Downward Spiral: Horus Station is an upcoming sci-fi adventure game from 3rd Eye Studios, a Finish studio featuring industry veterans from games such as Alan Wake, and Halo 5, and movies including Wall-E, Gravity, and Prometheus.
While Horus Station is technically the second installment in the series following last year’s Downward Spiral: Prologue (2017), it’s really just the next evolution.
“Last year’s Downward Spiral: Prologue was our proof of concept. Now we’re almost ready to let players embark on a full-length adventure to discover the atmospheric Horus Station,” said Kari Koivistoinen, CEO of 3rd Eye Studios. “For those that wish to experience the game in VR, we’ve continued to develop our proprietary tech that mitigates VR motion sickness while allowing for a full range of movement. Movement is seamless, allowing players to engage in both thoughtful exploration and pulse-quickening combat.”
image courtesy 3rd Eye Studios
Horus Station aims to be a full-length adventure that takes place on a space station which was mysteriously abandoned by its crew. While 3rd Eye is staying pretty tight-lipped on just what lies ahead, they told us you have to solve puzzles, and fight or avoid unknown dangers by using the ship’s maintenance hardware like bolt throwers, rail guns, and arc welders to take out threats—of course, all in zero-G.
Horus Station will be launching for PC and PlayStation 4 this spring with optional PSVR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive support at launch.
image courtesy 3rd Eye Studios
The game will feature co-op mode, allowing two players to explore the Horus Station both normally or with enemies turned off. It also boasts eight-player PvP and PvE multiplayer modes, which include Deathmatch, Horde and Survivor challenges.
Much like Lone Echo (2017), players will have to use the environment to physically propel themselves forward, or conversely use tools to help navigate the zero-G environment of the ship.
According to the studio, the game features no dialogue or cinematics, making users piece together the plot through observation and interpretation. The electronic ambient soundtrack was composed by HIM frontman Ville Valo.
Sairento VR (2018), a VR ninja action game from indie developer Mixed Realms, ended its year-long stint in Steam Early Access today. The game, which features both single player and multiplayer modes, also launched on Oculus Home today.
Sairento VR launches out of Early Access with a new single player campaign mode that lets you hone your slow-motion, high-flying ninja moves as you shoot pistols and physically hack away with your katanas at the game’s ‘cyber ninja’ enemies. The game also includes a single player arcade mode, multiplayer co-op and PvP mode.
One of the most attractive bits about the game is its unique locomotion system, which is best described as a ‘point-and-click’ system that lets you quickly bound through the air with the ability to triple jump and wall-run your way to almost any target, making for fast-paced action across a relatively large map. From what we’ve played in Early Access, it proves to be a really interesting mash-up of Raw Data (2017) and Superhot VR (2017).
Releasing the news on the game’s Steam page, the developers say that despite exiting Early Access, there’s still a few things to be done.
As many of you have rightly pointed out, an exit from EA is just a technicality. It does not mean that we will be washing our hands off it from now on. While it does mean that we believe all the elements required to make a full game are in place, we still want to continue ironing out the remaining imperfections. We also want to add more content periodically to reward our fans’ loyalty and support for a while more.
Our only regret is that we cannot make the Campaign mode as robust as we would like it to be due to a lack of resources, although we really did try our very best.
Yet, despite its flaws, we think that Sairento is a game that we can all be proud of. And by we, we mean you and us. Sairento VR is a result of the cumulative efforts of both your constructive feedback and our hard work. Without you, Sairento won’t exist in its current form and we want to salute you for that. As such, we have dedicated the About page in the game to you. This page is about you and not about us. Please check it out.
Sairento VR is currently on sale for $25.50 on Humble Store, a 15% reduction from its normal $30 price tag. You can also purchase direct from Steam (Vive & Rift) or from Oculus Home (Rift).
For Fun Labs, the developers behind Eleven: Table Tennis VR (2016), are hosting a free weekend for Rift players this week on Oculus Home.
Eleven: Table Tennis VR offers online multiplayer or practice with AI, and features cross-play between both the Steam (Vive & Rift) and Oculus Home versions of the game.
The tennis table simulator will be free from February 8th at 10:00 AM PT (local time) until February 12th at 12:00 AM PT (local time).
Normally priced at $20, the table tennis sim is currently ranked as “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam with a 95% positive score.
