Rec Room, the social virtual world filled with mini-games and activities, recently introduced a battle royale mode called ‘Rec Royale’. A new update now allows players to group up in squads of three for team-based strategic action.
‘Rec Royale’ in Rec Room tosses a big group of players out of a plane onto a large island where they fight with guns and grenades to see who will be the last one standing. When the mode was first introduced it was free for all, with only one player crowned the ultimate victor.
A new update today puts players in groups of three, recreating the popular ‘squads’ mode of other rattle royale games. According to the developers, the Rec Royale squads mode is replacing solo mode for the time being (to ensure a healthy player population), but they may later reintroduce solo mode.
Now that players can team up, a ‘knock down’ mechanic has been introduced, meaning that players don’t die right away but rather get knocked down and can be revived by teammates. It’ll take a few seconds to get one of your friends back on their feet though, so timing is key. Along with the knock down and revive mechanics, the patch also introduces ‘radio voice chat’, which means teammates can hear each other even when they are out of shouting distance.
In addition to squads, the patch includes improvements for custom rooms and a handful of other changes, see the full changelog here.
Marvel Powers United VR, the next big exclusive title from Oculus Studios, launches today (Thursday, July 26th) and is now available to download on Rift. We’ve got 16 minutes of fresh expert gameplay and our full review available ahead of the game’s launch.
Update (11:00 AM ET): Marvel Powers United VR is now live on the Oculus Store, so make sure to tuck in for the game’s 26 GB download well in advance.
Marvel Powers United VR gives players a roster of 18 heros to choose from, allowing up to four friends to defend nodes from waves of Marvel faction fodder, including the occasional mini-boss villain. We gave the game a decidedly middling score in our full Marvel Powers United VR review.
We have 16 minutes of fresh Powers United gameplay from an expert—one of the title’s own developers plays a full round as Spiderman:
Ninja Theory, the minds behind BAFTA award-winning action-adventure game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017), have brought the full, uncut title to Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets. We got an exclusive first look at the game’s new VR edition, which is coming free to all owners of the PC game when the update goes live on Steam July 31st. The short of it: it has a few flaws, but it’s a great game.
Update (July 31st, 2018): The VR edition of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is now available as a free update to the base game. Both Steam and GOG versions of the game are said to arrive with the VR edition.
The original article follows below:
Original Article (July 25th, 2018): If you’ve never played Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, here’s a quick, spoiler-free primer. You can skip these two paragraphs if you’re already well-informed:
Played in the third-person, Senua is a warrior from the Orkney Islands, one of the many spots in the current day United Kingdom that was subject to Viking raids and later colonization throughout the eighth and ninth century. Battling against mythological creatures from both Scandinavian folklore and classic Norse mythology, you push Senua through difficult trials deep into Norse territory, all the while experiencing her pain and reliving her past. Senua suffers from psychosis, and according to the traditions of her people, she was sent to live in the forest alone to battle her own demons. Returning from the wilds, Senua, a fierce warrior, carries the skull of a loved one whose soul was taken hostage by the Norsemen, driving her to battle the gods in a fatalistic and shattered world of her own design.
One of Senua’s few happy memories, Image courtesy Ninja Theory
The game deftly addresses the very serious mental illness of psychosis—a descriptive term that can cover a host of maladies such as hearing voices, seeing hallucinations, and connecting dots that simply aren’t there, like assigning special meaning to everyday occurrences, or by creating elaborate fantasy worlds where the person is entirely immersed in solving cryptic puzzles that surround them in everyday life. This is the basis of the game; the world is constantly shifting, evil spirits confuse and battle you, and internal voices shout you down, casting doubt on your every move. For good reason, the game comes with a trigger warning—something doubly important for the VR version based on just how immersive it can be.
Now for VR
Ever since I started writing about virtual reality four years ago, I’ve found myself playing less and less traditional games, and replacing them almost entirely with VR titles. While I’m slightly ashamed to say I missed out on Hellblade’s PC release last year, my first opportunity to play it was in VR, and outside of a few minor niggles specific to the game’s VR implementation, I’m really glad my first experience with it was from within the immersive viewpoint of a VR headset.
