ILMxLab is to finally demo its upcoming Star Wars Virtual Reality series, Vader Immortal at the annual Star Wars Celebration event in April.
We reported on ILMxLAB’s latest immersive VR experience way back in October last year, after the studio revealed that their forthcoming built-for-VR experience, set in the Star Wars universe, would form part of the official canonical Star Wars universe. The new experience is being co-developed with Facebook’s Oculus Studios and is due to debut on the company’s forthcoming standalone VR headset Quest.
After remaining schtum for months, ILMxLAB today announced that Star Wars fans can look forward to more details on the experience being revealed during this year’s annual Star Wars Celebration event, due to take place between April 11-15 in Chicago. They’ll also be able to go hands-on with the first episode.
Star Wars Celebration is the pinnacle fan event for the franchise, attracting 1000s of attendees every year and is traditionally a venue for big Star Wars announcements, trailers and games to be teased.
ILMxLAB has announced it’s to let fans in attendance go hands-on with the first episode of Vader Immortal, with demos powered by Oculus’ Quest headset, at the show. Here’s a snippet of the press release to set the scene:
Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series transports fans to the dark lord’s home turf of Mustafar, and with lightsaber in hand, puts them at the center of an original Star Wars story. The canonical immersive adventure takes place between Star Wars – Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope, and is set up by the events of Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, ILMxLAB’s award-winning location-based virtual reality experience.
ILMxLAB is also due to hold a panel discussion to dive into details on the first episode of Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series. The panel will feature David S. Goyer, the author of the debut episode, known for his work on the The Dark Knight film series.
Image courtesy Oculus
The timing is excellent as, although we still don’t yet have a firm release date for Oculus’ brand new high-end ‘standalone’ VR headset Quest, Facebook have said we’ll see the device ship some time in Spring – so even assuming the worst – it won’t be long before Star Wars fans can ‘get their vader on’, so to speak. Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series is confirmed as an Oculus Quest launch title.
If you’re heading to Star Wars Celebration, you can catch the panel at 1:30pm CST on the main stage.
As Oculus has pushed out iterative runtimes to support its consumer hardware, many of the beloved early VR experiments have fallen to the wayside, languishing without support and lost in the annals of defunct software. To remedy this, WEARVR, an independent virtual reality app store, announced a new competition challenging seasoned VR devs to update their original Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 demos, games and experiences, and bring them back to support the latest VR hardware.
Dubbed the ‘Remastered Competition’, WEARVR is challenging developers to enhance, update and re-engineer their original Oculus DK content “to make it contemporary with new releases and fully functional on the latest headsets, including the Oculus Rift CV1.”
far from consumer-ready experience, Oculus SDK .05.01
The independent app store, which hosts a number of ‘legacy’ DK1 and DK2 experiences and games, is offering up cash prizes totaling $10,000 to the best Remastered virtual reality content submitted to the WEARVR app store before 1st May, 2018. Check out the rules and conditions here.
“These early demos are what compelled us to launch WEARVR and give the experiences the dedicated audience they deserved,” says WEARVR COO, Andrew Douthwaite. “Having tried and tested nearly every DK1 and DK2 demo out there, it’s sad to see that some of them haven’t made it to the consumer headsets. However, it’s understandable when you consider that these were largely created by new, or one-person teams.”
“What we’re trying to do with Remastered is give new VR users an opportunity to try these short experiences that helped the new VR industry grow so fast, as well as creating a bit of nostalgia for the VR veterans,” Douthwaite continues. “There are many developers who, perhaps, created a demo with no intention of selling it. This gives them an opportunity to monetize their demos, through WEARVR, whilst having the added bonus of prize money for best in class,” Douthwaite concludes.
Developers interested in reviving their early projects can enter here.
The opening keynote at the fourth annual Oculus Connect developer conference delivered several new product announcements from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, VP of Virtual Reality Hugo Barra, and others. This included new standalone VR hardware, a new price for the Rift, and many software and game reveals.
At $199, Oculus Go is a low-cost, all-in-one standalone headset launching in early 2018. On stage, Hugo Barra claimed that the headset was designed to deliver the “best visual clarity of any product we’ve ever built”, using a “fast-switch LCD” at 2560×1440 and an “all-new, custom optical design”. The lenses are an evolution of the ‘hybrid’ optics found in the current Rift. Sharing the same controller input set as Gear VR – a single controller and rotational-only tracking – apps will be “binary compatible”, working on both systems. Essentially, Oculus Go is an enhanced, standalone version of Gear VR.
Project Santa Cruz developer kits coming in 2018, we go hands-on:
Image courtesy Oculus
Described as the “first, complete, standalone VR system with full inside-out tracking and hand presence”, Santa Cruz developer kits will be available next year. The company revealed various improvements to the latest prototype, including brand new 6-degrees-of-freedom controllers, similar to Touch. Unlike Oculus Go, Santa Cruz is designed as a high-end, standalone system, with full positional tracking on both headset and controllers, but will be limited by the performance of its on-board mobile PC. Check out our hands-on impressions here.
‘Oculus Dash’ is a total interface overhaul, supports desktop apps:
Nate Mitchell, Head of Rift, described how Oculus has been rebuilding the core software from the ground up over the past year, introducing various improvements to ‘Rift Core 2.0’. Most significantly, Oculus Dash is a total overhaul of the Rift user interface, designed specifically for motion input. It combines the existing functionality of Home and the Universal Menu, while allowing access to traditional desktop apps. Mitchell claims Dash will offer “best in class performance and visual quality,” for PC apps in VR, setting the platform “on a path to replacing real monitors entirely.”