Oculus has advertised several free weekends recently, allowing users to try out games such as Onward (2017), SPARC (2017), and From Other Suns (2017). To see the latest free weekend, keep an eye on the ‘Coming Soon’ section on Oculus’ website.
In Death is a roguelike bow-shooter from Sólfar Studio, the developers behind Everest VR (2016). Now in Early Access on Steam and Oculus Home, the procedurally generated, medieval-inspired world stretching out in front of you offers a pretty standard selection of monsters, bow-shooting baddies, and magical shops along the way to offer weapon upgrades and precious health points—a fairly familiar concept for fans of the roguelike genre. While the premise is standard, the results are actually pretty surprising.
GDC Update (03/29/18): We went hands-on with a few new modes at GDC 2018 that promise to deepen gameplay in ‘In Death’.
Firstly, Sólfar showed off a new prototype challenge mode that lets you send a challenge request to a fellow player. This gives your competitor all of your available achievements with the objective of beating your high score with all the tools you had during the best run you could muster. While it still isn’t finalized, the mode gives players bragging rights over each other – something Sólfar co-founder and business development director Thor Gunnarsson told me was designed to keep users engaged without relying heavily on concurrent usership of the app.
Besides showing off a few new enemy types, including giant fire-throwing succubus and a terrifying ethereal ghost mob that can morph through the game’s architecture, requiring a single well-placed shot to the heart to kill, the most important update to ‘In Death’ I saw was the newly revealed dungeon system, which places extremely difficult dungeon portals periodically throughout your run.
Stepping into these portals, you’re transported to a high-stakes dungeon filled with ghouls and a boss at the end. These dungeons, while incredibly tough to beat, are also extremely rewarding, throwing plenty of coins and buffs your way upon completion. And once you go in, you have to fight your way to the end no matter what – i.e. no turning back.
Substantially, the game remains the same from my original hands-on (seen below), although Sólfar is still iterating in Early Access. So far, it’s shaping up to be an extremely polished exemplar of a VR roguelike.
Original Article (02/03/18): You’re given a minimal training session, which teaches you how to shoot your bow, and move around. Locomotion is simple. You can teleport by shooting a magical arrow, or teleport by throwing that arrow with your hand for a more precise short-range jump. In the settings, you can also add in smooth-forward motion, which personally makes peeking around corners and dodging arrows a little easier if you’re playing seated. Teleportation is a key element to the game since the world’s architecture isn’t always foot-accessible however. Since it supports both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, you can of course play standing so you can get the most out of dodging those incoming arrows too. Rift users with a standard two-sensor configuration will likely make good use of the game’s snap-turning to get around.
Like most roguelikes, your health bar is the most important element to watch for. A few well-placed arrows from an enemy monk, or a mace square in the jaw from a towering 6-foot Crusader, will put a quick end to your run. If anything, I found ranged enemy accuracy to be too on-point; or maybe it was just my relatively bad accuracy that made me think so. After playing for about 20 minutes and experiencing my first death, I restarted, noticing that I had only made it 7% of the way through. At the time of this writing I’ve still only made it a paltry 25% of the way, the results of a plodding 40-minute run. What lies ahead at this point, I just can’t say.
Image courtesy Sólfar Studios
Accompanied by ominous Gregorian chants and extremely well-realized Romanesque/Gothic architecture, In Death is incredibly atmospheric. A mix of melee and ranged enemies are placed throughout the map’s winding path. Although enemies are finite, once you’ve encountered a group, they can easily outflank you by teleporting around, snapping into existence with a faint screech and re-emerging from a blue ethereal mist. Each enemy telegraphs their attacks differently, so they can be interrupted at any time when shot with an arrow. This is good news for when the hordes start piling up, desperately trying to amble past each other to get to you, although don’t expect them to stay put, as they’ll just as easily poof out of existence and behind you, keeping you on your toes.
That said, I definitely still need work on balancing the game’s locomotion with its combat system, and getting my accuracy down better too. Bow mechanics are rock solid, although I would like some haptic feedback to go along with the audio cue of nocking an arrow.
Image courtesy Sólfar Studios
One thing I learned quickly: you can’t take the easy way out. Traveling by rooftop means you’ll most likely miss out on coins and special items picked up along the way as you kill baddies. Going to the shop, dubbed the ‘Reliquary’, with less than 2500 coins will probably mean you’ll have to backtrack and flush out that last zombies creatures or Blood Templars.