Image courtesy Ninja Theory
I’ll start with some caveats, but I think you’ll find they’re easily outweighed by the game’s many (many) positives.
On a technical level, Hellblade at minimum requires an Intel i5 3570K or AMD FX-8350, 8 GB RAM, and either a NVIDIA GTX 1080 or AMD Radeon RX 580. Luckily, my testing rig meets those minimum specs, but I don’t suspect the majority of VR owners will. While I imagine lower-speced GPUs might be able to play on lower settings, as I was able to play on the highest possible settings without suffering reprojection with my GTX 1080, Ninja Theory was clear on the game’s minimum requirements for an acceptable experience.
Playing on ‘very high’ for all options—foliage, post-processing, shadows, textures, view distance, and view effects—I did notice at time that textures and some smaller game geometry take a noticeable bit to load in larger areas, which can sometimes detract from what would otherwise be a grand, detailed world. Knocking down to medium settings in some of those departments mitigated this somewhat, but overall the render distance on objects such as plants and rocks (read: far-field scenery loads consistently) appears to be a constant phenomenon, leading to some unsightly texture/geometry popping throughout the game.
Image captured by Road to VR
The game is in third-person, and there’s no chance of a first-person view coming. This is less of a hindrance than I thought it would be though, as the game can get pretty frightening at moments, what with all the binaurally-captured voices criticizing your every step (these can be turned down) and the ever winding path towards Senua’s declining mental state—it can be equally immersive and frightening, if not more so than many first-person VR games currently.
The last niggle: the only supported controllers are Oculus Touch, gamepads, and keyboard. Vive controllers were likely left out considering the nature of quick inputs needed during fighting sequences; a touchpad simply won’t do. Hopefully Vive users have a spare Xbox One gamepad lying around, because otherwise you’ll be using a standard WASD layout, which isn’t really a great way of playing. Touch controllers are supported, but predictably take the place of a gamepad, as there is no motion controller-specific support.
Caveats Be Damned to Helheim
While these main caveats could stop you from engaging with the game ‘perfectly’, the base experience is anything but disappointing. Hellblade’s engaging narrative quickly takes over, and Senua’s masterful motion capture is delightful to see in VR, as you come face-to-face with the warrior bedecked in blue war paint, who transmits some very realistic and intense emotions. Textures here are dumbed down somewhat for the VR version, but it’s plain to see that the in-your-face view of the character really begins to immerse you in her pain, fears, and struggles through the trials of the game. Check out the gameplay video at the bottom to see what I mean.
Traversing Hellblade, solving its many illusory puzzles, and engaging in combat sequences is a fairly fluid experience. Enemies at times spawn behind you, but the beauty of having a 360 view is in choosing where to look and when, so you can naturally keep an eye on baddies as they come. Combat relies on quick dodges, decisive sword slashes and kicks, and the use of ‘focus’, which activates a slow-mo mode that can both make shadow monsters vulnerable to attack and allow you more time to tear through multiple enemies. Boss battles are, for the lack of a better word, absolutely epic in VR. Should you ever find yourself facing too hard of an adversary though, you can always toggle between easy, medium, hard or ‘auto’ difficulty modes. But watch out; every time you die, an evil rot takes greater hold of your arm, which eventually will lead to your permanent death and a loss of all progress.
Image courtesy Ninja Theory
Puzzles are especially fun (and rightfully unsettling) in VR, as one of the main features of the game includes the ability for the world to morph around you; a staircase that wasn’t previously there snaps into view after you cross the threshold of a magic gate. The first time it happens, you really begin to question your own sanity, but soon the pieces come together and you start to understand how to use your own illusions to further progress (eg: go through a magic gate to reveal a hole in a wall, go through the hole and unlock the door from the inside). The VR implementation is a natural fit, and I would love to see it in more games.
Another core puzzle throughout Hellbade is lining up runes to open otherwise impenetrable doors—some of the “assigning meaning to things” of Senua’s psychosis—and this is handled really well in VR, as you use your gaze to search and align these runes using your perspective. At moments I would need to crane my neck to get the perfect view, as it’s usually a funny-shaped tree, a few well-placed beams of light, or a piece of a building that has to be lined up, but I tend to think this is based on my preferred game setting. I would routinely enable a higher vantage point in the settings so I could get a better view of the scenery without Senua blocking the way.
