Category: Prey

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13 Big VR Games To Look Out For This Fall

13 Big VR Games To Look Out For This Fall

Can you believe it’s nearly September already? It seems like it was only yesterday that we were looking ahead to 2018 and imagining all the great VR gaming we were going to be doing. Now most of it’s behind us.

Fortunately, though, 2018 has saved the best for last. We’ve rounded up 13 games!

Firewall Zero Hour
Platforms: PSVR
Release Date: Out now

A hugely anticipated competitive shooter from First Contact Entertainment, Firewall pits two teams of four against each other in attack and defend game modes. It’s been compared to Counter-Strike and Rainbow Six, and we’ve fallen in love with it each and every time we’ve played it. Pick up a PlayStation Aim controller for the best way to play.

Bow to Blood
Platforms: PSVR
Release Date: Out now

We weren’t going to put Bow to Blood on this list until we actually played it. Turns out Tribetoy’s PSVR debut is a winning mix of strategic micromanagement and arena-based combat. You pilot flying ships in a televised tournament and must forge unlikely relationships in order to prevail. This may be a sleeper hit for PSVR.

Torn
Platforms: Rift, Vive, PSVR
Release Date: Out now

An intriguing new puzzle game and the first internally-developed project from Aspyr. Torn sees you explore an enormous mansion as you gather the memories of as renowned inventor. Puzzles ask you to complete circuits by locating symbols fitted to random objects and putting them in the correct place. It’s a mad scientist of a VR game and definitely worth your time.

Zone of the Enders 2: The 2nd Runner – MARS
Platforms: Rift, Vive, PSVR
Release Date: September 4th

First announced at Tokyo Game Show last year, this is a full remaster of Konami’s cult classic, Zone of the Enders 2, with full support for VR putting you inside the cockpit of Jehuty for the first time. The entire original game can be played inside your headset, and what we’ve played of it is promising, if a little confusing.

Transference
Platforms: Rift, Vive, PSVR
Release Date: September 18th

The next VR game from Ubisoft is developed in partnership with Elijah Wood’s Spectrevision. It’s a psychological thriller that mixes CG and live action elements to create a mysterious and disturbing exploration of the mind. There’s a free demo out right now on PSVR, and what we’ve played of the main game is hugely promising.

Creed: Rise to Glory
Platforms: Rift, Vive, PSVR
Release Date: September 25th

Raw Data and Sprint Vector developer Survios is back with what’s sure to be another knockout. Creed is based on the recent films spinning out of the Rocky franchise and has you using two motion controllers to box your way to the top. Survios’ new Phantom Melee Technology is promising a more immersive, convincing boxing system than we’ve seen so far in VR.

Astro Bot: Rescue Mission
Platforms: PSVR
Release Date: October 2nd

One of the surprise success stories from PSVR’s launch back in 2016 was a small platforming minigame in the free Playroom VR collection. Now, Sony Japan is building that experience out into a full game akin to Lucky’s Tale. Expect inventive use of VR as you make your way through several levels saving your adorable robo buddies. This is sure to be a great addition to your PSVR library.

Evasion
Platforms: Rift, Vive, PSVR
Release Date: October 9th

Archiact, the developer of Waddle Home (yes, Waddle Home) is trying its hand at making the next big VR shooter. Evasion features co-op bullet hell gameplay in which you fight your way through an alien planet-trashing just about everything in sight. PS Aim support on PSVR is sure to make the experience more immersive.

Defector
Platforms: Rift
Release Date: 2018

Don’t forget about this hugely promising spy game from Wilson’s Heart developer Twisted Pixel, which last we heard was still coming this year. It’s as cinematic as VR gets, mixing stylish gadget-based gameplay with exciting shootouts and massive setpieces that will have you skydiving and more. Expect big things from this.

Prey: Typhon Hunter
Platforms: TBA
Release Date: 2018

Another one that might have slipped under your radar – Prey is getting VR support! Well, sort of. It’s actually an escape room-style DLC expansion in which you have to solve puzzles. There’s also going to be a multiplayer component in which players become shape-shifting mimics and disguise themselves in a room before a human player seeks them out. Verdict’s still out on this one.

Echo Combat
Platforms: Rift
Release Date: 2018

An expansion to the excellent Echo Arena was promised at Oculus Connect last year and it looks like it’ll be launching soon. Echo Combat brings gunplay into the series’ excellent zero gravity arenas. There’s already been several promising betas for the game, so expect this to be one of the big Rift games of the next few months.

