We had a chance to go hands-on with Gumi and Yomuneco’s Sword of Gargantua at GDC back in March, and while an official write-up never materialized out of the hectic game-filled dev conference, a demo for the studio’s upcoming online action RPG is finally here for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
Set in a world dominated by a race of giants called the Gargantua, the full release will let you and up to three other players join in physical combat against the Gargantua, giant overlords in the combat-focused fantasy world. Swords of Gargantua is slated for release on Steam Early Access later this year.
The demo is single player-only, which shows off some of the massive scale of the world and its warrior inhabitants. The Gargantua’s minions tower at six-feet tall, while the Gargantua themselves loom over you at increasingly impressive heights.
Using weapons such as battle axes and swords, you can physically strike enemies, although you’ll have to watch out for the durability of the weapon along with your own stamina, which will limit your swinging power, making hits less effective.
Locomotion, while using a standard smooth forward and snap-turn scheme, also offers a dash mode that you can activate by physically leaning in the desired direction for those quick jumps into the fray. A targeting system allows you to lock onto enemies and circle around them, using all of the locomotion schemes at your disposal to block, dodge, and defeat your hulking enemies.
Image courtesy Gumi & Yomuneco
In the demo, you face off against a few waves of minions at the throne of what presumably is one of the lower-level Garantua rulers. The throne room is littered with shields and epic long swords. Watch out for the build up swings of the minions though, because they do devastating damage that can quickly put you out of the game. All objects are physics-based too, meaning you can satisfyingly clank together your swords, and feel some degree of ‘imagined’ force feedback through your motion controllers. Seeing your weapon stop mid-swing as you make contact with an enemy works somewhat like it does in GORN (2017).
Talking to Gumi & Yumenco at GDC, I was told that Swords of Gargantua wasn’t a story-based adventure, focusing on quick action so you and friends can drop into a battle at any time.
“Since this demo is the first public playable build, you may experience some issues,” the studio says. “We’re currently focused on the Early Access build of the game, so should you experience any issues that limits your enjoyment of the game, we ask for your patience and understanding until we launch in Early Access later this year. Looking forward to hearing your feedback!”
Swords of Gargantua will be Yomuneco’s second dive into VR, following their latest VR puzzle game Enigma Sphere: Enhanced Edition (2017)for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Sprint Vector (2018), the Mario Kart-style VR foot racing game from Raw Data (2017) developers Survios, just got new content update called the ‘Big Bang Update’ which includes a new map, two new playable characters a new leaderboard for racers.
The new map, called Cosmic Odyssey, puts you in the heart neighboring black hole and in a top-secret research center nearby studying the singularity.
The two new characters are Rockslide, a comet strapped to a bipedal body, and Necho, the cat-like, cyborg alien queen infused with the souls inhabitants of a dying planet by the same name.
The Big Bang update also includes a new ‘pure’ leaderboard mode that adds leaderboard to all maps, “so players conducting solo runs without items and AI can compete against each other solely based on skill,” the company says in a blogpost. Survios is wiping all leaderboards to level the playing field in its wake.
Neat Corporation today announced that Budget Cuts, their upcoming VR stealth game, now has an official launch date after difficulties with framerate stability and other bugs encountered in the game delayed the game’s May 31st launch. And there’s not much time left to wait, as the game is set to launch tomorrow, June 14th at 10 AM PT (local time here).
Update (06/13/18): Neat Corp sent out a surprise tweet this morning saying the delay is coming to end.
The original article detailing the delay follows below:
Original article (06/30/18): The studio announced the news via a Reddit post, saying that the long-awaited Budget Cuts still suffers optimization issues. The studio says they’ll be taking the time to improve the game’s stability and framerate until it’s “consistent and acceptable,” delaying Budget Cuts launch until further notice.
The latest delay comes after a two-week delay earlier this month, which Neat Corp says they thought would be enough to fix the outlying issues with the game.
With the review embargo up since May 28th, we’ve already had a chance to dive in, giving it a solid [9.2/10]. In my playthrough, the bugs I encountered weren’t grave enough to consider the game unreviewable, or even remotely unplayable. In retrospect, I may have just been lucky to have seen acceptable frame rates on my admittedly higher-spec test rig and HTC Vive, and didn’t encounter anything more than what I would consider minor bugs that weren’t gamebreaking in the least, something Neat Corp said would be ironed out for launch, then scheduled for May 31st.