Image captured by Road to VR
The game also has some experimental VR modes too, which can let you view the world either in ‘tiny mode’, which changes your perspective to see the world as a miniature diorama, or ‘giant mode’, which shrinks you down by about by three quarters to make the world decidedly larger than life. I didn’t really faff about with either, as the 1:1 normal mode was exactly how I wanted to play in the first place. In normal mode, scaling on Senua felt slightly larger than reality, but not so far off that she was in any way freakishly large.
Intense Themes, Mostly Comfortable Gameplay
Because the game relies on snap-turning, it’s ultimately pretty comfortable—and that’s despite the game’s forewarning that it’s an ‘intense experience’. There are moments when you smoothly turn into a cinematic mode to face Senua, but these are both conducted slowly and are few and far between, so whatever discomfort you may feel from this artificial locomotion will likely fade in a few seconds. Smooth turning is only available in ‘focus’ mode, which lets you look around for runes and other artifacts.
Since this is originally a PC/console title, the game includes many cutscenes to tell the story, which are refreshingly well handled. Instead of carelessly tossing your POV to fit the narrative, which can cause extreme discomfort, the world zooms out to a black void where you’re given a viewing window to help keep you grounded as things shake up. Had this not been a third-person game, I would say the cutscenes would be an overall a detriment to VR immersion, but somehow the whole narrative of Senua battling herself and her illusions makes this okay. Psychosis can make a person see the world in a different way, and provide out-of-body experiences, so it’s really a fortuitous match-up that I really enjoyed being a part of.
After playing the entire game in VR, which lasted around 7+ hours, I was left sobered and sympathetic to Senua’s plight. She fights for love, but carries her hate with her, something you witness at length throughout the game. I couldn’t help but feel a real connection with her, even though I wasn’t really apart of the story as such. At times she’ll look you in the eye, following the position of your head as you get closer to her. She’s distrustful of you, as you’re sometimes construed as just another illusory companion on her fatalistic journey.
In the end, Ninja Theorymay have served up something of a gamepad throwback, which really hasn’t been on the menu since all major PC VR systems now have purpose-built motion control support, but there’s an undeniable charm to the game that will definitely keep you playing. As a high quality offering, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice does enough VR-specific refining to take it out the caste of ‘shoehorned VR ports’; it gives you just enough of the AAA game, which seems to have grasped VR well enough to make it worth your time if you aren’t scared away by the caveats mentioned above. More importantly, it serves as a lesson to other developers that good-looking traditional PC games can, and do work in VR.
Check out a full 14 minute gameplay session below to get a better idea of what Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice – VR Edition has to offer.
Developed over the course of two years, Marvel Powers United VR is the first VR superhero game of its scale. A large roster of playable heroes lets you step into the boots, masks, and leotards of 18 Marvel superheroes. But rather than embodying your character, along with their powers, conflicts, and triumphs, you’ll end up feeling like you’re just dressing the part as you fight waves of enemies for high scores and loot boxes.
Publisher: Oculus Studios Developer: Sanzaru Games Available On:Oculus Store (Rift) [Exclusive] Release Date: July 26th, 2018
Gameplay
Marvel Powers United VR is an unabashed wave shooter where the primary incentive to keep playing is grinding your way to unlocking new costumes and character poses. The game has just one mode which consists of two slightly different phases: 1) defend the nodes, 2) defend the node while bringing eight power cells to the node. You can play solo (with AI controlled companion heroes) or with up to three friends.
During a round, you will encounter a few villains. The nodes and power cells spawn in random locations, but once you’ve played one round, you’ve played them all—the villain mini boss encounters rely on the same basic tactics, the game’s various maps function primarily as set dressing without meaningfully impacting gameplay, and on your first go you’ll see every one of the bland cannon fodder enemies that make up the game’s many waves.
