop, you can collect schematics and components from enemies, terminals and boxes found throughout each level.
Once again though, you never directly act these things out in a way that’d be unfeasible with a keyboard or a gamepad in a 2D game. You drive over items and they’re sucked into an invisible inventory. You double-tap the lower face button on your left or right controller to reload your respective weapon. When you craft, all you’re doing is selecting options from a menu.
The charm of playing with hands in VR is thoroughly undermined when you’re given things to do but then you’re forced to do them with simple button presses while locked into a seated position. And despite its best efforts or possibly due to laziness, Scraper: First Strike frequently acts like it’s forgotten you have virtual hands. There’s actually a sequence in the game where you equip a large drill that negates the use of your weapons and activates on a trigger tap, almost entirely removing your physical body from gameplay interactions for a solid 15-20 minutes.
Meanwhile, the shooting and strafing and melee mechanics feel lackluster from a pure shooter perspective. Don’t get me wrong — they’re fun, but they’re fun in a basic (‘rock-paper-scissors’) sense, which is more excusable if you approach the game as an RPG rather than a shooter. But then the problem here is that Scraper simply is not an RPG at all. It has the mechanical underpinnings of an RPG, but those are never realized. Instead, it has loose RPG elements in the form of hoverpod mods that offer better stats.
Even so, that modding system is removed from the direct progression of the campaign. It’s easy to call player progression in Scraper: First Strike inconsequential or even non-existent because it only happens after you’ve tripped over it or sought it out — it lives entirely outside of the shooting and looting and crafting loop that makes Scraper more than a walking simulator.
And because the game’s paper-thin RPG-style progression happens so far off to the side (you must return to the Skydeck to purchase mods, then backtrack through a level to an engineering station to equip them to your hoverpod), Scraper lacks a consistent sense of power gain that responds to the player progressing through its campaign.
Adding to that point, if you’re expecting a long, narrative-focused game to chip through over the holidays, Scraper: First Strike won’t actually give you more content than SUPERHOT or Robo Recall. Each of its six total levels offer no more than two or three exercises in moving from place to place, pressing a button to complete a simple action, and trying not to die between point A and point B. And without a compelling story to guide Maxwell through these sequences, you end up feeling like you’re pressing buttons for no reason other than to kill time. The randomized combat encounters which make up the meat of Scraper’s gameplay are self-gratuitous, leaning heavily on wave after wave of swarming bullet sponge enemies with minimal recourse.
These combat encounters might even be interesting if enemy AI weren’t always doing one of either two things: moving directly at you while attacking, or standing in one place while attacking an objective you’re supposed to defend. Unfortunately, they are too repetitive to maintain interest even as the game introduces tougher enemies in its later levels.
Often you can find yourself dying because you walked in the wrong direction and/or were unfortunate enough to run into the wrong batch of random encounters — an event which can most annoyingly occur while en route to upgrade your mods.
This is partially because you can’t actually heal your hoverpod’s hull without returning to a separate, remotely placed repair station. During combat, you can only perform a quick recharge of your shields, an action that sets off an inconveniently lengthy reset timer during which you’re at the mercy of any enemies that manage to cluster around you.
At first, these punishing design ethics come across as a challenge to manage your resources. But you never quite catch up with the sharp spikes in difficulty to where Scraper: First Strike feels fair or balanced. And because your cockpit’s most critical functions are arranged in a way that distract from Scraper’s thumbstick-centric strafing-n-shooting, you end up fumbling to death more often than there’s an actual challenge to overcome.
Adding salt to the wound, autosaves are few and far between, and the game frequently blocks you from manually saving during various sequences. If it wasn’t already suspect that Scraper: First Strike is using difficulty spikes to pad its length, each of its three boss battles come equipped with unavoidable attacks and unreasonably high health bars, dragging you beyond simply wanting them to be over with and leaving you with only twinges of satisfaction when you finally defeat them through what feels like sheer luck. Take into account that three and a half hours of my seven hour playthrough on Medium difficulty consisted of dying and reloading because of these issues.
Scraper: First Strike probably isn’t the first foray into VR that Labrodex Studios hoped it would be. It doesn’t take itself anywhere seriously enough to offer mechanical depth or robustness of content, yet it takes itself far too seriously to let you relax and have fun in its world. And it’s no small fact that it desperately lacks the soul and personality of games like Borderlands or Deus Ex that it initially appears to tease inspiration from.
What I did truly enjoy about Scraper: First Strike was the beautifully orchestrated soundtrack by Winifred Phillips. Each piece is very well done but often carries a level of grandiosity that feels incompatible with the pacing and scale of events actually happening inside the game. The main menu is the only place where Scraper’s soundtrack actually matches what you see on the screen; ambient and mysterious with a sci-fi tinge reminiscent of Mass Effect’s primary Citadel hub.
