Archiact launched its dynamic first-person shooter Evasion several months ago for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. Having released a couple of updates since then, today the studio has announced the rollout of its biggest content update yet, adding a more competitive edge to the multiplayer experience.
Called the ‘Killstreak Update’, what Archiact has done is introduce an arcade-style scoring system for players, as well as a leaderboard for every mission and difficulty Evasion has to offer. As the campaign allows up to four players to cooperatively complete every mission, with the new additions they can now compete to see who’s the best, with points awarded for Base Kills, Lash Kills, Surge Kills, Assists and more.
And to celebrate the update release, Archiact will be holding a challenge event this weekend. So from 4pm PT on Friday 15th February until 6pm PT on Sunday 17th February, you will be able to fight side by side with the developers to challenge their skills. Top-scoring players form each platform will then be awarded prizes.
A frantic sci-fi shooter that can be played in either single-player or co-op multiplayer modes. Evasion allows gives you the option to choose from four character classes (Striker, Surgeon, Engineer and Warden) each having their own unique strengths, weapons and abilities, which you’re then able to customise as they level-up.
Featuring an action-packed story campaign as well as a Survival Mode, the studio paid particular attention to the locomotion aspects of the title. Movement plays a very important role in any FPS, so Archiact has been keen to ensure players are as comfortable as possible whilst in VR. There’s a big range of movement customisation options available to suit every need. Whether that’s teleportation, smooth locomotion, snap turning or anything in between. Additionally, the PlayStation VR version also comes with support for the PlayStation Aim controller, although this does mean you can’t dual wield.
Evasion was one of VRFocus’ favourite VR shooters of 2018, making it onto our ‘Best HTC Vive Games of 2018‘ list. VRFocuswill continue its coverage of Archiact and Evasion, reporting back with any further updates.
VR bullet hell shooter Evasion is getting a new update today. It adds a competitive twist to the co-op gameplay.
The Killstreak Update, as it’s called, goes live today at 10am PT on Rift, Vive and PSVR. Chief among the additions is a new scoring system. Every level in the game now features leaderboards to compete in, each of which is tuned to different difficulty modes. It’ll put your skills to the limit as you aim to shoot down enemies as quickly as possible while avoiding an incoming barrage of bullets.
Check it out in action below. It’s basically ‘Evasion: Now With Numbers!’
To celebrate the launch, developer Archiact is hosting a Weekend Challenge event. From 4pm PT February to 6pm February 17th you’ll be able to shoot your way to the top. Unspecified prizes (the best kind) will be available for the winners.
We’re quite fond of Evasion here at UploadVR. It’s a frantic shooter that’s a lot of fun to dive into with friends. “There isn’t as much progression across the game in terms of class abilities and leveling up as I’d have liked, but the core gameplay, boss fights, and level design are so strong I didn’t mind as much,” we said in our review. “Playing solo is a bit rough, so with a friend by your side Evasion not only becomes one of VR’s best shooters, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any other VR game that’s as purely fun on a moment-to-moment basis.”
2018 has almost come to an end which means VRFocus is rounding up the best videogames for each headset. Now it comes to the turn of HTC Vive. Probably the one head-mounted display ((HMD) with the fewest exclusives, there’s still no shortfall of great content on the device. Looking back over the last 12 months, it’s time for VRFocus to name its favourite HTC Vive experiences.
The Best HTC Vive Games of 2018
Transpose – Secret Location
A truly mind-bending puzzle title from Blasters of the Universecreator Secret Location, Transposehas over 30 levels where you have to bend time and clone your body, in a bid to solve the challenges. Alongside the time loops, Transpose allows players to rotate the environment around them to walk on walls and ceilings, experiencing perspective shifts and multifaceted puzzles in ways only possible in VR. One for the more advanced VR player, nevertheless a highly thought-provoking experience.
Arca’s Path – Dream Reality Interactive
The debut title from Dream Reality Interactive, Arca’s Path VRtakes the gameplay style of classics like Marble Madness and updates it for VR headsets. Featuring a dark storyline where you play a girl tricked by an evil witch, you’ve been turned into a ball and must navigate levels in a bid to free yourself and return home. Great for VR beginners as the controls are gaze based.