Oculus Home also completely rebuilt:
The Rift Core 2.0 update also brings a brand new Oculus Home space, with a more realistic visual design, with “state of the art lighting” and “dynamic soft shadows”, powered by Unreal Engine 4. This is customisable with toys, furniture, artwork and achievements, and is designed to be a persistent, social space, with the potential to create shared spaces in the future.
Rift receives permanent price cut:
Photo by Road to VR
Hugo Barra, Vice President of Virtual Reality at Oculus announced a permanent price cut of the Rift and Touch bundle to $399. The package still includes the same hardware bundle of headset, two sensors, two Touch controllers, and “six free apps” – although there are actually several more free apps available on the Store.
Marc ten Bosch’s side project 4D Toys is a unique physics-based toy box using the game engine he created for Miegakure, a groundbreaking 4D puzzle-platformer. Launched on June 2nd for SteamVR and iOS, the app simulates an environment with a fourth spatial dimension, where players can freely manipulate four-dimensional objects with dynamic physics.
image courtesy mtb design works, inc.
Starting the app for the first time, you’re greeted by a set of artworks that form a short, suitably abstract comic strip offering a loose explanation for why a mind-bending toy box like this might exist, and then you’re thrown right in. Most of the objects are immediately accessible, laid out in a grid, allowing the user to choose a particular shape or set of shapes to play with. Ten Bosch recommends that VR users sit on the floor (and ensure that the virtual floor aligns with your own) to give the best feeling of engagement. His intention is to offer an undirected experience, giving any player a childlike sense of wonderment as they discover these ‘impossible’ toys.
While messing around in any physics-based environment can be entertaining, it’s important to have a basic understanding of what’s going on here. At first glance, to our three-dimensional visual perception, it looks like spheres enlarge and shrink at random, cubes get sliced at odd angles and objects ‘clip’ through invisible planes. But these are hyperspheres and hypercubes, and this apparent shape-shifting is a genuine mathematical representation of four-dimensional objects moving within four spatial dimensions, appearing and disappearing from our view – a mere ‘3D slice’ of a 4D scene. Frankly, the creator does a much better job of explaining the system than I ever could, so I’d strongly recommend watching the video below:
The ‘flatland’ used to demonstrate how 3D objects would appear to a 2D character is available in the app, along with an interactive, written explanation of the full 4D system. Over 100 ‘scenes’ have been prepared, which include a large number of increasingly complex 4D objects, from your common or garden tesseract to the delightfully exotic omnitruncated variant… it’s heavy stuff. Many scenes combine multiple objects that bounce off each other in interesting ways. The physics implementation results in some unusual effects – you can throw a 4D object between your hands as if it’s 3D, because you are operating in 3D too, but as soon as you bounce it off a wall or another object, it’ll change appearance or even disappear, becoming more unpredictable as it tumbles along the fourth dimension.
One peculiar scene contains two interlocked 4D rings, which can only be separated by engaging with the fourth dimension. Unlike other scenes where objects easily change their appearance from impacts, the rings remain locked as you throw them around, and only change with many hard impacts or by manually adjusting the fourth dimension slider. I asked Marc if this was an ‘artificial lock’ on the physics for this particular scene, and he explained that it’s actually a detail of his physics implementation – “the rings (and the spheres) can start perfectly mathematically balanced, which can’t happen in real life and makes them very stable until you offset them or they collide a bunch”.
image courtesy mtb design works, inc.
4D Toys was initially created for iOS – “VR wasn’t even a thing when I started it!” says Marc – but it was developed on PC simultaneously thanks to its cross platform engine, and the transition to VR “didn’t take very long and was well worth it”. The app has some advantages on iOS, as those with dexterous fingers could manipulate more than two objects at once using multi-touch, and it’s possible to tilt the entire world with the accelerometer. The non-VR versions (the SteamVR version can be played on a standard display with a mouse and keyboard) also allow you spin objects quickly to make 4D spinning tops, and you can see the 2D and 3D viewpoints in split screen for the ‘flatland’ levels. However, the VR experience is probably the most compelling, thanks to the depth sensation, more intuitive controls, and the ability to easily manipulate objects and even juggle two objects at once with motion controllers.
Is it a great VR showcase? For those of a certain mindset, it’ll push the right buttons. While it’s a very literal demonstration of using VR to perform physically impossible feats, it’s probably not for everyone. Some may see it simply as a physics-based toy box with objects that exhibit bizarre behaviour, and not really appreciate its creative and technical achievements. Others will find pure joy in tossing a hecatonicosachoron between their hands. Visualising a fourth spatial dimension is inherently an abstract concept, but 4D Toys somehow manages to give the player a ‘feel’ for it.
This undirected play is a contrast to Miegakure, which will carefully lead the player through finely-tuned levels of increasing complexity. Their 4D implementations are different too – in 4D Toys, you use your thumbs to scroll, translating your ‘slice’ along the fourth dimension, marked by a vertical slider, with a granular control over the offset. In Miegakure, you press a button and your ‘slice’ automatically rotates through 90 degrees rather than translating, press the button again to rotate back to the initial orientation, and you can’t move your character until it is done rotating. In other words, 4D Toys is considerably more ‘freeform’ by design, showcasing the remarkable 4D engine that powers Miegakure in a meaningful way.
image courtesy mtb design works, inc.