A Fisherman’s Tale
Platforms: Rift, Vive, PSVR
Release Date: 2018

Firebird: La Peri developer Innervision is getting much closer to a game with its latest VR project, which has some incredibly inventive puzzles on offer. You play as a fisherman that has a scale model of his lighthouse inside his room. Look into it, and you’ll see a small version of yourself, while a bigger version can be found outside your window. Things get trippy fast.

Space Junkies
Platforms: Rift, Vive
Release Date: 2018

Ubisoft has a competitor to Echo Combat also coming this year. Space Junkies is another zero gravity shooter in which you grab power-ups and dual-wield weapons as you fling yourself around space, blasting other players. It’s a decidedly more arcadey take on the genre, and we can’t wait to see if it manages to build a community of its own.

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Prey: Typhon Hunter Add-On Will Include Three VR Escape Rooms And Competitive Hide-And-Seek

Prey: Typhon Hunter Add-On Will Include Three VR Escape Rooms And Competitive Hide-And-Seek

Back at E3 2018 we went hands-on with both new VR adaptations from Bethesda in Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot and Prey: Typhon Hunter. While Cyberpilot faltered a bit with its mindless, repetitive wave-based combat, Typhon Hunter caught us by surprise with meticulously detailed environments and well-paced puzzle solving. It was basically an elaborate, Prey-themed escape room experience. We liked it so much in fact that we picked it as our favorite HTC Vive game at the show.

Now this past week in Dallas, TX at the annual QuakeCon event, press got the chance to go hands-on with both titles once again, but this time it looks like a few more details were gleaned from developer discussions.

According to Polygon, Ricard Bare, lead designer at Arkane, developers of Prey, said that the VR title will ship with three escape rooms, all of which will be playable in VR instead of just the single room. Each area will take anywhere from 30-60 minutes to complete. Enemies won’t attack you here and it’s not randomly generated at all, so you can just focus on unraveling the layers of intricate puzzles.

The other game mode featured in Typhon Hunter is on the polar opposite end of the gaming spectrum as a sort of competitive hide-and-seek mode where one player takes on five other players that are all acting as shape-shifting mimics in the game world. This mode will also support VR, although it’s unclear if the VR player is forced to portray Morgan, the protagonist, a mimic, or if they can pick just like a non-VR player would be able to do. Hopefully it also features cross-play between VR and non-VR players like in other titles, such as VRChat.

As a part of Bethesda’s mission to continue supporting VR when it makes sense, Typhon Hunter is scheduled to release later this summer (that means soon!) for anyone that purchased Prey’s Mooncrash single-player non-VR DLC. Hopefully we get a firm date soon. Let us know what you think of how that sounds down in the comments below!

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UploadVR’s Best Of E3 2018 Game Awards

UploadVR’s Best Of E3 2018 Game Awards

Now that E3 2018 is officially over we decided to take a look back at the week and discuss what we played. There wasn’t a whole lot of VR this year and overall it was a bit underwhelming for the industry, but there were a few highlights for each platform.

In order to name winners, we’ve decided to break down the awards into three categories: Best Rift Game, Best Vive Game, and Best PSVR Game. One of those will also be dubbed Best VR Games of E3 2018 and we’ll have a section at the end mentioning a few of our other favorites as well. Worth mentioning as well is that a game must have been playable in order for it to be considered. We’re as excited anyone about Stormland, but it wasn’t at the show, and The Elder Scrolls: Blades was only playable on mobile phones.

That’s about it, so let’s get to it!

Best Oculus Rift Game: Echo Combat

This is the first E3 in years that Oculus didn’t have its own dedicated booth at. Instead, they had a couple demo stations tucked away at the back of the Facebook Gaming booth. But that didn’t stop Echo Combat from being the standout Rift game over at the Alienware booth. Echo Combat is the next VR game from Ready at Dawn, creators of both Lone Echo and Echo Arena. By taking the core gameplay mechanics behind those two games and adding on layers of complexity with different guns and asking players to compete over a payload that’s traveling across the map, they’ve once again crafted an addicted, beautiful, and exhilarating zero-G VR experience that we can’t wait to play more.