In Death – Solfar Studios
It featured in VRFocus’ Oculus Rift list and we liked it that much that Solfar Studios’ In Deathdeserved a place here with HTC Vive. With procedurally generated levels, no checkpoints or saving of any kind, the gameplay is as brutal as it is difficult. With just a bow by your side – until you unlock the crossbow – you need to become proficient at dispatching enemies at close and long range. Fail and you return to the start, a little wiser and a little tougher. Just remember that so are the angels and demons you need to kill.
Blind – Tiny Bull Studios
While the title may look a bit sinister Blindis simply a puzzle experience with one unique feature, you can’t see unless you make a sound, using an echolocation system to see the world around you. This can be achieved via a walking cane or grabbing anything to hand and throwing it. Clocking in at around fours hours of gameplay Blind doesn’t feel too short, and puzzle fans should like the way most of the challenges are designed.
Tin Hearts – Rogue Sun
Currently, in Early Access, Tin Hearts is a wonderfully quaint VR puzzle experience from indie studio Rogue Sun. Tin Heartsrequires you to guide squads of little tin soldiers through a magical toy filled world, in a similar vein to Lemmings. This time though you need to use the toys to guide the little guys in the right direction. It may still be in development but Tin Hearts is too adorable to not recommend.
Island 359 – CloudGate Studio
When it comes to massive adventures for HTC Vive, most may instantly veer towards Bethesda’s Fallout 4 VRwhich is exclusive to the headset. It may be a good videogame but it’s so 2017, and VRFocus isn’t interested in last year. Instead, how about going for CloudGate Studio’s rather epic Island 359. Whether you want to hunt, or just try to survive, Island 359 has something for every dinosaur fan – apart from a visitor centre, just remember there are no fences and they bite back.
Beat Saber – Beat Games
It doesn’t matter which headset you play Beat Saber on you’re more than likely going to enjoy it. It’s just so frustratingly addictive, bopping and swinging your arms around to catchy tunes, slicing away at blocks. Not only can 30 to 60 minutes pass without thinking about it, but you also get a reasonable workout to burn those calories, excellent for when you fancy another Christmas snack.
Transference – Ubisoft Montréal and Spectrevision
Love to be scared witless? Either by things jumping out from the shadows or by creatures you can’t see then VR horror is the way to go. Ubisoft Montréal and Spectrevision collaborated on terrifying psychological thriller Transference that blurs the lines between live-action movies and videogame dynamics. With a multi-branching narrative focused on a scientist and his family experiments, this is one title not for the faint of heart.
Sprint Vector – Survios
If you want a VR title that’s energetic but you don’t fancy Beat Saber then it’s worth trying Survios’ Sprint Vector. There’s still lots of arm swinging involved but this time it’s competitive, racing against opponents to find the best line to the finish. With the ability to jump and glide to find new routes, you can also disadvantage opponents with a selection of armaments.
Evasion – Archiact
For those that are looking for an all-out first-person shooter (FPS) then sci-fi action adventure Evasionis what you seek. A frantic sci-fi shooter that can be played in either single-player or co-op multiplayer modes. Players can choose from four classes (Striker, Surgeon, Engineer and Warden) each having their own unique strengths, weapons and abilities, with players able to customise their class as they level-up. There’s a great feel to the gunplay, and Archiact has built in plenty of movement options for those worried about motion sickness.
Evasionis a sci-fi VR shooter that has a heavy focus on constant movement, lots of enemies and bullets on-screen, and a frantic pace that can be played either solo or with a friend. There are different character classes and a solid amount of content, adding up to a fun, relatively simple, arcade-style shooter. For a game like this, a strong, consistent art style is important not only for immersion, but to sell a vision.
I don’t think I’d say the visual fidelity rivals any of the top-tier VR titles, but the art direction and art style itself is quite bold and unique. There’s a lot of variety between the various locales and a lot of work was put into establishing the lore for the property.