Playable heroes: Black Bolt, Black Panther, Black Widow, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Crystal, Deadpool, Doctor Strange, Gamora, Hawkeye, Iceman, Rocket Raccoon, Spider-Man, Star-lord, Storm, The Hulk, Thor, and Wolverine. | Images courtesy Marvel, Oculus
Some gameplay variety comes depending upon which one of the 18 heroes you choose, though you’ll quickly identify the underlying ‘classes’ which largely break down into melee, ranged, and caster. Each hero has three or four abilities and a special attack that can be activated after gaining enough points from dealing damage to enemies. The basic abilities don’t feel terribly differentiated, and gameplay typically involves finding your hero’s most effective attack and then spamming it indefinitely. Special attacks aren’t particularly thrilling to use, and generally either amplify existing abilities so they do more damage or create a sphere of damage around the player.
The no-name enemies—which you will kill by the hundreds, and will spawn out of thin air directly next to the node they intend to attack—are so unthreatening and similar that they can all be killed with the same tactics, meaning you’re never challenged to switch up your abilities. Mechanically the game doesn’t make you manage your abilities either, as pretty much every ability can be spammed indefinitely with no cool down, reload, overheating, or friendly-fire.
Deadpool’s SMGs, for instance, can be literally fired infinitely by holding the trigger down the entire match. You can also pull out his Katanas and throw an unlimited number of them at enemies (this turns out to be incredibly effective, and means you’ll have little reason to use the katanas for slashing, let alone your SMGs, pistols, or throwing stars). Characters who can hover can do so indefinitely, and there’s almost never a reason not to be in the air as it gives you the best angle for zapping baddies.
The villains, which act as mini-bosses, don’t change up the equation much. They are all damage sponges and are best defeated by hitting them repeatedly with your highest damage attack without getting within 15 feet (otherwise you risk getting hit by a near-instant high-damage area attack). All bosses also occasionally do a massively telegraphed attack that will usually put you down if you don’t get out of the giant orange glowing circle before it goes off.
The lack of incentive for varying your tactics and abilities is exacerbated by an absurd amount of auto-aim for many of the heroes’ abilities. The auto-aim on some attacks is so extreme that you literally don’t need to aim—as long as the enemy is anywhere within your view, your attack will fly directly at the target for a perfect hit at any range. In many cases the auto-aim will totally override your reticle, leading to some frustrating moments where your attacks seem to defy your intentions completely—sometimes causing you to miss entirely (like when attempting to lead a target).
Score is essentially the only reason not to simply spam your most effective attack; during each round you’ll earn points for killing baddies, and if you vary your abilities you can get your combo meter higher to get points faster. The problem is that the only reason you’d care about your score is if you want to unlock new costumes and character poses—neither of which change the gameplay in any way.
The end of each round tallies up your scores and per-character mini objectives (which are often as simple as ‘kill X# of enemies with X attack’), and you’ll be awarded some loot boxes based on your score. When you return to the game’s lobby space you can go to the award room to open your loot boxes and see what new costumes and poses you unlocked. There’s also a few ‘artifact’ type props to unlock (little trinkets of Marvel character lore, like a badge, cloak, or sceptre) which will appear in your award room. Unfortunately beyond the props, there’s no easy way to see your overall unlock progress; you’ll need to go through the rather slow menu to select a different hero and then you can see which costumes and poses are unlocked, one hero at a time. While it may be slow, the ability to switch heroes at any time (in the lobby or during a round) is welcomed.
There’s one other element to your grind that does actually lead to something different than costumes, poses, and props. For each villain you defeat during the wave mode, you collect one piece of the Cosmic Cube. If you collect 25 pieces, you unlock a chance to fight a certain big baddie from the Marvel universe in a different arena. While this fight is a bit different than fighting the villains in the wave mode, you’ll use the very same tactics (attack with your highest damage attack while staying away from the boss), and the rewards (loot boxes) are the same too (just more of them). This unfortunately makes the encounter feel quite anticlimactic.
It took me about six hours to collect the 25 pieces needed for that special encounter. After spending the cube pieces on the fight for the first time, you’ll have to collect 10 more to do it again (whether you won or lost). It isn’t made terribly clear to the player that collecting 25 cube pieces will unlock the fight (I only knew about it because I was told); had I not been grinding them out so that I could see what the encounter was like (for the sake of this review), I don’t think I would have bothered continuing to collect them.
