Former PSVR-exclusive first-person shooter (FPS), Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher, is coming to PC VR headsets this month.
The single-player game will launch on March 19th via SteamVR with support for the Rift, Vive and Index. Developer Viva Games already launched a non-VR version of the game on PC, but it looks like this will be a fully separate purchase. Check out the trailer for the PSVR version of the game below.
Immortal Legacy PC VR Version Confirmed
Immortal Legacy takes players to an ancient island in search of long lost secrets. There they’ll battle enemy soldiers and monsters with dual-wielding weapons. The game is notable for featuring a multi-hour, single-player shooter campaign. Even two years on from release, there aren’t many of those floating around in VR. That said, there’s some issues we hope are fixed in the PC version, like spotty motion controller support on PSVR.
We gave the game 6/10 when we reviewed it on PSVR in early 2019, saying it was one of the better VR games to spin out of Sony’s China Hero Project. “Immortal Legacy is clearly half the game it was once intended to be, with missing puzzle pieces strewn throughout,” we said. “What remains, though, is an often half-decent, if mostly uneventful, shooter. Control issues aside, it’s a palatable bit of VR action that, if nothing else, suggests China’s VR development scene is making strides beyond its previous efforts.”
Will you be checking out Immortal Legacy on SteamVR? Let us know in the comments below.
Sony’s China Hero initiative holds promise. It’s a PlayStation-run incubator designed to nurture talent from an emerging market that often puts style ahead of substance. Chinese-developed games like Reboant offer some of VR’s most striking visuals, but last mere minutes. Others like Seeking Dawn promise hours of gameplay that are padded out with laborious crafting and survival mechanics. Under Sony’s wing, though, Beijing-based Vivagames shows reassuring progress with Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher.
There’s a much-needed sense of structure to this relatively simple first-person shooter. Vivagames’ shiny screenshots aren’t masking a simple wave shooter or on-rails campaign but instead a full, linear adventure that’ll take you around five hours to blast through. Immortal Legacy is never terribly inventive or even particularly memorable, but it is at least an earnest shot at delivering the type of experience many PSVR owners desperately want more of.
Potential shines throughout, though it’s largely just out of reach. The nonsensical plot offers a glimmer of promise with detailed, if embarrassingly under-dressed, companions and some interesting interactions. An early encounter with a cigar-chomping thug is particularly squeamish, suggesting Viva might find great use for VR here. Minutes later you meet a fairly intimidating villain that makes an effectively deadly entrance.
Inexplicably, though, the game’s cast completely disappears about 20 minutes in and doesn’t show up again until the final cutscene. It seems clear that some of Immortal Legacy’s grander ambitions were cut from the game without their setups being taken out too. It’s in need of a narrative tidy up; these plot beats are made far too early and openly to have been considered teasers for a sequel.
Immortal Legacy deals better with more familiar traits, though. The campaign has a welcome touch of progression, from shootouts over rocky mountain tops to creepy treks through dark caverns. It’s one part action adventure, one part survival horror (and, right at the end, one part painfully dull sci-fi shooter). As a standard FPS it’s serviceable, if formulaic, with tidy action sequences quickly mopped up with some well-placed headshots.
What’s lacking, though, is the thrill of a gunfight. Immortal Legacy’s uncharted island (which owes a debt to a certain series of the same name) is packed with mercenaries and monsters to riddle with bullets, but they’re all devoid of real threat and tension. It’s pretty easygoing, failing to deliver any sense of urgency when your life is on the line. It hampers the horror element somewhat (which is either a pro or a con depending on your outlook), though the game does feel better suited to the slower-paced scares than the Hollywood set pieces. Sheepishly stepping through a cave armed with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol on its last few bullets in the other is wonderfully immersive.
It’s just a shame the game never gets experimental with its foundations. Human and monster enemies never mix, for example, and some persistent enemies simply disappear if you put enough distance between them. Immortal Legacy often feels more like a template than a game, just begging to be iterated on to find the real magic. It never gets there.
Messier still is the game’s control scheme, which is an enemy in its own right. I can see the logic behind the button mapping to the Move controllers but the translation is, frankly, dire. Turning is assigned to one of the top corresponding face buttons on both controllers with the button next to it opening that hand’s inventory system. On paper it makes sense but in practise, you’ll be accidentally opening your inventory and fighting with the controls in the middle of action setpieces. It’s hard to tell if Viva is simply failing at intuition or aiming for Resident Evil-style tank controls, but the answer makes little difference. Why there’s no PlayStation Aim support is beyond me.