Thankfully, you’re given infinite combat arrows, a basic single shot that is good for most tasks. Although the further you go along, finite arrows like scatter-shots or triple shots help clear out tougher enemies. These can be purchased or found along the way after a particularly impressive headshot.
Since I haven’t made it to the end, I can’t really comment on the game’s length or overall difficulty level yet. Suffice it to say, In Death is neither generous, nor an easy game to play, so practice those headshots, dodge and block those arrows, and clear every last bad guy if you can. If you’re demoralized by a quick death, there’s plenty of achievements to entice you to come back that provide more help (and danger) the more you play.
We’ll be checking back in for a proper review once it exits Early Access, although taking into account the game’s high level of visual polish combined with the reliability to both locomotion and combat systems, it feels pretty consumer-ready so far.
Sparc (2017), the VR sport from EVE Online developers CCP Games, is hosting a free weekend for Rift players on Oculus Home. Temporary free access has already begun, and will conclude on February 4th at 11:59 PM PT (local time here).
Initially launched in April 2017 on PSVR, Sparc is a unique VR sport that pits you in a 1v1 skill-based match; it’s a little like a racket sport from some neon, Tron-inspired future. Sparc, which features multiplayer game modes, as well as single player challenges and training modes, was later released on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with crossplay last November.
Unfortunately for Sparc, CCP has since shut down the Atlanta-based branch tasked with creating, selling off their Newcastle branch in charge of EVE: Valkyrie (2016) as well. While development on Valkyrie continues under Sumo Digital, no new content has been created for Sparc, leaving it essentially to wane alongside capable, but ill-serviced games such as Eagle Flight and Werewolves Within.
Sólfar Studios’ new title IN DEATH, launches today in Early Access with a launch week discount. The “roguelike” bow-shooter makes use of procedural generation to create different experience every time you play, the developers say, while players come upon “monsters, mysteries and loot.”
In Death launches today in Early Access (at 10AM PT) on the Oculus store, as well as Steam where it supports the Vive, Rift, and Windows VR headsets. The $20 title will see a 10% launch discount for the first week. Developer Sólfar Studios—the team behind EVEREST VR (2016)—explains the gameplay:
Inspired by classic Roguelike dungeon crawlers, In Death pays homage to this merciless genre favoured by core gamers. With no save points, each procedurally generated run uses a random seed to generate the map with randomized enemy and loot spawn points. Game progression is driven by an achievement system that persists across each run and scales the difficulty level of the game in lockstep with your mastery of it.
And further promises:
Ranged combat, perfected
Unique locomotion system
Global, cross platform leaderboards and personal stats
Beautiful medieval setting
Convenience settings for your playstyle
As an Early Access title, the studio says they are planning regular updates centered around feedback from players. While there’s no hard launch date set, the studio says they anticipate the game’s full launch to come in 2018.
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Image courtesy Sólfar Studios
Image courtesy Sólfar Studios
Image courtesy Sólfar Studios
Image courtesy Sólfar Studios
Image courtesy Sólfar Studios
“We have reached that moment in our development where we are confident that the core loop is solid, replayability is high and visual polish and performance is good,” the studio writes on their Steam page. “We are still very much in Beta and iterating on ideas and player feedback. We do have frequent patches planned so that players can expect the game to continue evolving throughout the Early Access period.”
Sólfar also announced that PSVR version of In Death is in the works, though no specific timing for its launch is mentioned.
Having just celebrated a successful closed beta, which showed off some of the game’s new mechanics and solo challenge mode, Survios now says its infectious footracer Sprint Vector is set to launch on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift on February 8th. PlayStation VR players will have to wait until February 13th to join in the fun.
Sprint Vector features a unique locomotion system, which Survios dubs ‘Fluid Locomotion’. By pumping your arms, you generate forward motion, much like a skier might when using ski polls. But it’s not just about skating your way to the finish; you have to jump, climb, drift, fling, and fly at speeds that on paper sound impossible in VR. We’ve followed Sprint Vector since it was first revealed back at GDC last year, and can attest to just how comfortable the high-speed racing experience really is.
Much like the Mario Kart franchise, Sprint Vector features power-ups like weapons, traps, and nitro to keep things interesting; although you’d be forgiven if you forgot all about it while desperately pumping your arms, tossing yourself 30 feet into the air and flying to hit that critical speed boost to inch you into first place.
The closed beta only featured a fraction of the game’s content, so here’s a full list of the game’s features:
Competitive multiplayer matches: Public and private online multiplayer modes pit up to eight players against each other in intense, high-speed races as you vie for a spot on the Global Leaderboards.