At the end of the day, however, this isn’t to say that Labrodex should throw in the towel. Scraper is intended to be episodic, with progress carrying over from iteration to iteration. There are multiple assets that exist in Scraper: First Strike that are independently great. For example, the graphical fidelity and PC optimization have a AAA tightness to them which is still uncommon for many new VR releases, even if the underlying art direction leaves something to be desired. And if nothing else, I feel like at least the atmospheric soundtrack stands out — even when it fails to add anything to gameplay. If Labrodex takes this criticism seriously and uses it to their benefit, they can still steer the IP into a territory where players are given a reason to participate.
Final Score:4/10 – Mediocre
Scraper: First Strike is a game that initially promises so much, yet never makes good on any of its promises. It offers the most basic mechanical trappings of what could later become a linear action RPG, yet never uses any of its design foundation for means greater than rote tasks and wave shooter combat. And while it continuously implies its intentions to segue into a larger narrative, it never comes close to giving you a reason to care.
Scraper: First Strike is now available on Steam for $29.99 with support for Rift, Vive, and Windows VR. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Pavlov VRcontinues to provide the quintessential FPS experience for players who want frantic, classic game types such as Team Deathmatch and Search & Destroy in a modern-day military setting. While not as hair-raisingly intense or competitive as its distant cousin — Onward, which it is so often compared to — it does constitute a fluid, fun FPS for both friends and competitors alike.
Hearkening back to the mechanically creative attitude of Garry’s Mod, Pavlov VR also stands out for its open support of user-made maps and mods; some of which have introduced features such as day/night cycles and entirely new game modes. Furthermore, if you do decide to check out Pavlov VR for its asking price of $9.99 on Steam, then the following is a list of mods that you absolutely should not miss out on.
A classic map from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dust 2 fits perfectly into Pavlov VR’s gameplay pacing — which is not conceptually different from Counter-Strike’s pacing at all. This isn’t just a fantastic port, it’s also a fantastic first map for new players to learn Pavlov’s mechanics in. As in the original Dust 2 map, this Pavlov VR iteration is set up with the game’s bomb-defusing Search & Destroy mode in mind.
Another instantly recognizable classic from Counter-Strike, the Office HQ is a decently large map that’s versatile and perfect for any of Pavlov’s game modes. Its contrast of open horizontal space cut off by long hallways that are compromised by weaving office boardrooms leave plenty of opportunity for different kinds of play. This makes it a heavily balanced map for competitive players to round off in.
Ported in as a classic map from Rare’s GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64, Facility is a series of tightly woven corridors and shooting galleries that make for intense door-to-door skirmishes. It’s bananas to get a full room of people into this map for a free-for-all Deathmatch, since the bullets don’t really stop flying until the match is over. A word of warning: spend very little time in the central hallway or on the stairs. As other players spawn in small rooms adjacent to those primary thoroughfares, it’s easy to get caught in crossfire from all directions if you’re out in the open for too long.
Ziba Tower is another ported map, this time from Battlefield 3. Unlike many other maps in Pavlov VR, the Ziba Tower penthouse feels exceptionally clean with attention paid to small aesthetic details. It even has multiple swimming pools for you to dip your feet into. In contrast to Facility, Ziba Tower is much more spacious and can feel quite lonely without a full lobby of players or AI bots. Granted, I particularly enjoy Ziba Tower’s use of vertical space — making for really interesting Team Deathmatch sessions rife with tactical firefights between vantage points.
The Practice Range is perfect for new players who want to try out all of Pavlov VR’s weapons without feeling the pressure of enemies firing back. Even as an experienced player, this map offers a slew of versatile physics-based target practice toys that you can play with to improve your aim. I enjoy challenging myself to hit vases across the range down the ironsight of an M1911, but that’s certainly not all there is to do. There are a number of exercises on the Practice Range that are designed to test your accuracy and skill with each of Pavlov VR’s weapons, including breaching rooms and moving targets. All of them are worth doing at least once.
For those who remember spending countless nights in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s high-octane free-for-all matchmaking lobbies, Rust sets itself apart as one of the most beloved close-quarters skirmish maps in recent gaming history. In Pavlov VR, it’s sort of striking to see Rust presented to me as a virtual place that I feel I have now visited, but it doesn’t function any worse than it did in Modern Warfare 2. In fact, VR presence makes Rust come to life in a special way, if not solely because Pavlov VR’s gameplay mechanics fit naturally on top of its meticulously-crafted chutes and sandy rampways. Expect frantic and charged combat from all sides as players chase one another up, down, and around corners.