As explained on ten Bosch’s official blog, the project is the result of creating 4D physics for Miegakure, a game he has been working on since 2009. The physics system was intended ‘as a purely aesthetic component’, but 4D Toys has benefitted Miegakure significantly, inspiring many ideas for levels and scenes.
The success of 4D Toys also means that VR support for Miegakure is likely. Colin Northway of Fantastic Contraption fame can be seen trying the first prototype in a tweet from October last year. “The game takes place on a small island in the middle of the VR area and you still hold a regular controller to move your character”, says ten Bosch. “It’s pretty cool, you can make the island larger and feel what it’s like from an almost first-person perspective, then make it smaller and keep playing from a vantage point where you can see everything”.
As one of the first game genres to embrace VR, sim racing has successfully transitioned from the ‘very early adopter’ stage (using Oculus development kits) to the ‘early adopter’ stage (the first-generation consumer headsets). Now that the majority of PC racing sims support VR, there are several compelling options to try.
Update (10/6/17):Following the recent launch of Project CARS 2, this top 5 list has been overhauled. Every title has been re-evaluated based on its current VR features and performance.
From mid-2014 until early 2016, when the Rift DK2 was essentially the only hardware option, software support in racing simulators was a nightmare. Since then, the situation has improved, but each software solution featured here can still be considered a work-in-progress.
The HTC Vive launched on April 5th 2016, a week after the consumer Oculus Rift. The headsets shared similar specifications and, for seated games like racing sims, should have delivered a very similar experience. However, that was definitely not the case. In terms of getting development kits into the wild, Oculus had more than a two-year head start, the effects of which are still apparent today; at launch, the Vive was poorly supported by racing sims, and in some cases remained totally unsupported for months. Assetto Corsa (2014), for example, was functional on the Rift DK1 in Early Access in 2013 and had solid consumer Rift support by May 2016, but only received Vive support in March 2017.
The situation continues to improve; with the exception of Automobilista (2016), every PC racing sim (in active development) now has some form of VR support for the Vive and Rift. Below are our top five recommendations – please note, the list is weighted towards the VR implementation, not the ‘simulation value’. The truth is, depending on your sensitivity to particular contributing factors, one could justify listing these titles in almost any order, as they all feature a functional, competent VR mode – many of their differences are nuanced.
RaceRoom Racing Experience (2013) is the only ‘free-to-play’ sim on the list (most content requires purchasing). After the studio endured a challenging transition from SimBin to Sector3 in 2014, the game began to improve significantly, with a clearer direction towards realism. Today, the presentation is becoming more consistent, with many impressive track environments and detailed cars, representing the DTM series particularly well. Unlike the others on this list, the game offers three different physics models – ‘Novice’, ‘Amateur’, and ‘Get Real’, which are effectively driving assist presets. Even on the most ‘hardcore’ setting, handling is on the forgiving side, but it is a very enjoyable drive, thanks to its powerful audio design and impressive AI.
VR support in RaceRoom landed for Rift and Vive in January, and despite using a relatively old graphics engine, Sector3 delivered a solid implementation. Performance is strong on both headsets, the menus and HUD work well, and it supports supersampling and world scale adjustment.
Photo courtesy Sector3 Studios
However, due to an outdated, 180-degree steering animation, along with an incomplete, poorly-proportioned driver model (with no torso), RaceRoom’s VR experience has suffered. iRacing (2008) also used 180-degree rotation for years, but has since reworked the animations across most of its cars. Sector3 has been improving in this area – every new car they release has an animation that does well beyond 180, and features a complete, more-realistic driver model. But the old steering and driver model still feature in many of the cars, including the popular DTM and GT3 series. The cars with the old animations also seem to be the most inconsistent in their default head position, but the game does allow for cockpit camera/seat adjustment.
There are other signs that this title wasn’t originally built with VR in mind – the cockpit mirrors appear distorted and aren’t very usable (but there is a ‘virtual mirror’ option for the HUD), and there are jarring transitions during loading, and the opening panning camera shots before each race can feel uncomfortable in VR. RaceRoom’s widely praised audio doesn’t come across as well as it could in VR either, as it doesn’t support surround or spatial audio.
Assetto Corsa is a very popular sim, recognised for its intuitive physics and attractive visuals. Unlike most PC racing sims, it gives a significant amount of attention to road cars, giving the title a more mainstream appeal. Many prestigious brands are represented, including a vast collection of Ferrari and Porsche race and road cars. It also supports ‘mods’, and is now the go-to sim for user-created cars and tracks. Sometimes criticised for being a ‘hot-lap sim’ due to its basic career mode features, Assetto Corsa doesn’t offer the best single player experience – although its AI has improved. However, the game’s public multiplayer lobbies are very popular, making this the best choice for those looking for a quick race against human opponents.
The combination of slick visuals and sublime handling meant that even in the Oculus DK2 era—where no in-game menu system meant a limiting and painful setup process—Assetto Corsa was still worth trying. Since May 2016 however, the Rift has enjoyed much-improved support, and now Vive owners don’t have to mess with unofficial hacks for support as the game now natively supports OpenVR. An ‘IPD slider’ in the sim’s OpenVR app offers a solution to world scaling on Vive, and there is quick access to a cockpit camera adjustment.