Archiact, the developers of Evasion, shared with us an internal interview they hosted with the game’s Art Director, Fran Gaulin. Before working on Evasion, Gaulin worked both outside of the game industry and in the market on some of the biggest properties out there, such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Dead Rising.
You can watch the full interview above for more insights into working in art direction for not only video games, but virutal reality itself as well.
Make sure to read our full review of Evasion to see what we thought and let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Today Evasion is finally out on PSVR and PC VR. This is a first-person shooter that’s part bullet-hell chaos in VR and all fast-paced frenetic action. It can be played in co-op with a buddy by your side or solo with one of four different classes.
We’ll be playing Evasion on Rift with Touch. We will also be joined by our new Editor-in-Chief, Kyle Riesenbeck, who will handle giving out codes on the stream today. All codes are for Steam, either Rift or Vive. We’re starting any minute now, right around 1:00PM PT and we’ll aim to last for around an hour or so. We’ll be livestreaming directly to the UploadVR Facebook page and also using Restream to go directly to YouTube as well. Either way, you can see the full stream embedded right here down below once it’s up:
Evasion is a first-person sci-fi shooter from indie AR/VR studio Archiact. With its co-op campaign missions, the game is decidedly aiming to capture a Halo-esque shooting experience along with massive numbers of enemies, something the studio has been couching as a bullet-hell genre shooter. While it’s a technically competent game that looks and feels well polished, some lackluster enemy types and repetitive gameplay left me feeling pretty ambivalent about moving forward through the off-world colony.
Developer: Archiact Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift), PlayStation Store (PSVR) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Release Date: October 9th, 2018
Gameplay
As a sci-fi super soldier, you’ve been dispatched to a mining colony that’s been overrun by a race of robots called the Optera who’ve broken an armistice in search of a super rare substance, a metal that’s used in powerful illegal weaponry. We’re not really here for the story though, because as it goes, it’s a pretty cookie cutter pretense for exercising your trigger fingers—one dedicated to firing, and the other dedicated to secondary attacks, healing, and interacting with key items in the game.
With four classes to choose from, Striker, Surgeon, Warden and Engineer, you’re offered up a few fixed variables such as max health, shield size, gun strength and ultimate ‘Surge’ attack. There’s no in-game currency or weapon upgrades to look forward to, making it essentially the same shooting experience throughout the entire game.
Image courtesy Archiact
Your singular primary weapon has three fundamental firing modes: semi-auto standard shot, charge shot, and an ultimate, all of which requires collecting yellow power canisters dropped by enemies upon death. You can speed the collection process by using your secondary heal/tractor beam weapon on critically damaged enemies, and getting a guaranteed power or health pickup. While healing are predictably doled out randomly, if you play in co-op mode you can infinitely heal your buddy at no material cost to you, something I felt detracted from the overall co-op experience. With two players, I never had the sense that I would run out of anything at any time, and a life-saving heal was always just a simple ask away.
While the emphasis here is on cooperative play to make for a balanced assault, you can play the entire game in singe-player mode if you want; difficulty appears to scale depending on the number of players in your party.
Visually, the game has very few flaws, delivering masses of articulated enemies and lasers at a buttery smooth frame rate even on top settings using my testing rig (GTX 1080 and Core i7 – 6700K), a testament to Archiact’s ability to create a truly cohesive VR environment. Specific destructible points in the game, while entirely inconsequential to gameplay, make for an interesting sideshow to the sprawling industrial facility.
Image courtesy Archiact
The studio has however labeled the game as “the next generation of VR combat,” and a bullet-hell shooter. Here’s a few reasons though why those monikers don’t really fit.
The bullet-hell shooter genre is pretty well-defined. At its essence, it’s a test of a player’s skill to be able to recognize patterns in the stream of enemy bullets and successfully navigate your way through, all the while accruing minimal damage. Throughout most bullet-hell shooters, you’re also given increasingly cool weapons that you have to tactically use for fear of running dry at critical moments. There’s always an even cooler weapon around the corner that’s risky to get, which not only provides a sense of urgency, but also fear of failing the mission after taking too much damage in the process. Simply put, there’s a carrot and a stick. You desperately hate the stick, and you’ll almost die to get that carrot, making Evasion more of a ‘bullet-heck’ flavored substitute.