We did note bad optimization on Rift, but went ahead with the review on Vive anyway, giving the studio the benefit of the doubt that the press version wasn’t ready for Rift users in the first place, citing the lack of 180-degree sensor support on the press build on Steam.
“So, when will the game release? The honest answer is that we don’t know, but it’s going to be as soon as the game is as performant and stable as it should be,” says Neat Corp’s Freya Holmer. “I’d like to say we’re releasing soon, but that meant 2.5 years last time we used that term, so I’m going to say “in 5 minutes” which should mean approximately 1-2 weeks. Will it take longer? Maybe, maybe not. It’s very hard to predict when the issues we’re facing have many unknown variables and moving parts, which is why we’re not ready with a specific release date. Maybe we’ll time it perfectly with E3, to make sure our game will be drowned out by all of the other announcements.”
On the docket of items to address: occlusion culling, audio performance, eliminating rare progression-blocking bugs, and fixing screen glitches when framerate drops on Oculus Native build.
“On behalf of the Budget Cuts team,” says Holmer “we’re truly sorry, and hope you’re all okay with waiting just a little bit more.”
While disheartening to hear, we stick by our review score, and look forward to the day when users can see for themselves why we rated Budget Cuts so highly; hopefully sooner rather than later.
Downward Spiral: Horus Station is a sci-fi adventure that puts you aboard a vast, abandoned space station that was cleared out of all life after military-grade robots turned on the station’s human inhabitants. There’s a lot to admire about the full release of Downward Spiral—an expanded universe first seen in Downward Spiral: Prologue (2017), a 20-minute taster that released on Steam in fall of last year—although after playing through the campaign, which features first-person shooter elements and can be played in single player or co-op mode, I left feeling unclear about what Downward Spiral really wanted to be, making it a jack of all trades, but master of none.
Developer: 3rd Eye Studio Available On: Steam (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PC), PSN (Summer 2018 on PSVR/PS4) Reviewed On: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift Release Date: May 31st, 2018, Summer 2018 on PSVR/PS4
Gameplay
Downward Spiral is an atmospheric adventure built around the very Kubrick-esque Horus Space Station, a staggeringly large multi-sectioned craft replete with flickering CRTs and an environment clearly inspired by 2001 Space Odyssey (1968). I call it an ‘atmospheric adventure’ because the star of the show really is the station’s eerie atmosphere, in part due to the game’s soundtrack created by former HIM frontman Ville Valo, but a liberal sprinkling of lifeless rag doll bodies along the way doesn’t hurt either. Also, the space station is an awesome showpiece for the team’s design chops, as its interiors offer shimmering glass, high quality textures and lighting that puts it on par with many AAA games visually.
Death by laser beam – Image captured by Road to VR
As a shooter-meets-adventure game hybrid, Downward Spiral’s default campaign features guns. You can also play the game without guns and enemies, treating it as a zero-G ‘walking simulator’ (or floating simulator), but for the full experience I dove into standard difficulty mode with guns in single player. I haven’t had a chance to play either the online horde mode, or deathmatch multiplayer, so this review will concentrate on the meat of the game. I’ll be heading back in after launch, and will update accordingly.
Image courtesy 3rd Eye Studio
As a first-person shooter, Downward Spiral makes a few missteps that can’t be ignored; by not offering a clear way to aim most of the weapons, it leaves you to do guesswork as you blast away at the aggressive bots with things like your semi-automatic bolt gun, fully automatic assault gun, and a shotgun that can wipe out a baddies in a single devastating blow. While I liked the variety of weapons, I would have liked them more if aiming was consistent, and sight pictures were more clear in the guns without scopes or laser sights. The flatscreen PC/PS4 version of the game makes heavy use of an on-screen reticle, and I’m not sure enough attention was paid to how you physically shoot the gun, as lining up the sights oftentimes resulted in a miss when aiming at targets. This could be chalked up to user error, but everything is really quite dark, making whatever sights there are nearly invisible to me in the first-person. To add to the confusion, your guns don’t always go where you point them, something I would guess is due to the way physical objects like your gun, body and hands interact together. This made me rely on the shotgun most of all, because spray and pray was the only logical way of going about it.