Images courtesy Marvel, Oculus
For all the gameplay criticism above, Marvel Powers United VR’s redeeming quality is its visual presentation. It’s a good-looking game that feels highly produced and pretty well polished. Character models and poses look great and have had a ton of attention paid to them. Costumes are generally completely different outfits (rather than just different colors) and represent a wide range of looks from classic outfits to modern interpretations. While the static character models look very good, they tend to look a little janky once you see another player’s head and hands driving the character model (classic limp elbows and knees).
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Image courtesy Marvel, Oculus
Image courtesy Marvel, Oculus
Image courtesy Marvel, Oculus
Image courtesy Marvel, Oculus
Environments also look great (with one or two exceptions), and it’s a shame that they’re used as the mere backdrop of wave shooting arenas rather than something more meaningful.
Immersion
Superheroes aren’t cool because of how they look or sound. They are cool because they have interesting origin stories, unique villain conflicts, and do heroic stuff. Unfortunately you won’t experience any of that in Powers United. One surefire way to quash immersion in VR is to take characters that inhabit a rich universe and then reduce them to a score counter and loot boxes. Throw into the mix waves of nameless enemies that are so homogeneous that they don’t even warrant having their own nicknames and you’ve got a recipe for bland gameplay.
Powers United is perhaps a victim of ambition. No one has really figured out what a great superhero game looks like in VR, but instead of focusing on one character and figuring out how to take their unique capabilities and translate them into a rich and embodied VR experience where the player feels like a hero, they tried to cram 18 heroes into one game right off the bat; I can’t say I’m surprised that they didn’t find unique and meaningful mechanics for all of them, but it’s a shame that not one of them really delivers the dream of feeling like a badass superhero.
Much of the game is based around spamming triggers or using rough gestures which are translated into heavily auto-aimed attacks, robbing the player of the feeling of being present and impactful in the world. There was never a moment in my time playing where I felt like I had landed an especially important shot, or killed a key enemy at just the right time. There’s just so much shooting and so many faceless and uninteresting enemies that none of it feels important.
When you do end up taking damage you rarely know which enemy it came from, but you’ll respond in the same way regardless: spam the dash button for a few moments and then turn around and start fighting again.
The audio channel in Marvel Powers United VR is so saturated with music, shooting, one-liners and interface cues that directional sound is almost entirely lost. As a result, the game doesn’t use audio for any key information.
Frustratingly, you can’t hand weapons from one hand to another, and you can’t resheathe most weapons; if you had any visions of roleplaying your character and doing some cool gun juggling or returning a sword to your back or a gun to your hip in a heroic way, you’ll watch as the weapon unceremoniously falls to the ground while a new one magically appears in its place.
For all the time spent on making the character models and costumes look good, there’s rarely an opportunity to see them up close. You can see your arms and body in first person if you look down, but it seems like a major missed opportunity to not have a mirror in the lobby space at minimum, or a way to browse through all your unlocked models and look at them in detail.
At least at the end of each match you get to pose for a team photo with your companions. It’s a neat idea and can lead to some funny social moments, but unfortunately you can’t charge any of your abilities or unsheathe any weapons for the photo, so everyone ends up standing around somewhat awkwardly, unable to wield signature weapons or powers for the photo. The photos unfortunately don’t get saved anywhere, so if you end up having one that’s particularly funny or interesting, you’ll only get to see if for the few seconds after the picture gets snapped.
Comfort
Marvel Powers United VR is the first game from Oculus Studios to use free locomotion (head relative with snap turning) and dashing mechanics. From start to finish I was completely comfortable, including several multi-hour play sessions. It felt easy enough to get my character around the environment, though dashing is somewhat important and seemingly can’t be triggered unless you are looking generally in the direction you want to go (quite possibly done to avoid dashing sideways, for comfort considerations). The game also has an additional comfort option (vignetting) for anyone having trouble with comfort.
When you fill enough of your points meter to use your special ability, a purple veil completely covers your field of view for a few seconds, which isn’t welcome when you’re in the middle of shooting enemies. This would be much more frustrating in a game where any individual enemy or attack mattered, but fortunately (unfortunately?) that’s not the case in Powers United.