In single player mode, what actually follows is an exercise in blandly strafing back and forth as you deflect oncoming barrages (with varying amount of success) and sponge-up whatever stray lasers are fired from randomly spawning baddies. Bad guys always shoot where you are, and never where you’re going to be, so it’s a simple task in making sure you have enough lateral room to escape the lasers as they land at your flank, and simultaneously prioritizing targets.
This changes in co-op mode as baddies have multiple targets to consider, namely you and your friends, but then it erupts into something of a blind chaos. Without a good idea of when I was deflecting shots or absorbing them—both audio cues are deceptively similar in sound—you’re left with the job of sallying forth, taking the inevitable damage, and maximizing your health pickups along the way which you can tractor-beam to your position without any added fear of losing out. However you slice it though, it’s a bog standard arcade shooter with lots of the same enemy types in quantity, and no new weapons to look forward to.
And by ‘bog standard’, I mean it comes replete with some decidedly tired VR shooter tropes: floating gun reticles for easy aiming, repetitive enemy types, the “helpful” AI voice who tells you exactly where to go and what to do, and waypoints as breadcrumbs to your next objective. Walk here. Scan this. Shoot these guys until they’re gone for whatever reason. It’s the same story throughout the entire game. I was also always waiting for those big boss reveals that bullet-hells are notorious for, but I was led through the game with continuously repeating B-class baddies until the very end.
That said, I made full use of my three available lives in the later levels where difficulty ramps up significantly—so personal gripes notwithstanding, it’s does present a challenge that a group of proficient marksmen will find difficult. My personal playthrough took just under five hours to complete on campaign mode, which consisted of nine missions. A co-op survival mode is available as well, which should keep your party entertained for a while longer once you’re done with the game’s story.
Full-bodied avatars, created with IKINEMA’s inverse kinematics, are fairly well done, although they’re scaled strangely to fit a range of heights—from four feet to seven feet tall. At the bottom end of the range, you’re treated to a child-sized avatar holding giant guns, which while hilarious, is somewhat immersion breaking in co-op. More on that in the ‘Comfort‘ section.
Speaking of guns, they have a typical ‘VR weightlessness’ which is really hard to avoid without a dedicated peripheral like PS AIM (supported in the PSVR version). By not providing any recoil though, it makes them feel more like magic wands than massive weaponry fit for a space marine super soldier. No reloading or ability to drop your gun (they’re glued to your hands) puts any hand presence out of the question for Evasion.
Image courtesy Archiact
Enemy animations are competent, although all but a single rolling exploding robot type ever offered any up-close and personal encounters, as I was hoping for some melee from the hulking nine foot-tall walking bots that never materialized.
Vive controls are less capable overall, as I found it difficult to do tighter strafing maneuvers than on Oculus Touch’s analog sticks. Interactions in the game are however very simple (point and shoot), and while Vive movement is fairly sludgy, you can get used to them.
Because of the range of heights made available, you can easily play sitting down by putting your avatar’s height in the upper range.
Evasion also offers a number of locomotion modes that makes it a very comfortable game. You’ll be able to choose from a free locomotion mode with both variable snap-turn and smooth-turning, a ‘dash’ mode that turns your movements into a sort of instant teleportation slide show, and a jogging mode that allows you to jog in place to move in the desired directions. Of course, if you have a 360 tracking setup, you’ll be mostly relying on the head-relative forward movement.
Comfort vignettes can be toggled on to provide a temporary limiter to your field of view when you turn, which has been shown to help with motion-related nausea.
Over two and a half years after the launch of consumer-grade VR headsets, my favorite thing to do in VR is still to stand side-by-side, with a friend, while fighting enemies. Whether it be a tactical military shooter like Firewall Zero Hour, a pirate-themed adventure in Rec Room, or a tense arcade-style bullet hell shooter like Evasion, all VR is better with friends.