Inventory management is a mostly seamless process however, letting you store key items and weapons, and access them by either selecting the item directly in the black overlay-style inventory, or switching between your empty hand and your last chosen gun, or one of two maneuvering devices – an automatic grappling winch and a hand-held air booster.
Grappling winch in action – Image captured by Road to VR
These maneuvering devices are fundamental to moving around station, as the zero-G locomotion scheme that lets you grab onto something and propel yourself forward by pushing off the interior of the ship—similar to the way you move around in Lone Echo (2017)—decidedly takes a back seat. Moving with the devices isn’t only a superior way to get from A-to-B, but it’s really the only consistent way to do so, as the by-hand method left me feeling nothing short of frustrated at times. Oftentimes I found myself clipping through desks and control panels to reach a button, or stopping short of my target because I brushed up against a wall that I couldn’t free myself from without looking for an opposite wall and using my hook/booster to freedom. By-hand locomotion, while comfortable (more in the Comfort section), just isn’t robust enough to be truly useful for either long distance travel, or short distance corrections, making me rely almost entirely on the devices to get around.
The story, which ought to be the star of the show, never really takes off, which begins and ends with my lack of purpose. Here I am on a derelict space station with no memory, no way of finding out what happened and why, and only the singular mission of doing whatever the CRT screens tell me: ‘RESTORE POWER TO THE MAIN REACTOR’ – ‘OPEN DOOR MANUALLY’. Ok, but why? This sort of breadcrumb trail approach, leading you from objective to objective, was my main gripe with the game. While extremely visually appealing, I just didn’t ever get the feeling of truly exploring, or learning about the world ahead of me outside the confines of ‘DO THIS BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO’.
Objective screen – Image captured by Road to VR
More on the visuals: brief interludes of deserts and underwater scenes are disquieting, gorgeous, but ultimately not well explained either. There’s certainly lots of style in Downward Spiral: Horus Station, but I felt it was lacking substance to really make it a cohesive experience. A story commensurate to the visuals would have elevated Downward Spiral by a large margin, borked shooting mechanics notwithstanding.
What it lacks in narrative, it makes up in a seemingly infinite supply of door levers and small objectives, which soon become an absolute chore. Fetch a key card, press a button, turn on the power, pull a lever so you can fetch the key card, press a button, turn on the power etc. These aren’t really puzzles, but small tasks that you have to fulfill on your one-way trip through the station. At the very least, object interaction is decidedly good enough.
The game emphasizes systematically hunting for one of the two items you need to progress: key cards and power cells to open doors and turn on subsections of the ship. There are timed challenges, but these were more often than not just to open a door before the lever becomes inactive. My favorite part was docking sections of the ship together to gain access to new location, but this was few and far between.
Key card required – Image captured by Road to VR
With three and half hours of total campaign gameplay, I found a lot of it was spent slowly navigating the ship and floating from one door to the next, interspersed with moments of robot-killing action. I suspect overall gameplay time would be significantly less in co-op mode since you can split up and hunt for key items and open doors without fear of timed challenges.
While various enemies like laser-shooting bots and giant, powerful drones help spice things up, bosses mostly require at least one or two deaths to understand how to beat. Thankfully you’re given infinite lives to retry, leading me to believe I’m actually a clone. Again, I’m still not sure because the game just doesn’t take the time to explain.
Immersion
Downward Spiral uses the same basic locomotion concept as Lone Echo, but despite the implied comfort of moving yourself through zero-G, some of my frustration comes from the inconsistency of moving around. There are no dynamic hand poses, which is entirely forgivable for a game that supports many motion controller styles, but it still suspends any belief that you’re actually grabbing onto something. Again, clipping through a control panel and not finding any purchase is enough for me to abandon the notion of using it almost entirely. Another niggle: when you approach a barrier like a wall, you automatically slow down, which in practice created needless hangups if you accidentally brush against something on your way to your destination.
Image courtesy 3rd Eye Studio
That said, the visual aspect of the game is nothing short of magnificent. I found myself gazing out at the wrecked planet below for a few minutes to take in everything, either from the safety of a lounge with a nice viewport, or in the breathless wilds of space as I went from one subsection to the next. I can’t overstate how good this game looks, showcasing a fine hand in 3D modeling.