Today’s VR experience on Assetto Corsa is fairly painless. Unfortunately Kunos aren’t planning to implement a proper VR menu system, so you still need to launch the sim from a desktop view (although it is possible to operate this from a virtual desktop app). Once you’ve loaded a track, Assetto Corsa is stunning in VR, with smooth performance even on large grids, and excellent steering animations across all cars. The motion-to-photon latency is typically very low, improving your connection to the car and delivering a highly immersive experience. If your priority for VR immersion is low latency combined with high-quality visuals, Assetto Corsa strikes the best balance on this list.
Unfortunately, it’s not perfect. The curved HUD and in-sim menu system isn’t the most elegant or intuitive, and the mirrors are inaccurate, rendering a single FOV across all cockpit mirrors. The basic ‘surround’ audio implemented on the Rift is welcome, but it still doesn’t work when using the Vive, and it can’t match the spatial audio system of Project CARS 2.
By far the oldest product on the list (first seen in 2002), Live for Speed’s evolution has been painfully slow at times. In stark contrast, its VR updates across the last couple of years have been remarkably rapid—often industry-leading—implementing Rift and Vive support before either consumer hardware had even launched. The sim remains an impressive example of uncompromising driving physics, but visually it struggles to compete against the more recent titles, particularly with its ageing selection of (mostly) fantasy car models. Live for Speed is an ongoing project; 15 years of development updates have resulted in a unique, feature-laden simulation. The core driving experience is excellent, combining intuitive handling with strong force feedback.
Despite its dated visuals and fictional vehicles, Live for Speed remains a very interesting sim as a VR showcase. Its system requirements are very low, delivering 90Hz performance on sub-minimum spec machines, with a streamlined setup and comprehensive options to fiddle with. There are considerations for VR users not found in other sims, like a HUD-based keyboard (combined with a gaze-based pointer) for entering text, and a dedicated ‘walk’ mode intended to improve the experience of exploring the track environments in VR ‘on foot’.
Since version 0.6Q in September 2016, Live for Speed has featured stereoscopic mirrors, an effect first seen in Codemasters’ experimental VR support for GRID Autosport (2014). Live for Speed remains ahead of the competition here – it is the only racing sim on the list with the feature.
Interior and side mirrors in all other sims essentially appear like digital screens rather than reflections. iRacing and Project CARS 2 manage to move the mirror view relative to head position, but they’re still not stereoscopic. It might seem like an insignificant feature, but the effect of depth in mirrors has a remarkable impact for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it helps to mitigate the low resolution of current VR hardware; it’s hard enough to see distant objects in the main environment, and certainly troublesome to see detail in mirrors (many VR users opt to use a larger ‘virtual mirror’ as part of the HUD). Stereoscopic depth allows the eyes to resolve detail more easily. Secondly, there is the natural sensation of looking in a mirror—we expect them to work in a certain way, and it’s jarring when they don’t.
Due to the close proximity of the mirror itself, your eye’s convergence reflex is in full effect; when the virtual reflection is faked and appears as a ‘screen’, you’re having to look at the details as a close object, messing with your focal distance in an unnatural way. In Live for Speed, you look ‘through’ the mirrors as in reality, and focus on distant objects in the reflection in the same way as looking straight ahead.
The effect is so convincing that I genuinely feel a heightened sense of presence, particularly when leaning up to the rear view mirror and seeing my own reflection (wearing a helmet) making exactly the same movement. All VR racing simulators should have this feature; unfortunately a mirror is one of the most performance-sapping elements to render. But once they do, ‘virtual mirrors’ on the HUD will likely be a thing of the past as they become completely unnecessary when the ‘real’ mirrors are so good.
With huge performance headroom, Live for Speed always feels responsive in VR. Thanks to minimal latency on inputs and the 1:1 head movement in the stereoscopic reflections, LFS achieves a level of body presence that is a step above all other driving sims, despite the fact that the driver model is presented in very low detail by modern standards. It ticks almost every box for VR sim racing nirvana – perfect tracking, low latency, surround audio, 1:1 steering animation, and stereoscopic mirrors all contribute to powerful immersion, but it is let down by its dated visuals and a choppy world movement relative to head position – apparently due to the sim’s 100Hz physics update rate not matching the 90Hz rendering.
NASA and Oculus have launched their collaborative project ‘Mission: ISS’ for the Oculus Rift for free and it’s offers a detailed, visually sumptuous virtual reality trip to space that most of us would otherwise never experience.
Virtual Reality’s transportative powers being used to live out experiences most of us will never have in real life is rarely most effective than in the realm of space travel. Given the tiny fraction of Earth’s inhabitants that have (around 500 to date) or ever will venture beyond the planet’s gravitational field, VR can give as what life is like for those brave enough to travel beyond it.
Mission: ISS is the latest VR experience to try to convey what it feels to be an astronaut as the collaborative project between Oculus and NASA attempts to recreate life onboard the International Space Station (ISS) high above Earth’s atmosphere.
According to a blog post from Oculus, the new experience, built for the Rift and Touch motion controllers, uses space station models direct from NASA themselves, while information for enhancing the authenticity of the project were gleaned from conversations with “multiple astronauts and the VR Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.”
This is no Sci-fi action extravaganza though, as the most outrageous tasks you’ll get to fulfil on your virtual extra-terrestrial mission is docking cargo capsules and station maintenance. You do however get to venture beyond ISS itself to experience spacewalks however.