Evasion is a game that is built, from the ground up, with co-op multiplayer the very heart of its identity. So much so, in fact, that it’s often overwhelming to the point of being frustrating if you try to play it alone. It’s very possible, but it’s going to give you a tough challenge.
The team at Archiact have done a great job of crafting a rich, detailed world. You can read more about the setup for the conflicts in Evasion here, with a blog post directly from the game’s Lead Writer. The premise is pretty simple: humans are colonizing space and mining for precious resources that are being contested by an aggressive alien race that was previously working with the humans. You shoot hundreds of bad guy aliens and fight your way through a series of missions to find out what’s going on. One way to look at Evasion, especially for the PSVR audience, is to think of it as a faster-paced version of Farpoint, but this time with co-op in the actual campaign.
In Evasion you’ve got four different classes to pick from. The Surgeon, which is a combat medic type, that can heal multiple allies at the same time and the “Contagion” ability on his blaster can bounce between enemies. Then there’s the Striker. She’s a more agile and quick-thinking class with armor-piercing rounds, a smaller shield that can deflect attacks, and a particle beam style weapon.
Next is the Warden, my favorite class. He’s kind of the polar opposite of the Striker in that he is heavily armored and described as a “one-man wrecking crew.” His main blaster is a bit more like a shotgun and he’s also got a grenade launcher and a large tower-style shield. His tether link can actually buff allies, increasing their damage resistance, and his big Surge Attack shoots out a bunch of cluster bombs. I’ve always gravitated towards the most tank-link characters in games. Finally, there’s the Engineer. She can shoot off orb-shaped charges the do big damage and overload enemy systems with a charged attack. Her tether grabs enemies out of the air and she can also buff allies with increased damage.
I really enjoyed the class variety, but I was hoping for a bit more nuance inside the game’s structure. There isn’t really a good progression system in place to make it feel like you’re constantly growing in power, so you’re more or less left with whatever you start with. It would have been nice to have a bit more influence over weapons and abilities as you play through the game.
I’ve played a lot of Evasion over the last year since it was originally announced at various events on Rift, Vive, and PSVR — but most of my time for this review was spent on PSVR using the PS Aim controller. Despite the performance downgrade and lack of roomscale movement, this was my favorite way to play the game because of the PS Aim controller. I’m convinced that most any shooter is enhanced with this device. I’d much rather hold a rifle in my arms than two separated motion controllers if it fits the game I’m playing. Technically it also supports DualShock 4 as well, but it was dramatically better with the PS Aim. DualShock controls are just like in Farpoint or Firewall Zero Hour, in that you physically move the controller around and aim it as if it were a gun. There is no PS Move support due to the lack of analog sticks.
The biggest difference between playing on PC VR headsets and PSVR is that if you’re on Rift or Vive, then your character is holding two guns. In your primary hand it’s your main weapon and in your secondary hand it’s a shield glued onto the front of your tether gun. The tether gun lets you do things like heal allies, buff allies, swing enemies around, and so on depending on your class. And when an enemy is near death, the tether gun can actually grab power-ups from enemies and blow them up. But if you use the PS Aim controller, you don’t have two separated hands. Instead you have a single rifle weapon that has the functionality of both guns mushed together with a shield in front. You lose a little flexibility since you can’t block and shoot in two different directions, but the sense of presence and increased accuracy afforded more than makes up for it.
Evasion is the type of game you can’t sit still with. You’ve got to always be moving around levels and your play space as much as you’re able. It really embraces the “bullet hell” designation whole-heatedly, similar to games like Blasters of the Universe.
One of the most impressive bits about Evasion from a technical standpoint is just how much work has gone into making Unreal run efficiently, even on PSVR. There are tons of bullet flying all over the place at any given time, dozens of enemies on the screen, terrain and points of cover getting blown up and destroyed, and lots of quick, erratic movement. It’s a lot to render at a steady FPS, but it never faltered for me. Also, they use Ikinema’s avatar system to fully animate your entire body. It all looks and feels really great. I especially liked how the bottom portion of the Striker’s tunic flows and moves around as you walk.