Comfort
Despite its misgivings, Downward Spiral is consistently a very comfortable experience, something you wouldn’t think is possible in zero-G. Like Lone Echo, the user controls their path through the world by pushing off the station’s interior. This has proven time and time again to be an extremely comfortable way of moving around. Although in the game’s zero-G environment, you won’t be able to twist and turn from the standard horizontal view—a knock on realism, but a big plus for comfort.
Both the grappling hook and the air booster are both slow enough to be very comfortable, and while I personally didn’t like slowing down for doors and other barriers, the slow-to-stop mechanic also adds a measure of comfort. I could have definitely withstood a faster pace however, as it times I was left boringly boringly ratcheting from A-to-B.
Because it offers snap-turn as a default (360 tracking setups can choose to turn naturally, but no ‘free locomotion option), the game is very playable while seated, and is also extremely comfortable to use. While there is no bespoke seated mode, it really doesn’t need one thanks to the zero-G environment, which lets you go as high and as low in the area as you want. Just make sure to clear the space so you don’t knock over anything on your desk as you pull door levers in a seemingly infinite supply.
With shooters like PUBG (2017) and Epic’s Fortnite (2018) taking the traditional gaming world by storm as of late, many VR developers have seen the success of the battle royale games and attempted to replicate the winner-take-all game mode in virtual reality. While far from the first to do so, Against Gravity’s social VR game Rec Room (2016)is diving head-first into the battle royale genre with its newest activity, something they dub Rec Royale. It’s currently in open beta until the end of today for PSVR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR, and is slated for full release on June 7th.
If you haven’t played Rec Room before, here’s a quick primer:
Rec Room is a free social VR game set in a cartoony re-imagining of a YMCA, replete with activities like dodgeball and low-gravity racquetball, but also more fantasy-based multiplayer games, called Quests, that let you team up with other players to have mini-adventures. You can also style your avatar in a number of ways, with some default items like hats, clothes, hair (etc) on offer, but now players can also earn in-game coin by exploring the platform and completing Quests. The more you play, the more coins you earn, and you can buy items in the store—all of it for fun, with no microtransactions or real world currency implied. Although free, it’s also one of the highest quality VR experiences out currently, and offers many of the same features you find in other social VR apps like being able to make friends, host private chats, and although it lacks the ability to share photos and stream video not captured from within the confines of Rec Room, people usually come back for the insane amount of games on the platform.
Image courtesy Against Gravity
Now for Rec Royale:
This isn’t Rec Room‘s first shooter, as both paintball and a few other Quests feature guns too. Keeping with the game’s family-friendly vibe, Rec Room’s guns are modeled after either paintball guns or Nerf-style toys that let out varying degrees of splats and pops. Oh, and there’s a crazy number of kids on the platform too.
Putting a blanket mute on everyone in the game is an option if you don’t feel like chatting, trash talking, or dealing with kids under 13 (12 and under are officially limited to junior accounts, which prevent them from hearing and transmitting via voice chat and have other privacy restrictions). If you don’t mute everyone though, you’ll really only have to deal with about a minute of chatter before the game starts, and all 16 players are ready to hang glide from the giant flying gondola to the map below.
Image by Road to VR
Experienced battle royale players will instantly recognize what comes next. You have to scrounge for guns, ammo and health and duke it out with everyone on the map, all the while paying attention to the constantly shrinking barrier, called ‘The Swarm’, that limits the size of the play area, resulting in closer quarters combat until only one player is left. The map isn’t very large, but decidedly large enough for 16 players.
Image by Road to VR
You’re given two hip holsters for guns, and are allowed to fire only one at a time (no dual wielding). It took me a while to get used to the guns, and find out which ones were peashooters and which ones could land powerful shots. A mix of pistols, automatic rifles and sniper rifles fill the map, a big island which includes summer camps, mountains, forests, outposts, ravines and lakes—plenty of places to stock up and hunker down for when the Swarm begins. Drinkable health potions let you add health and armor, and of course you can loot your fallen enemy for anything they were holding.