Magnopus are the developers behind Mission:ISS and the team is born from experience in Hollywood visual effects and are now focused on the realms of interactive entertainment.
Mission: ISS is available now on Oculus Home for the Rift and Touch (and I’m sure for HTC Vive via Revive either now or soon) for free. It’s well worth checking out even if you posses just a passing interest in the subject matter.
VR motion control comes to AirMech: Command, and the game has been released on Steam with support for multiple VR headsets and controllers through OpenVR. The game originally appeared as a launch title for the Oculus Rift in March 2016.
Drawing direct inspiration from pioneering real-time strategy title Herzog Zwei, AirMech started life as a free-to-play game on PC in 2012, where it has remained an open beta. Optimised for gamepad control like the Mega Drive/Genesis game, AirMech naturally found its way to Xbox and PlayStation consoles in the form of AirMech Arena in 2015. As Oculus launched the Rift with a seated, gamepad-controlled focus, the game was again in an ideal position to transition to a new platform, and AirMech: Command became an exclusive launch title for the headset on March 28th 2016. The game was largely well-received, showcasing VR’s suitability for the RTS and MOBA genres.
Today, Carbon Games released a major update, adding support for Oculus Touch controllers (existing owners of the Rift version receive a free update). And with the timed exclusivity complete, the product has also launched on Steam with full OpenVR support. As shown in the teaser trailer, the motion controls allow for brand new ways of interacting with units and navigating around the battlefield, described by the creators as ‘a huge game changer for RTS games in VR’.
By using two virtual cursors, Carbon have devised a way of amplifying hand movements for faster control, and the zoom and rotate functions mean that you can play in a single spot like a board game (seated VR is still supported) or walk around a massive world in room-scale VR.
Robo Recall has been given a locomotion mod for those looking for a less-restrictive movement system. Epic Games’ new VR shooter employs a teleport mechanic for movement, but has full mod support, allowing for additional experimental control systems.
Robo Recall, an Oculus Touch-exclusive action shooter, has only been available for three days and already the community has been treated to a mod that allows free-form locomotion. Like the majority of FPS titles built for VR, Epic Games designed Robo Recall’s gameplay around a teleportation mechanic, as traditional locomotion (with analog sticks) is a well-documented contributor to VR sickness. However, each time a game launches with a teleport system, a passionate crowd of gamers who aren’t adversely affected by artificial locomotion in VR complain about the missed opportunity.
User tonsta31, developer at MGSStudios, has been posting updates to his experimental locomotion mod on the Oculus community forums, which allows more traditional movement with the left analog stick on the Touch controller (in addition to teleporting). Unfortunately, Epic aren’t currently allowing mods to function in the story mode (due to the global leaderboards), so your locomotion antics will be limited to the mission mode.
The latest version 3 of the mod adds a locomotion tweak, jump, 45 degree snap turning, adjusted slo-mo, and fixed damage. The game appears to play well with the free movement already, although it does mess with some of the AI routines. Tonsta31 is working quickly however, and hopes to improve enemy response in a future update, as well has adding ‘new guns, a new level, a double jump and other bits’. It’s definitely worth keeping an eye on the forum thread.
Epic’s mod support has also benefited those affected by the current rotation issues in roomscale setups. The 360 teleportation mod from developer Huge Robot solves the problem, and Epic has stated that an official resolution will be out by the end of the month.
Oculus Rift exclusive title Robo Recall – which launched just yesterday – can already be played on the HTC Vive, using the infamous Revive mod. And, as you can see in this video, the game seems to work remarkably well.
Oculus’ approach to encouraging development on their Rift virtual reality platform via funded exclusive (be that timed or permanent) has been one of the most divisive and hotly discussed since consumer VR became a reality. It’s something that’s divided the VR community and is brought into sharp focus when exclusive titles are perceived as particularly desirable, as is the case with Robo Recall – a title developed by Epic Games exclusively for Oculus Rift and Touch motion controllers, published though Oculus’ content portal Home.
Whatever your views are on Oculus’ stance on the subject of exclusivity, the fact remains that there are a lot of VR enthusiasts out there who only own the Steam VR powered HTC Vive headset who would very much like to play Robo Recall, one of the most polished VR titles yet published. Luckily for them they can, thanks to the infamous Revive software mod, and as seen in the video above, this is exactly what some Vive owners are now doing.
What’s perhaps surprising is how well it seems to work. The YouTuber MERPTV (above) puts the title through its paces, with the most obvious potential issue – the lack of thumbsticks on the Vive’s Steam VR controllers – taken care of with the trackpads used in substitute.
Of course, if you don’t own an Oculus Rift and Touch device, the title won’t be free to play on the Vive. You’ll need to stump up the £22.99 ($29.99 in the US) on the Oculus Store to get access to the game first – a price I’m sure many are willing to pay for such a polished VR title. After which, Vive users should head to Revive’s GitHub page which includes the latest version of the injection software as well as a setup guide for new users. One important note here – we’ve not yet had a chance to try this out for ourselves and would point out that running such a configuration will be officially unsupported by the software’s developers and publishers. If you’re happy with those caveats, you should be good to go.
Of course, the game was developed with the Touch controllers in mind, and as pointed about above, although using the SteamVR controllers may not be the optimal experience, they are certainly more than functional.
Let us know how you get on with Robo Recall on the Vive using Revive in the comments below.