12 competitive race tracks: Scale towering pyramids and plunge into alien ruins, leap across bottomless pits while dodging debilitating blobs of sludge, or survive the trap-riddled streets of an ancient city. A dozen complex race courses full of obstacles, alternate paths, and game-changing power-ups make for endless replay value.
Customizable solo play: Run the course at your own pace and learn the ropes with customizable solo game settings.
Nine challenge courses: Take on these diabolical courses designed to test your sprinting prowess to the extreme. Tackle three specific challenges across nine single-player challenge courses with Local and Global Leaderboards.
Eight intergalactic competitors: Choose from eight colorful characters pulled from every corner of the galaxy, from notorious street artist Daxx to ethereal Luna to streetwise hammerhead Hendrix, each with multiple skins to unlock.
Power-ups galore: Utilize a wide range of power-ups, from explosive proximity mines to nitro speed and racer-seeking rockets, to gain an advantage over the competition.
Survios also tells us that a cosmetic skin pack will be available to all PC racers free of charge, which are said to have an “international spin just in time for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.” These international-inspired skins represent 16 countries and are available across all eight playable characters.
Google Blocks, the 3D object creation tool for VR/AR app developers, just got a big update that includes new environments, improved object snapping, and a number of experimental features that the company says makes Blocks “more powerful and even easier to use.”
Released to Rift and Vive users for free back in July, Google intended the creation experience in Blocks be more akin to playing with children’s blocks than working with traditional 3D modeling software like Z-Brush or Blender. Giving you a simple set of shapes, a color palette, and a number of simple tools, the user can easily create objects from within VR that you can then export to a standard OBJ file for inclusion in other 3D creation software.
Now, Google has added a few more features to make creation a little more hassle free.
Background environments now include a night version of the desert environment, and also plain white and black background options. An improved snapping function has also been included, which the company says address the “often unpredictable or difficult to control” snapping tool from the previous build. The company says they’ve “vastly improved [their] snapping algorithm and introduced a brand new user experience to guide you.”
Google has also added a host of experimental features, many of which are responses to user requests. For more information on how to use each tool, check out Google’s official blog post announcing the update.
New Features
Non-coplanar face mode: Now you can enable non-coplanar faces to avoid creation of extra triangles.
Loop subdivide: Subdivision can be a really powerful tool. It’s even more powerful if you can cut a loop around an entire mesh. With loop subdivide enabled, simply long press on the trigger while subdividing to see a perfect subdivision loop form around your object.
Edge, Face and Vertex Deletion: With this feature enabled, you can use the eraser tool to delete a single edge, face or vertex. We’ll “collapse” the mesh based on the edge, face or vertex you delete.
Worldspace grids: This feature will show grids along every side of your worldspace. The grid units are equivalent to the actual worldspace grid units, so you can precisely measure and place objects along the grids.
Volume insertion ruler: This experimental feature allows you to enable a ruler when you are inserting a mesh. As you insert the object, you’ll see relative measurements in meters appear on each axis so you can precisely and accurately measure every object relative to the others.
Expanded mesh wireframe: When reshaping a mesh you see a helpful wireframe around the section of the mesh you are reshaping. Now, you can turn that wireframe on for the entire mesh.
Stepwise selection undo: You can now undo and redo steps in your multi-selection. You can use the undo and redo buttons on your non-dominant controller to undo or redo the selection of objects in order.
Check out Google Blocks on Oculus Home (Rift) and Steam (Vive and Rift).
Sprint Vector, the upcoming VR footracing game from Raw Data (2017) studio Survios, went into closed beta last week. Now with a few multiplayer matches under my belt and a number of solo challenges (and possibly some overextended elbows), it’s clear the studio’s so-called “adrenaline platformer” is aiming to impress with a number of new modes, some new mechanics and a thick coat of polish.
I’ve had the opportunity to play Sprint Vector multiple times since it was first debuted at GDC last year. Every time I approached it, I got a little less horrible at drifting through the cartoonish courses. I was always relegated to playing head-to-head with a far too lenient handler or developer though, who more often than not were more concerned with showing me the ropes than punishing me outright. Now, having played what could easily be mistaken for a consumer-ready game, I am humbled.