Reaching to your back, you can also take out your map, which shows your position on the island, and where the Swarm is at any given time.
Image by Road to VR
Games are typically very quick thanks to the 16-player cap on player numbers. Since all players have an integrated mic, there’s a lot more teaming-up than I originally expected, as the beta only offered a free-for-all deathmatch. I don’t suspect there will be any real punishment for players caught teaming up, although a team switcher icon in the lobby leads me to believe there will also be eight vs. eight team deathmatch available too (see update below).
Rooms featuring both teleportation and ‘free’ locomotion are available, but I found myself playing in the free locomotion games for greater immersion. Variable snap-turning is available as well, letting users with 180-degree sensors setups engage in the fun too while seated or standing.
Image by Road to VR
Once the game is over, you’re tossed back into the lobby to either chat with other players, or restart a new game.
That said, optimization can definitely be improved in Rec Royale; UI objects like your healthbar can be jittery, and judder is pretty apparent in the beta overall—not a gamebreaking, or entirely uncomfortable occurrence, but definitely on the checklist of things to address before serious shooter fans can call Rec Royale a true winner (winner, chicken dinner). This is, afterall, a pre-release open beta, so there’s bound to be bugs.
In the end, Rec Royale has proven to be a really fun game in its own right, and is built on some very strong core foundations, that over time could become a big draw for the already successful VR social platform. Giving people a reason to come back and stay is fundamental to continued user engagement, and it’s clear Rec Room is hoping to land another big score with Rec Royale. I would personally love a larger map with more players, but as Against Grav makes continual strides to attract users, we can only hope for more, bigger, and greater things to come.
Update (6:00 PM ET): A member of Against Gravity reached out to us to clarify some points in the article. It was previously reported that children 12 and below weren’t allowed on the ‘Rec Room’ platform, but the studio has since updated the terms of service to allow children 12 and under, provided they signup with a junior account, which includes certain restrictions including the inability to transmit or hear voice chat.
Against Grav also reiterated via Reddit that the open beta was indeed intended for solo gameplay only, and that the inability to team-up was “a temporary pain that will be solved soon.”
Budget Cuts, a first-person stealth VR game, has been eagerly awaited since Stockholm-based indie studio Neat Corporation first released a free demo in 2016. The demo, which quickly became a breakout success in the early days of consumer VR, demonstrated a unique portal-teleportation mechanic, that, when married with the ability to throw knives at robot guards, spelled an instant hit—at least from a basic gameplay perspective. Two years later, the full release of Budget Cuts lands this Thursday, May 31st TBD and hopefully will definitely been worth the wait (see updated below).
Developer: Neat Corportation Available On: Steam (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift) Reviewed On: HTC Vive, Tested on Oculus Rift Release Date: TBD
Update (6/14/18): Following an indefinite delay announced one day before the game’s original May 31st launch date, Budget Cuts officially launches today (June 14th) at 10 AM PT (your timezone here). The delay was related to performance issues that some had reported during the game’s pre-release review build. However, we didn’t experience any major issues ourselves, and had published our initial review prior to the last minute delay announcement. As our team is at E3 2018 this week in Los Angeles, we haven’t had a chance to compare the pre-release review build to the release build, though the developer says performance has been improved on lower end systems. As soon as we’re back with VR headsets in hand, we’ll dig into the release build and update this review if there’s any noteworthy differences in our experience. That said, the review as presently printed represents the game’s pre-release review build as originally provided to us.
Gameplay
Cubicles, fluorescent lighting, copy machines that don’t work: offices can be a depressing place, but what’s even more depressing is when you find yourself in a boring, cookie-cutter job that’s slowly being automated away. But like Neo’s impetus to escape The Matrix, you soon find yourself receiving a strange phone call telling you to get the hell out of there, lest you wish to meet the same fate as your other human colleagues: reported to Human Resources to never be seen, or heard from again.
The Morpheus to your Matrix is Winta, a helpful voice on the other end of the fax machine who sends you instructions, clues, and guides you along your way as you uncover the truth behind the megalomaniac Texan owner ‘Rex’ and his obsession with squeezing the most out of his business. Humans, I learn, simply aren’t apart of the equation anymore, as an army of docile drones fill the workplace with canned banter like “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!” and “Don’t you just hate Mondays?”