When the Robo Recall title screen first appears – a voice calling its name out like a boxing ring announcer while the electro-rock soundtrack builds in the background – arcade aficionados could be forgiven for thinking they had stepped into an alternate universe where Sega’s legendary arcade divisions were still churning out hits to this very day. That’s the company in which Robo Recall belongs.
Unlike an arcade machine you won’t need a stack of shiny coins to play this shooter. If you own an Oculus Rift, it’s being brought to you absolutely free of charge.
Publisher: Oculus Developers: Epic Games Available On: Oculus Rift (Oculus Touch Required) Release Date: Q1 2017
Gameplay
Epic Games’ Showdown demo first shown way back in 2014 was a cinematic walk down a street during an assault on a giant robot; rockets firing and bullets whizzing all around you, people diving for cover, cars flipped into the air by explosions, and you right in the middle of it all. You reach the end of the street and stop beneath the gigantic robot, where you look up and take in the scale of it all, and the culmination of the demo is when this robot stares right into your eyes and roars. It stayed with me, and it’s still well worth a look today if you haven’t seen it.
You can draw a line from the Showdown cinematic from 2014 through to the playable Bullet Train demo that captured everyone’s imagination in 2016, and now to Robo Recall. The same DNA runs through them all. From humble beginnings with a tiny team begging, stealing, and borrowing assets and time to build prototypes for their VR vision, the partnership with Oculus has allowed Epic Games to spin up a team of 15 people to turn Bullet Train into Robo Recall. It is telling that in the nascent VR industry even bigger players like Epic Games need partnerships to justify investment in VR content.
Robo Recall, then. Comparing to those earlier sketches it’s what doesn’t make the transition that sticks in my mind more than what does. The excess of Showdown’s environmental destruction is completely absent; Robo Recall’s world is one that you traverse through but never impact. Cars are static. Windows don’t shatter. Lampposts shrug off rocket blasts. There is no ongoing pitched battle between opposing forces, we’re back to gaming’s favourite lone wolf cliché as you clear each area solo. There aren’t any vehicles to take a trip on, and with the exception of a few blimps high in the sky there’s not much else moving around the play area.
That’s the sort of thing that was lost on the journey from Showdown to Robo Recall – a reflection of the relatively modest size of the team working on it – but what have we gained? Quite a lot as it turns out, not least of which is a far more lighthearted tone, resulting in an experience that is all the better for not taking itself too seriously.
The Unreal Engine is put to good use building a visually arresting future cityscape, with supersampling options that allow those with the GPU horsepower to improve clarity even further, and enough graphical settings to ensure that even minimum spec machines get a smooth ride. Clean lines, readable environments and enemies, and an excellent sense of scale abound as billboards shine their adverts at you, and blimps pass by overhead. The robots themselves impress with a tangible solidity and presence, and they chatter away to you endearingly during gameplay. This is no grimdark future, it’s all very tongue in cheek and deliciously meme-heavy which may delight or annoy depending on the individual.
…it’s all very tongue in cheek and deliciously meme-heavy which may delight or annoy depending on the individual.
This is a game about mastering movement while engaging bad guys through the twin mediums of guns and casual up-close dismemberment. Grabbing enemy ordnance out of the air and sending it back at them is a frequent happening – the signature moves from Bullet Train all present and correct – and you’ll need to get good at analysing enemy abilities, managing encounters, prioritising targets, building and keeping your multiplier up, and finding your flow. This is all in service of completing challenges and racking up immense scores to attack the leaderboard.
There are echoes of Rocksteady’s Batman combat, Platinum Games’ Vanquish (2010), and even the recent Doom (2016) reboot. Fast paced, kinetic encounters with time slowing at critical junctures to allow you to execute (pun intended) your plan of attack. Being in VR lends this a crisp realism that those games could never match: when you clear a zone it was you clearing the zone, not the abstract byproduct of button mashing, and each encounter feels very personal as a result.
Due to the generally rudimentary enemy AI, only very rarely do the encounters pose a real sense of threat. You can feel the game walking the line between VR shooter enthusiasts and more casual shooter fans, aiming for that delicate balance that serves both in different ways. The satisfaction comes from efficiently demolishing the assembled robot ranks rather than a sense of winning through against impossible odds – in this regard it’s almost a puzzle game, and I frequently had to adapt my tactics in order to grow my score multiplier.
Robo Recall neatly sidesteps the whole teleportation vs. direct locomotion debate. The gameplay couldn’t function without teleportation. To return to the Rocksteady Batman comparison, that game sees you dart with improbable speed between melee combatants with the flick of a stick and tapping of a button. That is the equivalent to the teleportation in Robo Recall, where you push forward on a stick to ‘launch’ out your destination marker, and then rotate the stick to alter the direction you will be facing when you arrive. Teleport ’n’ Twist, if you will.
This teleporting system allows you to coordinate – no, to choreograph – your assaults: teleport behind shotgunner, relieve them of their robotic head, use torso as shield, toss it at a group of face huggers, spot a robot leaping off a truck, teleport beneath it, use the brief slow motion moment after each teleport to juggle the robot in the air with the revolver, meanwhile grab a face hugger, teleport to the top of said truck, and then lob the face hugger – now ticking down to self destruction – into a group of robots beneath taking them all out in one explosion while reaching behind to grab your shotgun and dispatch the rocketeer whizzing overhead. The whole manoeuvre is executed in a few scant seconds.