I had to turn all sound sliders down to 25% to have even a slight chance of hearing my teammates while playing co-op.
Ninja Theory’s BAFTA award-winning action-adventure game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017) is coming to Oculus Rift and HTC Vive soon. Here’s 14 minutes of gameplay, taken after the game’s initial intro.
Update (July 31st, 2018): Helblade: Senua’s Sacrifice VR Edition is now available as a free update via both Steam and GOG versions of the game.
The original article follows below.
Original Article (July 25th, 2018): The task at hand: battle the god’s of the Norse mythological realm Helheim, and overcome Celtic warrior Senua’s inner-struggles along the way.
Easily delivering more than seven hours of gameplay, Hellblade offers a new immersive look at the already rich world, which is teeming with demons and gods ripped from the few surviving texts detailing the Norse mythology. Like the PC/console game, it’s played in the third-person.
The game does have a few caveats, as you’ll notice in the gameplay video. Some textures pop, and geometry isn’t as solid as the PC version, although these are mostly minor complaints to what’s overall an impressive, and high quality VR implementation. You’ll also need a fairly beefy setup to run it though – at least an Intel i5 3570K or AMD FX-8350, 8 GB RAM, and either a NVIDIA GTX 1080 or AMD Radeon RX 580.
If you’re ready for an in-depth look at the upcoming VR edition, make sure to read our exclusive first look here, which covers everything from combat to comfort.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017) just got its first big content expansion for the PC VR versions of the game, now including the late ’80s, early ’90s-era U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701D—the very same captained by Jean-Luc Picard in the iconic TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994).
Update (July 24th, 2018): The PC version of Star Trek: Bridge Crew TNG Expansion is here. The paid DLC, which costs $15, is available through the Oculus Store (Rift) and Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR). The game is said to be cross-platform across all supported devices.
The original article detailing the PSVR launch of TNG DLC follows below:
Original Article (May 22nd, 2018): Created by Ubisoft’s Red Storm Entertainment, the TNG expansion is a $15 DLC which includes two new mission types—Patrol and Resistance, and of course the show’s beloved Bridge, walnut panels and all.
Image courtesy Ubisoft
Patrol mode is a bit like the base game’s ‘Ongoing Missions’, letting players roam the galaxy freely and engage in any mission types against the Romulans, while Resistance mode offers the meat of the update—a frenetic cat-and-mouse game against the Borg Cube which takes you on the hunt for three prototype ship modules which ultimately help you defeat the Borg.
A new role, Operations, is also a part of the expansion, which essentially works like a miniature version of FTL (2012) by letting you allocate crew members to 10 different stations: thruster control, main engineering, torpedoes, shield generator, transporter room, astrophysics lab, computer core, phaser control, scanners, and sickbay. These are red shirts, so expect some casualties.
The TNG update will hit HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets on July 21st 24th. Star Trek: Bridge Crew can also be played on traditional monitors.
The game’s retro launch trailer is certainly a fine touch to what promises to be a nostalgia-induced head trip of Delta quadrant proportions.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017) just got its first big content expansion for the PC VR versions of the game, now including the late ’80s, early ’90s-era U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701D—the very same captained by Jean-Luc Picard in the iconic TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994).
Update (July 24th, 2018): The PC version of Star Trek: Bridge Crew TNG Expansion is here. The paid DLC, which costs $15, is available through the Oculus Store (Rift) and Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR). The game is said to be cross-platform across all supported devices.
The original article detailing the PSVR launch of TNG DLC follows below:
Original Article (May 22nd, 2018): Created by Ubisoft’s Red Storm Entertainment, the TNG expansion is a $15 DLC which includes two new mission types—Patrol and Resistance, and of course the show’s beloved Bridge, walnut panels and all.
Image courtesy Ubisoft
Patrol mode is a bit like the base game’s ‘Ongoing Missions’, letting players roam the galaxy freely and engage in any mission types against the Romulans, while Resistance mode offers the meat of the update—a frenetic cat-and-mouse game against the Borg Cube which takes you on the hunt for three prototype ship modules which ultimately help you defeat the Borg.