Image courtesy Neat Corp
These aren’t the droids you’re worried about (or looking for), because in Rex’s palpable paranoia, which is constantly broadcasted over the office-wide loudspeaker, he’s peppered the office with military-grade security bots that tote revolvers, along with a keen sense of awareness when you’re in their line of sight. Thankfully, Winta has provided you with a number of “letter openers” (read: sharp throwing knives) and a translocator gun that lets you teleport around the sprawling office space like Nightcrawler, popping in and out of existence as you navigate the giant building’s many corridors and ventilation shafts. A preview portal lets you check if the coast is clear before committing to the jump, but the portal can be seen by anyone who looks your way.
Image captured by Road to VR
Other tools at your disposal: two gripping devices that take the place of your hands, and a magnifying glass-shaped viewer that lets you read the most essential bits of Winta’s messages, a nice touch to simplify the hand-written faxes, but not vital to the task at hand.
A quick pause before I get into the meat of the review. I have to say this: I loved the original Budget Cuts demo, and only wanted more of it, narrative be damned. But even then, Neat Corp has proven that it has storytelling chops too. I found myself exploring the facility, rifling through notes and learning about my colleagues that have disappeared before me, and laughing at the whole game’s quirky humor and tactful voiceovers. I didn’t need a fun and engaging story to enjoy ganking bots with my less-than-expert knife throws, but after playing, I can say this: expect more of Budget Cuts down the line, because there’s a big story to be told here, and I think I only scratched the surface in my nine hours of total gameplay. Now, back to the meaty bits:
I’m not ashamed to admit that in the beginning I had some trouble getting used to the way you change tools and access inventory, which hold five items of your choosing. While it took a little time to gain the muscle-button memory, Budget Cuts makes it clear that this isn’t a fast-paced, run-and-gun attack. You aren’t given an overly easy way to move and dispatch enemies because Budget Cuts is hard—and satisfyingly so.
Image captured by Road to VR
If you find yourself wishing for a silenced pistol, then you’re not playing the game right. There are no power-ups, no health boosts, no shields, and a single shot from a robot will send you back to your automatic save point. After multiple fails on a single level, it became clear to me that patience is more than virtue in Budget Cuts, it’s a necessity.
The game takes every violent situation, and makes it into a big moving puzzle; robots have standard patrol paths, and they usually stand between you and your objective; get a key card, door code, collect an item important to the narrative. Once you figure out the patrol path, you can swoop in and administer your three inches of steel, or you can challenge yourself by playing all the way through as a pacifist. That’s right, from head-to-toe, you can enforce your own Hindu code on Budget Cuts and complete the game without ever decommissioning a single robot. Ventilation shafts are plentiful, and only the quickest and most proficient teleporters can make it out alive.
The preview portal, which lets you look around corners before actually teleporting, presents its own dangers, as robots can see and shoot you through it. It’s an essential tool for figuring out where to go, and where your enemies are.
Image courtesy Neat Corp
Level design is typically multilayered, offering a number of ways to complete an objective, be it a through the three foot-tall ventilation shafts, or by ducking for cover behind the many cubicles. Neat Corp has also made it near impossible to cheat by limiting your view when you either teleport, or pop your head through doors or walls. The anti-cheat system forces you to adapt to the game’s environment, making you duck in ventilation shafts, and bend down to peer through grates. I’ll cover more of that in the Immersion section, but suffice it to say that I loved how the game forces you to be present, and not take the easy way out.
Core game mechanics aside, what remains is really more than the sum of its parts. Adrenaline rushes of a missed knife throw (causing the target to spin around and point a gun in your direction), the act of sneaking around and planning your next move, following breadcrumb trails to a missing key—it all works so well together, making Budget Cuts one of the smartest VR games to date.
Image courtesy Neat Corp
That said, I did experience some frustration with a few puzzles. If you have a hard time listening to instructions, Winta can’t help you, and she isn’t piped into your ear at all times—a good thing in my opinion.
Sometimes learning a new game mechanic, like unscrewing a grate with a screwdriver, can leave some logical gaps that may drive you crazy looking for the right solution. Fine attention to detail is a must with Budget Cuts, because once the office is splattered with robot blood and you’re still looking for that final key code, only your wits will save you.