Gameplay feels excellent too. The production values, especially when compared to other VR shooters, are extremely high and there is a real visceral sense of power behind your weapons. The soundtrack (rocking heavy metal like DOOM VFR) and computer AI writing and voice acting also deserve specific shout outs as well. There’s a bit of clever humor here to keep you smiling while bullets rain down around you.
Unfortunately, Evasion does have a slight content problem with its five hour campaign. Luckily there is also a wave-based horde mode on top of the main batch of missions, but it’s not something you’ll likely spend a lot of time in. With only three levels to pick from it’s definitely a tacked-on afterthought to pad out the list of things to do, but it’s welcomed change of pace never the less.
The developers at Archiact also did a great job of making Evasion as accessible as possible. You can really dig in and tweak a bunch of the comfort settings in terms of movement and rotation, FOV, and more.
Whereas games like Seeking Dawn look great in trailers but don’t feel finished when you play them, Evasion has the reverse issue — visually the environments are mostly bland and isn’t the greatest looking game by any stretch, but it has the mechanical polish of a AAA-quality shooter in VR with the gameplay to back it up.
Final Score:8/10 – Good
Evasion does a lot right. The chaos and intensity of combat is second-to-none in the VR shooter space from what I’ve scene, particularly when compared to other cooperative VR shooters. You’ll always be moving and dodging fire both physically and with in-game smooth locomotion at all times. There isn’t as much progression across the game in terms of class abilities and leveling up as I’d have liked, but the core gameplay, boss fights, and level design are so strong I didn’t mind as much. Playing solo is a bit rough, so with a friend by your side Evasion not only becomes one of VR’s best shooters, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any other VR game that’s as purely fun on a moment-to-moment basis.
The release of Archiact Interactive’s new virtual reality (VR) title on PlayStation VR, Evasion, is coming very soon. In anticipation of the release, the PlayStation Blog has delivered a guide on how best to survive the fast-paced action of the VR first-person shooter.
Evasion is a VR sci-fi shooter which can be played either solo or as co-operative multiplayer. Players can choose from one of four classes, each having its own weapons, abilities and strengths to match a variety of play styles.
The Blog details a number of tips on how players can make the most of the gameplay of Evasion. The first tip calls to mind the name of the videogame, as it says simply ‘Move or die’ as standing still is a recipe for being mown down.
It also warns that the Optera, the enemies of the title, are relentless are will come at players from all angles, so getting to cover is a vital part of surviving. Keeping an eye on your blaster is also important, as the blaster has three energy levels, with max level obviously having the most punch so keeping blaster power at max as much as possible is a winning tactic.
Sound is also important, as some enemies are sneaky and tend to be heard before they are seen, so a good pair of headphones or speakers is a good idea for keeping an ear out. Players are equipped with a Tether, which can be used for a variety of uses, such as healing teammates and performing class-specific buffs.
Each hero has its own special attack, known as the Surge Attack. This can be activated when the player’s health and energy level are at maximum. Learning when to unleash this devastating attack is an important step towards victory.
Evasion will be coming to PlayStation VR on 9th October. The launch trailer is available to view below. For future coverage of Evasion and other upcoming VR titles, keep checking back with VRFocus.
There are a fair number of VR games, both available now and coming up, that feel a lot like the next evolutionary step of the arcade-style light gun shooter, like Time Crisis or House of the Dead. You have more mobility and agency in a VR game, of course, but only just, and the VR bits are used to iterate on, or just awkwardly bolted on top of, the existing gameplay model.
Evasion, conversely, is about movement and, well, evasion. On PSVR, you can play the game with the PS Aim controller, but on PC-based platforms like Rift and Vive, it uses a two-handed control scheme with the corresponding motion controllers. Either way, it’s a first-person shooter that initially feels very arcade-like, pitting your space mercenary up against armies of invading robot insects.
The studio, Archiact, is based in Vancouver, and has put a 25-person team to work on Evasion. The developers at PAX West told me that they were influenced a great deal by the recent success of Ninja Theory, and wanted to follow their lead in making a big, full-size flagship title. Right now, Evasion features nine missions with three survival modes, leavened with a bit of dark humor and a decent soundtrack.