A new role, Operations, is also a part of the expansion, which essentially works like a miniature version of FTL (2012) by letting you allocate crew members to 10 different stations: thruster control, main engineering, torpedoes, shield generator, transporter room, astrophysics lab, computer core, phaser control, scanners, and sickbay. These are red shirts, so expect some casualties.
The TNG update will hit HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets on July 21st 24th. Star Trek: Bridge Crew can also be played on traditional monitors.
The game’s retro launch trailer is certainly a fine touch to what promises to be a nostalgia-induced head trip of Delta quadrant proportions.
Electronauts, the upcoming co-op music making game from Survios, is confirmed to be launching with support for mixed reality video through LIV, a tool for compositing yourself into VR for video streaming and capture.
Liv, a tool that helps streamers and content creators set up mixed reality video in VR games, is gaining ground with recent official support for Beat Saber, and now Electronauts, among others, which is due out later this year. Liv also supports many Unity-based VR titles without direct integration from developers. Below you can see the Electronauts Liv integration in action and see how players will be able to spin some sick beats in VR:
Electronauts is the next VR experience to come from Survios, the studio behind Raw Data (2017) and Sprint Vector (2018). The title is quite the departure from those previous projects, as it takes the shape of a much less ‘game’ focused experience and instead focuses on music making creativity. Learn more from our hands on with Electronauts earlier this year.
Racket: NX (2018), the VR racket sports game, is now out of Early Access. Offering a surprising level of polish, fluid gameplay, and both an engaging single player and competitive multiplayer mode, Racket: NX has taken a fairly simple concept and fleshed it out to an ultimately fun (and addictive) conclusion.
Featuring breakable blocks like gaming classics Breakout or Arkanoid, Racket: NX pits you against a 360 degree domed wall filled with flashing yellow targets of various designs and placements. In a race against an ever dwindling energy meter, your job is simple: accurately break the blocks as fast as possible, collect energy pick-ups to refill your energy bar, and avoid the precariously placed energy-drainers which are littered throughout the multi-stage levels.
The game contains three principal modes: solo mode for classic single player gameplay, arcade mode for infinite survival with both classic and ‘zen’ mode, and multiplayer mode for one vs. one online battles.
Image courtesy One Hamsa
Single player mode features four increasingly hard difficulty level subsets: basic, advanced, hardcore and insane. To move up, you’ll have to complete at least four of the five bespoke levels in the preceding difficulty level. Each of these bespoke levels contains multiple stages, which take anywhere from three to ten minutes to pass in total.
Controls are very simple, as you only use one controller (left or right) with a single trigger pull acting as your only input, which retracts the ball to your racket wherever you’re facing. Besides the obvious benefit of getting your ball back quicker, this can be useful when your ball is flying dangerously close to energy drainers so you can pull it to safety mid-run. Smacking the ball harder will send your ball wall-sliding for those tasty combos, so a tactical ball retract is always useful.
Later in the game you run across things such as gravity wells that suck in your ball and spit it out somewhere else, and speed boosters that can either send your ball for a level-winning combo, or straight into a minefield of energy drainers. Floating power-ups such as scatter shots, extra points, and a temporary buff that changes all of the energy-drainers into positive energy pickups keep things moving at a fun, and always varied pace.
Image courtesy One Hamsa
While I had trouble at first with the racket (auto-aim is either non-existent or very subtle), after a few levels of brick-bashing and power-upping, I had a good enough grip on how to accurately smack the ball for a more or less consistent arc to my target. As I headed into ‘insane’ mode though, that’s where I really started to feel the rush of the clock ticking, the ball flying just one brick off its target, and that’s where I started to consistently lose a battle of what turned out to be a real test of ball-handing precision.
Abandoning my first real test of difficulty, I went off for my first multiplayer game to see how I stacked up after about an hour and half playing from the beginning tutorial through to the beginning of ‘insane’ mode. When I could find a match (more on that below), they usually turned out to be a thrilling competition that really combines everything you’ve learned in single player, but letting each player return the ball one at a time, which is color-coded when your serve is up.