The closed beta featured three solo challenge maps with three modes each, and three competitive maps which could either be played solo vs AI, or in an 8-player online race.
image by Road to VR
Having played a few times before, I thought I was clear to skip the tutorials and head straight into my first competitive race. Boy, was I wrong. Landing second to last, and seeing my fellow racers finish the course way before me, I decided to go back to the basics for fear of missing something important. Divided into three sections—basic, intermediate, and advanced—there’s plenty to learn when it comes to mastering the locomotion system in Sprint Vector; you have to skate, drift, jump, fly, climb – all while keeping an eye on your opponents.
Instead of hitting the multiplayer mode again (fool me once), I started out fresh from the tutorial on the newly revealed solo challenge maps.
While there are only three right now—Driftway – a deceptively simple beginner track, Killer Boost – a track littered with boosts and tons of jumps, and Sidewinder – a ‘grip stream’ nightmare—it was easy to lose a good chunk of time playing each of these through their three different modes: time trial, coin collection, and hardcore one-life. Hardcore one-life pumps you full of nitro so you never stop moving forward at high-speed, meaning you have to dial in on your steering, shooting and flying to get the best time.
I could easily spend time honing my skill to climb the respective leaderboards, but even after polishing for an hour, it became clear that I simply wasn’t anywhere near good enough yet to post any meaningful result on the challenge board, not yet at least.
Returning to the ‘skate park’, or the lobby filled with air boosts and grip streams, I spent some quality time pumping my arms, diligently playing attention to the speed meter at my lower register. Soon enough, after some more practice, I was getting some momentum to my strides, releasing the trigger button just as I pumped my arm down to my hip.
image by Road to VR
Now after some bonafide training, I was ready for my first multiplayer. This time I hit my strides correctly, picked up my power-ups and traps (just like in Mario Kart) and finished in a respectable third place. I got a chance to use the game’s weapons for the first time too – a standard mix of missiles, nitros, and slowdown traps that come part and parcel with these sorts of arcade racers.
It’s clear there’s still a lot to learn about each course and how to best attack it, but I felt I’d finally understood how to move in the world and have that 1:1 physical engagement with my surroundings. The wizards over at Survios have certainly boned up on their Oculus Best Practice Guide too, as it felt completely nausea-free throughout.
Interesting side note: I got a chance to prove to myself just how much of a workout the game really is. According to my Fitbit, I have an average resting heart rate of around 50-60 beats per minute (bmp). While playing Sprint Vector however, the heart rate monitor told me I had entered into the ‘fat burn zone’ for nearly 20 minutes, with my heart rate jacking up to over 94 bmp. If my heart pumped any faster (over 131 bmp), I would have inched into the ‘Cardio zone’.
There was one unfortunate side effect after playing a straight hour of multiplayer: tennis elbow. It seems during my quest to do my best, and pump my arms like crazy, I was overextending the joints in my elbow with my feverish downstrokes, leaving the telltale pain that I had felt back in high school when I was into karate. While it’s not a show stopper, I’ll have to pay more attention to how I play from now on so I don’t develop the world’s first case of Sprint Vector elbow.
Sprint Vector feels and looks ready. And now that I’ve had my real training, I’m ready to head into the full version, which is slated to launch globally on Rift, Vive and PSVR in Q1 2018.
OrbusVR, the indie VR MMORPG, is now on Oculus Home, allowing for crossplay between it and the Steam version which launched last month.
The Steam version of OrbusVR has had support for both Vive and Rift when it started out in Early Access in December, but now Rift users looking to keep their games all in one place can get in on the quest-driven MMO too.
The result of a successful Kickstarter back in March 2017 which garnered $34,000, OrbusVR is shaping up to be one of the first ‘native VR’ MMORPGs to combine traditional sword and sorcery elements like quests and dungeons in a cooperative, social VR space.
Like most MMOs, you’ll need to team up with others to take down World Bosses and clear out the game’s many dungeons (hence the social VR aspect). Presenting an open world environment, OrbusVR promises “dozens of hours of quests following an intriguing story.”
Although admittedly less than ‘massive’ at the moment—Steam Spy reported a couple hundred hourly concurrent users before the its launch on Oculus Home—the game’s first content expansion is due soon, which will include a new World Boss and an end-game dungeon called the ‘Tradu Mines’. According to the lead developer Riley Dutton, the Tradu Mines “have been tuned so that they can be accomplished by a group of Level 20 characters with Rare-level gear.”
OrbusVR is now available in Early Access for $40 on Steam (Vive, Rift) and Oculus Home (Rift).