It took me a minute to figure Evasion out. I was running into each new fight and acting like I just put roots down. I’d stand there and target-lock on each one, methodically blowing them away. That worked for a while, but the further I got into the mission at hand—defending an off-world mining colony from what seemed to be an unprovoked attack by the bugs—the less effective it became.
It was only when I realized the game was probably named Evasion for a reason—it was late, I was tired, leave me alone—that I started using my mobility to my advantage, strafing and circling like you can in a non-VR FPS. The longer you can go without getting hit, the more your weapon charges up, and the stronger your basic attack gets. You can eventually discharge it in a single, screen-clearing super attack that feels a little bit like parking the moon on something’s face.
The trade-off for that mobility is that healing is easier if you stand still. Sometimes, enemies drop a green healing item, a big canister full of what probably isn’t Mountain Dew, and you can yank it towards you with a tractor beam built into your main weapon. When you do, the canister creates a small circular healing field on the ground that rapidly restores your health for as long as you can manage to stand inside it. It’s a trade-off; you’re immobile but healing quickly.
It isn’t as much of a death sentence as it sounds like, because your main gun in Evasion generates a force field in front of it, in a way that the developers mentioned was influenced by Audioshield. Any incoming enemy fire that strikes your force field gets reflected away at an angle, which lets you occasionally pool-shark an opponent’s bullet straight back at it. It’s a tricky, all-or-nothing mechanic that feels a bit like playing lacrosse. Death lacrosse. With machine guns.
I only got to play the game solo, but Evasion is a cooperative, class-based shooter for up to four players, with each class—surgeon, striker, warden, and engineer—featuring different basic capabilities. I played as the striker, who does a lot of damage with a charged laser beam, but compensates for that with a smaller force field. As the game picks up speed, teamwork becomes more important, as you’re frequently surrounded, ambushed, or forced to stay still in order to accomplish objectives.
Evasion is a little tricky, because as I was discussing above, it’s one of those games that punishes you for dragging in pre-conceptions from other games or genres. It looks like the sort of shooting gallery where you’re supposed to stand still and block or destroy anything coming your way, but not only are you not nailed to the floor, but the game is set up to make you feel like standing still is a death sentence. I’m really curious to find out how it would play on higher difficulties, with a full team.
When it comes to virtual reality (VR) with devices such as HTC Vive, Oculus Rift or Windows Mixed Reality, large part of the experience comes from the power and quality of your PC. In order to get the best from VR, you need a great PC. This is not exactly an inexpensive task, however. To celebrate the launch of its upcoming shooter Evasion, developer Archiact have teamed with PC maker Alienware to launch a competition to win an Area 51 Gaming Rig.
Evasion is due to launch for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR on 9th October, 2018. Fans can enter the competition for the chance to win an Alienware Area 51 PC gaming rig and a copy of Evasion.
The Alienware Area 51 PC is a powerful desktop PC powered by an Intel Core i9 7900X, with up to 4.5GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0. Graphics are driven by an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 with 8GB of GDDR5X RAM. A 512 GB SSD hard drive allows for fast loading speeds for your applications, while a 2TB SATA hard drive provides storage space.
Also included is an Alienware AW568 gaming keyboard and Alienware AW558 Advanced gaming mouse and an Alienware 25 AW2518H monitor.
Copies of Evasion are also up for grabs. Evasion is the latest VR title from Architect, and is a sci-fi shooter which can be played either single-player or in co-operative multiplayer. Players can choose from one of four classes, Striker, Surgeon, Engineer and Warden. Each of these classes has its own capabilities and weaponry, and players can customise the character as the progress.
The contest is open to residents of Canada and the USA, and begins at 12:00am Eastern Time on 10th September, 2018 and is due to end on 21st October, 2018 at 11:59pm (ET). Further information can be found on the Evasion website.
For further coverage on offers and competitions related to VR, keep checking back with VRFocus.
Blind – Tiny Bull Studios