Getting into a multiplayer game isn’t always easy due to unfortunately low player numbers. You can invite a friend to play, but the friend’s list isn’t as straight forward as I would have hoped. Contacting a friend through the Oculus app and starting an Oculus Party (voice chat) to coordinate—we were both on Rift and playing through the Oculus Store—we were unable to actually get into private match by sending the game’s match invite request. A tone would sound in the game when you were sent a request, but there wouldn’t be any obvious way to accept the invite afterwards. While this will no doubt be fixed in the future (it’s a crucial element, after all), at the time of launch getting into a private match seemed hopeless. We ended up both going for a competitive match at the same moment, and were fortuitously matched up. Now, back to the good.
With voice chat on as default, it was really cool to glance over for a chat, only see that the avatars are equally as futuristic (and befittingly weird) techno-lizards whose heads would articulate and pulse when they talk.
Image courtesy One Hamsa
Some niggles not withstanding, Racket: NX is a very solid experience gameplay-wise, which on its own is a pretty great thing to proclaim, but what really puts the cherry on the cake is the game’s impressive visuals. A bright and varied color palette helps you quickly distinguish target from trap, and combines a fun mix of translucent materials to give it that ultra slick, futuristic feeling.
The game’s music also helps set the scene, giving you a pulsing vibe that keeps you going until the energy meter’s tempo takes over for heart-pounding last-minute saves. You can replace it with your own music, but I never felt the need, as it fits to perfectly with the game.
Immersion
In a physical tennis game, learning where the edge of an actual racket is takes a bit of time when you start learning; a few key elements such as the weight of the racket, the vibration of hitting the ball, and how the racket cuts through the air all help us ‘feel’ where the ball hits, and know where it might land. In the physical world, this level of proprioception (knowing the position of your own body) helps the racket become a part of us, something that isn’t equally reflected in VR racket sports currently.
At times, it’s difficult to tell where the virtual racket is when it’s out of your field of view, and it’s not always clear at what angle the racket takes when you swing at the ball. When you do hit a ball, we miss out on that level of proprioception I talked about earlier, making it difficult to fully ground yourself in the virtual sport. That said, this can be overcome with practice though, as you get a better feel for the ball, and become more consistent in your racket hits. This isn’t so much a downfall of the game, but it’s a clear drawback of any racket sport in VR that uses stock motion controllers.
Outside of this, citing all of the game’s positives above, Racket: NX does everything it can to make you lose yourself in the task at hand.
Comfort
As a room-scale game that requires a 360 setup, Rift players may have a tougher time playing without a third sensor due to occlusion. Using a two-sensor, front-facing setup though didn’t create nearly as many issues as I thought I would have, as I only lost positional tracking for a moment and was still be able to return balls with the always-on rotational tracking of my single Touch controller.
Obviously three sensor setups and HTC Vive’s SteamVR base stations won’t have this problem, but it’s a valid warning nonetheless.
While you could play seated, provided you clear your space entirely, this is really a standing game that requires some physicality to play. I found myself switching between left and right hands to give my elbows a break too—but outside the obvious physical demands, the game is ultimately one of the most comfortable VR gameplay experiences you can have, thanks to the room-scale only nature of the game.
Megaton Rainfall (2017), the superhero game from Pentadimensional Games that lets you become an indestructible, interdimensional superbeing, is finally getting a VR mode for PCVR users next month. To boot, PSVR users are getting a free patch that will include PS Move support.
Pentadimensional today announced the news via a tweet, saying that Megaton Rainfall will be landing on the Oculus Store (Rift), SteamVR (Vive, Rift), Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One with 4K support for Xbox One X in August.
SteamVR and Oculus Store versions will release August 9th. The PS Move patch doesn’t have a specific launch date at the time of this writing.
Megaton Rainfall first launched as a timed exclusive on PS4 and PSVR back in October 2017. Although it later launched on Steam only a short while later, the version was for traditional monitors only, and didn’t include VR support. Not only are owners of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive going to get a chance at the well-received superhero title, but according to Pentadimensional’s tweet, all VR platforms will be getting full motion control support too. At the time of last year’s PSVR launch, the only supported controller was DualShock 4.