The combat is exhilarating, slick, satisfying, and challenging and it simply wouldn’t be possible to reach this John Woo level of acrobatics and bullet ballet if one had to trudge through the environment one step at a time. The teleportation isn’t simply a concession to comfort – although the team did have the inclusive mantra that ‘nobody will get sick in this game’ – instead it’s integral to the gameplay, if sometimes a little too fussy when trying to reach points at the extremes of its range, very close in, or above you.
The game awards three stars for escalating tiers of score in a mission – the third of which will feel completely out of reach at first. Additional stars are awarded for completing a variety of challenges that encourage repeat play such as finishing a mission without firing a gun, only using weapons scavenged from fallen enemies, or taking out a large number of robots in one of the timed extermination events. A challenge to finish a particular mission without taking any damage still eludes me, as does a boss rush that needs to be finished in under five minutes. The game threatens to turn into a racer as you look to shave off a second here, a second there, in your mad dash to the finish.
The combat is exhilarating, slick, satisfying, and challenging
Your weapons are upgraded as you unlock stars, reducing recoil, increasing damage, adding holo-sights, the usual. Once a clip is empty a weapon is largely useless but it can still be used to bludgeon robots, bat ordnance away, or thrown. After a respawn delay a brand new, fully loaded, weapon will be teleported into your holster. XP awarded after each mission feeds into your overall level, and this awards perks that decrease respawn time for weapons and teleports and increase your scoring potential. When you have earned five stars on a mission its All Star variation is unlocked, and this is where the real meat of the experience is to be found for those looking to engage more seriously with the game. Enemies are more numerous, move faster, and react more swiftly to your actions. The AI isn’t any smarter, but your reaction time is greatly reduced. You will need to significantly step up your skills to rank on the separate score leaderboards for this mode – its rhythms are so different from the standard mode that it almost feels like a different game entirely – but you need to unlock it first, mission by mission, and that process is far from easy.
One of the few frustrations in this package is determining when a weapon has been teleported to your holsters. In the midst of a frenetic battle it’s all too easy to reach behind to attempt to grab your shotgun, or go for the revolver on your hip, only to come away empty handed and waste valuable seconds before you realise your hand is empty because the gun hasn’t yet respawned. Later upgrades naturally mitigate this somewhat, as does the realisation that if you have spent a lot of time in slow-motion you’ll need to wait a lot longer in ‘real’ time before a weapon respawns.
In your time with the game you will ‘recall’ thousands of robots taken from the varied roster in evidence, encompassing basic pistol or shotgun wielding bots, through shield carriers, arachnid style skitterers, flying drones, leaping rocketeers, mini-bosses and one major boss, with each requiring you to mix up your repertoire of moves. They are visually distinct, either by shape or careful colouration, so every scenario is eminently readable as you plan your moves. You will clear areas of all robots, defend areas against attack, and even collect undamaged robots (neatly forcing you into non-lethal action by tossing them into a vortex that fires them up into the sky to be collected in a blimp for ‘analysis’).
The three environments that are home to the nine missions are distinct, but not particularly evocative: City Centre, Old Town, and Rooftops. Even the names sound mildly disappointed in themselves. Why not set part or all of a level on the blimps? Why don’t we ever see inside a building during a mission? Why not start in a building and erupt into the streets a few storeys up? I was waiting for an area set around a bullet train in homage to the famous prototype but nothing so dynamic ever appears, with missions electing instead to criss-cross the same handful of areas again and again. It gets old fairly quickly. What is there suggests a lot of effort has gone into constructing this world, so it’s a real shame we get to see so little of it and what we do see is limited to streets and boxy rooftops. They’re fun because the core gameplay loop would be fun anywhere, but there’s a sense that these aren’t quite the carefully crafted combat arenas and scenarios that they could be.
…there’s a sense that these aren’t quite the carefully crafted combat arenas and scenarios that they could be.
There is a welcome sojourn between missions to your basement HQ, where you can equip weapon upgrades, view your XP level, check on your unlocked abilities, and select missions. It’s inside this HQ that the single most important feature is to be found: among the bobblehead models and desk fans that you can interact with you will find coffee mugs. When you pick a mug up by its handle, the pinkie finger on your hand is extended. This is the kind of class that can’t be taught, you either have it or you don’t.
And Robo Recall does have class. It has the assured game mechanics of people who had a singular vision. It has crisp, sharp visuals and stable frame rates that come from people who intimately understand the technology they’re working with. It’s all too easy to forget how hard it is to make something this good, even if the combat arenas don’t quite live up to Epic Games’ own storied lineage. There just isn’t enough of it, despite the innate re-playability. Back in the days of their humble shareware beginnings this would’ve been the taster episode before the main event. Just when it feels like it’s finding a groove it’s all over.
The tantalising promise of All Star mode gives the game one source of longevity. Another comes from an extensive suite of modding options, allowing the community to build their own levels, encounters, and bad guys. Epic Games will be seeding this with demo content taken from their own games as well as some well known third parties. Nurturing a modding community is something that Epic Games have been famed for, so there is a real possibility that the community will supplement the core content on offer here.
Getting down to cold, hard, facts let me throw a few numbers at you. It took me two hours to complete my first run through the nine missions. It took another two before my scores were getting respectable, and another full hour in a frenzied attempt to unlock the All Star mode on one particular mission. The average player should be well into double figures of hours played to grab the majority of stars and upgrades – but that player would have to be a fan of arcade style score attack games, and at peace with replaying the limited content.