Immersion
Budget Cuts is cartoony, but graphics aren’t really the most important thing when it comes to immersion. When everything works correctly, and there’s a sense of danger lurking around every corner, then you may find yourself cowering under a virtual desk for cover. You wouldn’t hide, or scream, or fumble through your inventory if you didn’t think you were in real danger.
Image courtesy Neat Corp
Therein lies the problem with the current generation of PC VR. Budget Cuts is a fiercely room-scale game that requires you to duck, take cover, and crawl your way through the world. This is great when you don’t have to mind the ever-present cable attached to your computer, which can take you out of the experience somewhat.
As a teleportation-only game though, I thought I would feel less immersed, but teleportation works extremely well given the game’s premise and objectives. For the anti-teleportation crowd: this game needs it, and gives you a good reason to use it.
Now for the bad: level loading times may be enough for you to hate taking a bullet, because you’ll sit around at a loading screen for about 20-30 seconds upon restart, and even more at the beginning of a new level.
Optimization is also a pain point. On Vive, I saw max performance, which had brief moments of jitter in more object-dense areas; not unplayable in the slightest, but less than I would have expected. For whatever reason, Rift optimization was worse, leading to brief moments of visible stuttering. For reference, my test rig has an Intel Core i7-6700K, 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 1080. I would have liked some degree of control over the graphical quality of the game, as there are no graphics options at all.
Some other less than impressive bits: textures sometimes popped in an out, some areas loaded slowly, and robots sometimes collided with the game’s geometry to comical effect after death. None of this is game breaking, but I worry the lack of user-controlled graphic options may make Budget Cuts even more jittery on lower-spec systems, provided there aren’t any behind-the-scenes automatic graphic optimizations tailored to your specific setup. I admittedly had a pre-launch press build, which came along with two caveats. 1) the version lacked 180-degree snap-turning for front-facing sensor setups (but will come in the launch version), only offering 360-degree sensor support. 2) And the press build was “bound to have bugs that we won’t see in the release build,” I was told. That said, I suspect the problem with Rift optimization will be solved at launch, or at very least in the first updates.
Comfort
Teleportation is by far the most comfortable of artificial locomotion schemes, making Budget Cuts among the most comfortable games to play for all levels. Room-scale locomotion, like peeking around corners and hiding behind barriers, is basically the most natural way to make minor adjustments. Once implemented, snap-turning for 180-degree sensor setups comes as a close second in terms of user comfort.
It’s also a very physical game too, ideally requiring the full use of your arms and legs. Crouching down to avoid detection and hobbling through ventilation ducts means you’ll be getting a quad workout to boot. Although if you are unable or unwilling to stand, much of the game’s objects are reachable from the height of a chair, so while there isn’t a bespoke ‘seated mode’, users shouldn’t have a problem playing seated, provided they’re well away from desks (or wayward children), and either use the 180 snap-turn, or have a spinning computer chair. Seated players may also have to play more tactically, since crouching around peeking around corners while seated isn’t as easy.
Humble Bundle just started their big Spring Sale, which is now offering between 10-75% off on over 20 top VR titles.
Notable games at $20 or under include Superhot VR, Star Trek: Bridge Crew, GORN, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, Werewolves Within, and The Gallery Episodes 1 & 2. Links are below.
Remember: the Humble Bundle Spring Sale ends May 24th at 10 AM PT (local time here). If you miss it, your next big chance is only five weeks away with the Steam Summer Sale, which ought to sufficiently blow out some wallets too.
Here’s the full list below, showing the link to the Humble Store, the percentage off, and the final price:
COMPOUND is a rogue-lite VR shooter from indie developer NotDead Games that looks to bring back some of the classic feel of early FPSs like Doom (1993) and Wolfenstein 3d (1992). After a lengthy wait, the game finally launched today on Steam Early Access.
Indie dev Bevan McKechnie first showed off the concept for Compound back in October 2016, combining a decidedly retro FPS look to some not-so-retro mechanics such as ragdoll physics and a trusty hand-held gun and map.
Supporting Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, Compound first started out as a project hosted on Itch.io where NotDead hosted a playable demo, which is consequently still available for anyone looking to dive in.