Final Score:6/10 – Decent
Immortal Legacy is clearly half the game it was once intended to be, with missing puzzle pieces strewn throughout. What remains, though, is an often half-decent, if mostly uneventful, shooter. Control issues aside, it’s a palatable bit of VR action that, if nothing else, suggests China’s VR development scene is making strides beyond its previous efforts. Hopefully the next wave of China-made VR games gives us something truly special.
Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher is available now on PSVR. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Sony revealed new footage of the game as part of its recent China Hero Project update. The initiative is designed to support up and coming Chinese developers. In Immortal Legacy’s case, Sony is actually going to publish the game itself. That put the game on our radar in a big way.
The four minutes of gameplay on offer here might suggest why Sony took developer Viva Games under its wing. This doesn’t look like a simple wave shooter or on-rails experience but a fully fledged VR FPS. We can see an inventory system, elements of storytelling and some good spooky scares. It’s on the intense side, too; at one point the player falls through the floor without warning.
There are some nice ideas at play in Immortal Legacy too, like fish that bite into your arm and must be sliced off with a knife. The game also just looks pretty great on the visuals side.
We played a very early demo for the game a few years back. At the time it was a little rough around the edges but held promise. Hopefully, it’s had a much-needed tune-up since then. We’re less enthused about the horrid bug monster infesting the display with cockroaches, but we’ll just have to be brave.
Immortal Legacy is set to launch on March 20th. We’ll be bringing you full coverage of the game as the month goes on.
During the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2018 VRFocus came across a new virtual reality (VR) first-person shooter (FPS) called Kill X, by Chinese studio Viva Games. Today, the team has revealed a new name for the title, Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher as well as a release date on PlayStation VR.
An action-adventure/horror experience, Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher is based on an ancient Chinese legend with a modern day twist.
Detailing the story via PlayStation Blog, Viva Games explains: “You play as Tyre, an ex-special forces soldier travelling to the isle of Yingzhou after the mysterious death of his mother. Together with Ksana (an estranged friend of his mother’s), Tyre seeks to uncover the truth behind her death and her even more enigmatic past.
“The isle itself is bound in local legend, notorious for its enshrouding tempest in the midst of the mysterious Dragon’s Triangle, and soon Tyre finds himself fighting for his life. As he explores deeper into the island, he encounters unspeakable horrors and unique characters with their own motives for braving Yingzhou’s perils, including some who may prove essential to his survival…”
Supporting PlayStation Move, players will be able to use an arsenal of 15 weapons, from close combat knives to pistols, rifles, and grenades. The environments are open and designed to be explored, with players able to freely wander ancient ruins and dark caverns at their leisure. And alongside all the action, Viva Games has included puzzles to solve and traps to avoid if players are smart and quick enough.
What VRFocus is particularly interested in is how development has progressed since E3 2018. It got a bit of a hammering in our preview when we said: “Kill X has all the charm, grace and originality of a modern Steven Seagal film, you know what’s going to happen before its occurred and getting to the end just seems like it’ll take way too much will power. With certain aspects that can, and cannot be lived with Viva Games still has some way to go until Kill X should be taken seriously by FPS fans.”
Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher will launch exclusively for PlayStation VR on 20th March 2019. You can pre-order the title now from PlayStation Store for £15.99 GBP which will gain you a bonus WWII SMG. For further updates as the launch nears, keep reading VRFocus.
A few years ago now we played a Chinese demo for a PSVR exclusive shooter named Kill X. The game was born out of a Sony-led initiative and developed by Viva Games. It was a little scrappy, but it had potential. Two years on, we finally have a release date and a new name for the game – Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher.
We kind of preferred Kill X, but no matter.
Immortal Legacy will release on PSVR in Europe on March 20th. In the game you play as an ex-special forces soldier seeking revenge for his mother’s death. You’ll explore an island infested with horrific beasts. Playing with two Move controllers, you’ll gun these creatures down as well as solve puzzles and explore the world.
Check out the first English-voiced trailer for the game above. It doesn’t give away much, but what’s there is promising.
When we played the original demo the game offered full freedom of movement. It was a pretty spooky experience set in dark caves with creatures that crawled on the walls. That said, it was relatively simplistic.
We’re cautiously optimistic about Immortal Legacy, then. Outside of ports like Borderlands 2, PSVR hasn’t had a full-fledged FPS in a while. Hopefully this will offer a meaty campaign with solid action and an engaging story. Visually, it looks like it’s come a long way from the last time we saw it.
The game’s already up for pre-order on the European PlayStation Store for £15.99. There’s currently no word on a US release date though hopefully it’ll be around the same time.
