It’s yet another quiet week for PSVR owners, though that’s not such a bad thing when we know The Persistence is launching next week. Hang in there!
Sea of Memories, from Ivanovich Games
Price: £7.99 (EU Only)
A relaxing puzzle game in which you navigate between islands in an expansive ocean. You have to solve illusion-based puzzles, putting together the pieces of the protagonist’s mind as you go. It might look a little rough, but if you’re a fan of optical illusions this is one to check out.
Hopalong: The Badlands, From From the Future
Price: $24.99
A cheerful little first-person shooter in which you ride a toy horse by shaking your controller up and down. You’re on the hunt for bandits and must use a range of weapons to take them out. There’s a lot to like about Hopalong, though it’s ultimately a little shallow and completely inessential.
If there were ever a VR game in which I’ve thought “I must look ridiculous playing this” it’s got to be Hopalong: The Badlands. In this single-player shooter, you’re given a virtual hobby-horse, a toy horse head stuck on a stick that kids would place between their legs to pretend giddy-up with. You then proceed to imitate riding the horse (how much enthusiasm you put into it is at your discretion) to gallop around in VR. It’s pretty ridiculous, to say the least.
But, you know what? It’s also pretty fun.
As gimmicky as it is, Hopalong’s horseback riding lays the foundation for a surprisingly nimble, if ultimately forgettable shooter. You play as a Sheriff hunting down a gang of bandits over the course of 11 levels. You’ll journey through canyons, dive deep into mines and race through settlements as you steer your trusty companion with one and hand return fire with the other using one of several weapons.
Moving is done by flicking your controller up and down to walk forwards. The broader the strokes you make the faster your horse will move, and the direction you point your controller is the direction in which you’ll travel. It takes a little getting used to but it wasn’t long before I found myself falling in love with bounding around the game’s levels, which fuse tight corridors with more open set-pieces. Circling around enemies or simply keeping your head down and charging forward feels fluid, with a kind of natural intuition that most VR shooters long for.
It sets up some grin-inducing shootouts, too. As the name implies, Hopalong has a spring to its step, and you’ll need to keep moving in order to stay alive, lest you been bombarded with dynamite, mounted-gun fire and pick-axe wielding maniacs. Combat quickly becomes frantic, fuelled by the satisfying thrill of pulling off a well-aimed headshot from across a river as you race along its banks, or the last minute pull of a shotgun trigger before an enemy sword reaches your throat.
As intuitive as the movement can be, though, it’s not perfect. Weapons, of which there are a few, can only be cycled through in real-time, causing real frustration as you hunt for the right tool for the job in the middle of a fire fight. If you’re on PSVR or using a 180 degree Oculus setup, you’ll also struggle with wanting to instinctively shoot an enemy that runs past you but coming up against the tracking limitations. The game’s quick turn option is somewhat sluggish, taking some of the pace out of combat, and making some of the already-maddening difficulty spikes even moreso.
There’s also no escaping the fact that, innovative movement aside, Hopalong is a pretty basic and barebones shooter from a design standpoint. You move from A to B, shooting enemies that wait for you at set points without ever really engaging much thought. You’ll often find the AI sending bad guys running into walls or even getting grenadiers to accidentally bomb themselves. In fact, you can often just run past areas, and in those tougher battles that’s actually what I prefer to do. It was either that or risk repeating the last 10 – 20 minutes of the level I was on.
A valiant attempt to mix things up is made by introducing claustrophobic missions in mines and a few boss battles (there’s also a tedious level set in a dark maze really wants to stop the fun). You can see From The Future trying to populate the levels it’s built with the kind of variety you’d expect of a modern shooter, but they ultimately don’t disguise the fact that this is another VR FPS you can see through in roughly two hours.
Final Score:6/10 – Decent
Hopalong: The Badlands is a cheerful VR shooter with a great locomotion mechanic and a few hours of flawed fun to support it. Whilst navigating the wild west is an intuitive joy, simplistic design and frustrating difficulty spikes mean it’s easily forgotten soon after the credits roll.
Hopalong: The Bands is available now on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive for $14.99, and arrives on PSVR later this week. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Having launched on Steam for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in late 2017, then coming to Viveport in February, From the Future’s Hopalong: The Badlands now has a release date for PlayStation VR.
Hopalong: The Badlands is a fast-paced first-person shooter (FPS), where you ride around the wild west dispatching enemies from the Dynamite Gang. The twist in the experience comes from its locomotion system, whereby players ride a stick-horse. So to ride around they need to hop, skip and gallop – or wave your controller up and down – to make the horse move, as well as keeping the horse healthy and its hearts up by drinking at watering holes.
So there’s no teleporting, players need to find all the gang members the old fashioned way and to help them there’s plenty of weaponry to choose from. From the trusty Eight Shooter, to the much more up close and personal Pickaxe, there’s also the Double-Barrel, Sniper Rifle, Dynamite, Iron Falcon and Brimstone Gun.
Alongside the guns to unlock there are three single-player campaigns to complete, a quick-draw bullet time feature to get the hang of, and numerous mounts to unlock to suit your play style.
From the Future will be launching Hopalong: The Badlands next Tuesday, 17th July, via the PlayStation Store. For any further updates on the videogame or developer, keep reading VRFocus.
From the Future’s hilarious spin on the VR shooter, Hopalong: The Badlands, is releasing on PSVR very, very soon.
The studio announced today that the game will launch on PSVR on July 17th. Hopalong isn’t like most other VR shooters; it’s a western-style shooter that sees you jump on the back of a toy horse and imitate riding it with one controller to move around the map. In the other hand you hold a gun which, well, you know what that’s for. It’s essentially taking the cowboy games you used to play as a kid and injecting them with a little VR goodness. Check out the trailer for the game below.
Not exactly your average wave shooter, right? The game’s set to include three campaigns, so hopefully, there’s plenty of content ready and waiting.
It’s been out on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive for a little while now.
Haven’t we all wanted to be in a Western movie? When you disregard the smell, the heat, the disease, how filthy you would likely be at all times, it actually seems like a really cool experience. Well, as long as you’re not the one getting shot. Now you can relive the Western experience in virtual reality (VR) with Hopalong: The Badlands, which you can now get on Viveport.
In the trailer which you can watch below, we see plenty of horse riding and gunslinging action, which intros which a cowboy on a green screen drawing his pistol against the stylised mannequin like cowboys of the Hopalong world.
The videogame’s description describes the movement system in Hopalong: The Badlands as “one of a kind” as you hop, skip and gallop through the Western landscape. The mechanic for galloping is described as waving “your stick horse up and down” so that certainly sounds unique.
You’ll be fighting against the Dynamite Gang, and they’re only wanted dead, not alive. You’ll be shooting down the wooden bandits and fighting bosses riding pigs. As you progress, you’ll be able to earn new stick horses to ride.
There’ll be a variety of weapons too, including the Eight Shooter, Pickaxe, Double-Barrel, Sniper Rifle, Dynamite, Iron Falcon and Brimstone Gun. Needless to say, some of those sound fearsome indeed.
If you’re interested in Hopalong: The Badlands then you’ll want to grab a Viveport subscription, which will give you access to the game and many more on the service. Of course, if you’re new to Viveport, you can start a free trial.
If the screenshot on the videogame’s Viveport page you see a variety of times of day, giving the desert locale a fresh look in each. The experience is built for room scale VR where you stand and shoot at your enemies, so make sure you have room to wave your arms at least.
For more on Hopalong: The Badlands, check out the trailer below. If you want more gunslinging experiences to make you feel like John Wayne or John Wick in VR, make sure to keep reading VRFocus.