The game, the studio says on its Steam page, is a “randomized, rogue-lite, free-roaming shooter for Virtual Reality veterans.” The goal is to fight through the world’s enemies and eventually reach “the heart of The Corporation and take back what belongs to everyone.”
The current early access version, which sells for $20, contains six maps across three map types, a headquarters/training range, four weapons, five enemy types, and three difficulty settings. The game also boasts free locomotion, teleportation, and snap-turning for users with a 180-degree sensor setup.
Sole developer Bevan McKechnie says each map is “procedurally generated to provide a different experience with each play-though, and consecutive loops become progressively harder, providing quite a considerable amount of re-playability already.”
Because it’s a one-person studio, McKechnie has set up a community Trello board so players can keep an eye on what bugs and features will be addressed next.
In its first month, Beat Saber has sold 100,000 copies across Steam and Oculus, generating $2 million in revenue—another big milestone of success for a game still in early access and made by a three-person indie studio.
Update (05/28/18): Hyperbolic Magnetism has confirmed the new figure of 100,000 units sold, something they say was accomplished in “less than a month” via a recent tweet. The studio also says their level editor, which is poised to bring users a way to bring any music and create & share levels, is still in the works.
The original article detailing the 50K milestone follows below:
Original article (05/14/18): Beat Saber developer Hyperbolic Magnetism confirmed the 50,000 figure on Twitter, suggesting that 100,000 units isn’t far off. At $20 a pop, the game has generated around $1 million in revenue, before the 30% cut taken out by the storefronts.
Considering the game’s independent development, VR’s niche status, and the fact that the game has yet to be launched on PSVR, Beat Saber is a clear indie success, even now just two weeks after its early access launch.
Consider Fez (2012)—one of the best received indie games of the last decade—which took a little more than a month and a half to hit 100,000 unit sales. Yes, it was exclusive to the Xbox at launch, but that still represented a potential audience that was many times larger than all of the high end VR headsets today.
And Beat Saber likely has most of its sales still to come. Despite its polish, the game is still in early access, with the developers still to add one of the top requested features: a track builder for user generated levels. And the game has yet to launch for PSVR, which would increase its potential audience by more than 2 million—which could be more than double what it is with PC VR headsets alone.
Beat Saber’s not-so-secret secret to success seems to have a lot to do with its balance of immediate fun, high accessibility, and motion-driven gameplay—attributes that anyone developing for VR should be heavily considering.
Ahead of its launch later this month, we got a chance to dive into the beginning of Red Matter, an upcoming VR adventure puzzle exclusively for Oculus Rift that puts you in a wonderfully weird Soviet-style retrofuturistic world.
With launch quickly approaching, Spain-based developers Vertical Robot gave us the green light to show off a respectable chunk of the game’s beginning, which places you in the boots of an astronaut—Agent Epsilon of the vaguely American-sounding Atlantic Union.
Because we were only allowed to show so much in the press preview of the game, which let us experience the very beginning—a botched landing on a suspiciously Slavic-sounding Volgravian test site on Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon—we had to cut off right as we got deeper into the search for some key documents that would help us unravel the truth behind the test site.
We had a pretty similar experience jumping into Red Matter at its debut at Oculus Connect 4 last year, but one of the caveats at the time was we weren’t allowed to show anything but the vetted press images to go along with our written impressions. You can check out our hands-on here, which covers basically everything up until we hit the elevator, which in the OC4 demo was replaced with a mysteriously glowing substance. That’s gone (I think. I haven’t played past the preview’s cutoff).
At Red Matter‘s Oculus Connect debut, Design Director Tatiana Delgado told Road to VR the game’s Volgravian setting was a “cross between the encroaching surveillance of George Orwell’s dystopian societies and Kafka’s absurd bureaucracy.”
From what we’ve seen, Red Matter is shaping up to be a highly polished experience with plenty of intrigue to boot. A good measure of retro CRTs, propaganda posters, handy translator guns, and manipulator claws all make ridiculously charming experience thus far.
Delgado told me at the time that Red Matter was aiming for a 2.5-3 hour gameplay length, although they have since communicated that it will be closer to 3.5-4 hours. We’ll have our full review here at the game’s launch, which is slated for May 24th.