That I want more of it is a testament to Robo Recall’s quality, because what it lacks in breadth of content it makes up for with style, flair, and verve. It’s great to be playing the type of arcade game that Sega would’ve been proud of in their heyday.
Immersion
Two belt holsters and two back holsters house your pistol, revolver, shotgun, and energy rifle. You grab them – and anything else in the world you want to pick up – with the hand trigger on the Touch controller and shoot with the primary trigger. The actions of reaching for weapons at your side or from your back are so ingrained from movies and TV shows that they feel instantly naturalistic. It’s hard not to feel like a badass when you reaction-grab a revolver from your side holster and despatch a passing robot with a head shot. It’s hard not to feel like Neo in The Matrix as you’re plucking rockets and bullets out of the air.
As with other Rift shooters, this game makes the most of the Touch controllers. The ergonomics allow the hand grip to be used in a way that the equivalent Vive Controller button just can’t support, and that grip+trigger combo really improves the sense of realism.
Leaning around and under incoming fire, especially when the game’s signature slow motion is in effect, is likewise very empowering and incredibly cool. Grabbing a robot by its front or rear torso-mounted handle (to its plaintive cry of ‘why did they give us handles?!’), and then grabbing its hands and pulling the arms off would be grisly if it weren’t all so lighthearted and comic. Likewise removing the head (and then using it as a bowling ball to dispatch his colleagues). They’re appliances, not people, which allows us to enjoy the gratuitous nature of the violence without the need for too much introspection.
The sound deserves special mention. Effects are meaty when they need to be, subtle when they need to be, epic when they need to be and wonderfully positional. The sound mix overall is very effective, and this does ground you in the game world.
Unfortunately immersion does take a big hit when you realise that said world is entirely static. Windows don’t shatter, abandoned cars ignore rocket blasts, and even in scripted moments the world is left alone. It makes it feel sterile in contrast to the vibrant art style. It’s a backdrop, you just happen to be ‘in’ it. I’d even welcome hoary old clichés like exploding barrels and crates, just a little something in the world that recognises and responds to the carnage. In fact any sign of life in the world aside from the robots would be welcome.
Some technical issues also intrude to reduce the immersion. When grabbing certain robots from behind to use as a shield, and then wanting to finish them off, you will discover that the back of the head is entirely impervious to gunshot. You need to tilt it unnaturally to get an angle from the side, or release it and then shoot it from a distance. Sometimes weapons clip into the bad guys, and the shot issues from ‘inside’ their hit region and doesn’t register. This wouldn’t be so bad if the pace of the game didn’t demand a constant stream of kills to keep the multipliers going – it’s frustrating to lose out when things look like they should work but don’t, especially inside VR. There also seems to be an issue with hit registration when robots are in the middle of recovery animations after a jump or fall – there is a window in which they appear invulnerable but it isn’t consistent. Sometimes they take the hit, sometimes they don’t. Or maybe I’m just awful at aiming at fast moving targets.
The teleportation also suffers somewhat in specific circumstances. If you arrive in a location just as a robot also moves into it, you end up in a physics-breaking wedlock and they start to jitter uncontrollably and clip into your view space. You’d imagine that a more graceful solution would simply be to have robots in that situation pushed away or destroyed. Most likely easier said than done, but the net result is very distracting.
Shooting and teleporting issues can likely be patched out if they are widespread and not just down to the build I’ve played – updates were rolling out daily as I played the game for review, so the team are clearly on the ball here – but right now the immersion does take a hit when these issues crop up.
In common with other Touch-enabled titles using the standard two-sensor layout, the temptation – especially in the heat of battle – is to occasionally aim behind yourself to pick up a stray robot. This invariably ends in disaster, with a complete loss of hand tracking and more valuable seconds wasted as you reorient yourself with the teleportation. Those with three or more sensors, and the requisite coverage, will have more joy here. It suffers somewhat without full room scale, but if you’re accustomed to the ‘plant feet, face forward’ Oculus mantra you won’t have any problems.
Those annoyances aside, the immersion in general is excellent. The kinaesthetic nature of your interactions with the game make it feel very naturalistic, very rewarding, to play. Be that shooting weapons, grabbing robots off their feet, or grabbing bullets and rockets out of the sky. The fact that you’re pulling off Neo-esque manoeuvres and Batman-style takedowns is entertaining even after several hours, and it’s a credit to the team behind the game that you rarely fail to achieve what you want to: you grab what you intend to, where you intend to, when you intend to. In a game moving this quickly, that’s no mean feat.
Comfort
With its reliance on natural movements, and a teleportation based system of motion, the game is entirely comfortable throughout. You are in control at all times.
It is possible to teleport yourself to the edge of tall buildings, so those suffering from vertigo might unwittingly put themselves in an uncomfortable position. One third of the game is spent in an area called ‘Rooftops’ so consider yourselves warned.
On the purely physical side of things I found that half an hour in Robo Recall was more of a workout than many dedicated VR sports games. Depending on how ‘into’ it you get, you may well find yourself exhausted after a strenuous session.
Star Wars Celebration is the pinnacle fan event for the franchise, attracting 1000s of attendees every year and is traditionally a venue for big Star Wars announcements, trailers and games to be teased.