A perfect re-creation of Dunder Mifflin’s office space, titular The Office (Dunder Mifflin) is another skirmish-focused map that puts players into a tight proximity with one another. Granted, most of your time will be spent ducking behind desks and chairs or inside of Michael Scott’s personal office. Some of the boardroom spaces as well as the staircase offer more breathing room than the primary office space, but shotguns and heavy pistols reign supreme here. While the few main office areas are connected by hallways, those hallways can be difficult to defend and are quickly swallowed in gunfire during Search & Destroy mode. Meanwhile, tight doorways can provide enough cover for yourself or other players to hide in wait, which can still easily backfire either way if you aren’t paying attention.
TTT is a game mode that was already popular in Garry’s Mod, but has taken on new life inside of Pavlov VR. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a play on the classic murder mystery whodunnit, where up to three players are traitors and up to seven players are civilians — including one sheriff. Either the civilians outlive the timer (or eradicate the traitors), or the traitors murder the civilians before the timer runs out. While regular civilians can’t tell who’s a traitor and who’s a fellow civilian, the sheriff is immediately visible to every player at the start of the game. Traitors are visible to other traitors, but are outmatched from the very beginning — rewarding a sleuthier approach to picking off civilians rather than take them on full-stop. Unless the sheriff gathers the bulk of the civilian players into one spot early, they are usually the first player to be picked off, making sheriff the most gruelling position to play as.
Pavlov VR’s iteration of TTT comes in a few different flavored maps, including Manor and Asylum, but many players agree that it has been done best with Village. Based on Kakariko Village from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, this version of TTT comes with plenty of nooks and crannies for traitors to hide out in, as well as a testing machine that allows players to determine who’s a civilian and who’s a traitor.
While not introducing any new gameplay, Hyrule Market is where I’ve had the absolute most fun playing Team Deathmatch and Deathmatch modes in Pavlov VR thus far. It’s a complete reimagining of the Hyrule Market from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, including a perfectly simulated day/night cycle that adds a level of dynamic ambiance unseen in other maps. The vast majority of the combat takes place across the town centre, but there are surprises around every nook and cranny. For example, as you enter different shops and buildings, their correct OST plays, which is uniquely delightful and sure to evoke nostalgia on its own. But the cherry on top is the fully-explorable Temple of Time, which you can enter at your own peril.
Jailbreak’s slower-paced cops and robbers affair stacks (up to) three guards against up to seven prisoners. The job of the prisoners is to pool resources together so they can craft the tools necessary to escape from the prison. Meanwhile, the guards are meant to stop them from doing precisely that. But when a prisoner dies, they respawn inside of their prison cell with none of their items, meaning that it’s in a prisoner’s best interest to avoid incurring the wrath of the guards at all.
There are very few mechanical rules in place to hold Jailbreak up — a double edged sword, allowing guards to abuse their power and randomly shoot prisoners for looking at them the wrong way. Instead, the modders opted to leave Jailbreak’s abstract rules listed on the walls of the prison. To follow those rules and decide when/how to enact them, any given guard requires a combination of reading comprehension, snap problem-solving and empathy. As such, Jailbreak is best seen as a game mode where the player engages real humans behaving in eerily appropriate ways when put into certain positions. Guards act flippantly with their power while prisoners scurry around trying to avoid dying and therefore losing their items.
Violence isn’t always a winning strategy as a prisoner, but killing a guard and taking their key makes the process of moving between locked doors far easier. And the moment at the turning point when you finally kill a guard who’s been excessively aggressive to you and the other prisoners is a satisfying moment indeed. As is the moment when you lead your fellow prisoners to an escape route only to realize that one or two prisoners are left stranded, so then the five of you shoot your way back into the prison to execute a final stand.
The thrill of playing as a prisoner in Jailbreak comes from each risk assessment you have to make before taking the next necessary step forward, each step getting more important than the last, driving a feeling of tension that leads to the cathartic moment of escape. As a guard, however, Jailbreak can be more or less boring depending on what kind of person you’re willing to act as.
This is why ultimately, Jailbreak exceeds at creatively using Pavlov VR both to place human behavior under a microlens and provide a compelling gameplay reason for true multiplayer role playing in VR. It’s also where I’ve had the most fun playing Pavlov. Well done!
Note: Jailbreak Mod also has a sequel, Jailbreak Mod 2, which takes place on a different map and contains slightly advanced rules. Some players believe this second iteration is a big step backwards from the original, citing unintuitive map layout and issues with a new crafting menu interfering with the Oculus Rift control scheme.
It’s a massive joy to play Pavlov VR; not only for its punchy VR gunplay, but also because of the modding community that continues to add new maps and content for repeat players to consume and explore. That said, if there are any maps or mods you feel deserved to be on this list, then let us know!