Best HTC Vive Game: Prey TranStar and Typhon Hunter

There just weren’t very many games showcased for the HTC Vive this year at E3. The main one two that we got to see were Prey and Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, but the latter really didn’t have a very good demo showing at all. In Prey, I played the TranStar VR experience which is basically a puzzle room full of interactive objects. It’s not very original, but it’s super polished and well done. The asynchronous multiplayer Typhon Hunter DLC will have  VR support as well, which we are very excited about.

Best PSVR Game: Firewall: Zero Hour

Out of the big three VR headsets, Sony’s PSVR by far had the best showing and they barely even talked about VR at all publicly. On the show floor they had over a dozen VR demo stations featuring the likes of Astro Bot, Evasion, Megalith, Beat Saber, and more. But the best demo and by far our most-anticipated PSVR title to date is Firewall: Zero Hour. It plays out a lot like Rainbow Six, but in VR, and we can’t wait to dive in with our Aim Controller on all nine maps when it releases.

Honorable Mention: Tetris Effect

“It’s the kind of game you want to play at the end of a long day to get out of your own head.” That’s how famed game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi described Tetris Effect, the upcoming PSVR version of one of the most iconic games of all time. We had a chance to play Tetris Effect at this year’s E3, and it definitely lived up to Mizuguchi’s description. It’s a simple yet beautiful, serene experience that left us invigorated and clear-headed after playing.

Honorable Mention: Deracine

There was a single station for Déraciné at E3. It wasn’t at Sony’s public booth and was only tucked away in a corner of the press-only PlayStation area next to Blood & Truth and a host of other PSVR demos. Despite the subdued presence, it’s a beautiful adventure game with a gorgeous sepia-stained overtone. Déraciné is about as far away from Dark Souls VR as you can get for developer From Software, but it sold me on its premise and I can’t wait to see more.

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Hands-on With Prey: TranStar VR DLC

Fans of Bethesda’s Prey were excited to learn that the title was getting a downloadable content (DLC) expansion called Mooncrash. Interestingly, this expansion will contain two virtual reality (VR) sections, a multi-player called Typhon Hunter and a single-player called TransStar VR.

Nina managed to try out Prey: TransStar VR during E3 2018, and provided her thoughts on the experience.

Prey: Typhon Hunter VR

TransStar VR was in near-final form at E3 2018, and it puts the player in the role of an employee of TransStar who needs to solve a series of mysterious puzzles while travelling through some finely crafted environments of the Talos 1 space station.

As Nina report, players will initially find themselves in a giant room, and much carefully search the room to find different objects that can be recycled. These objects are placed in the special machine which turns the objects into different coloured blocks.

These blocks then need to be correctly placed in a different machine in order to solve the puzzle and activate the machine. Players will need to deduce what objects in the room can be recycled and what kind of objects will produce the block types needed to complete the puzzle.

Once the machine is active, you unlock a special headset, which when used lets the player see mysterious orbs that need to be scanned. The demo experience at E3 2018 ended there, but the full VR experience in the Mooncrash DLC will be longer and more involved.

Prey: Typhon Hunter - Logo

The gameplay has been described as being somewhat similar to an escape room, which is something that seems to work particularly well in VR, as has been demonstrated before. There was little combat demonstrated in TranStar VR, with the gameplay mostly being devoted towards exploration and puzzle-solving.

The full video preview is available to view below. For further coverage from E3 2018, keep checking back with VRFocus.

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Preview: Prey – TranStar VR

Last year’s reboot of Prey was met with significant critical acclaim, and Bethesda Softworks are looking to increase the lifespan of the title with a brand new downloadable content (DLC) pack, known as Mooncrash, coming soon. Free to all owners of the videogame, the new DLC will include two virtual reality (VR) components; the multi-player orientated Typhon Hunter and a single-player experience, TranStar VR.

Prey: Typhon Hunter - Logo

While Typhoon Hunter wasn’t playable at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), TranStar VR appeared it what seemed to be a near-final form. There’s no telling at what point in the videogame the vertical slice VRFocus experienced took place; but given the ease of interaction and the lack of threat it’s likely to be very close to the opening section.

The entire sequence takes place in a large room, which will appear familiar to anyone who played the original release. All the basic utensils of the world of Prey are contained within – recycling machine, fabricator, looking glass – and they must be used as the same fashion as previously done in order to complete the task at hand. The demonstration that VRFocus witnessed was very light on the action; without time constraints or any imminent threat whatsoever, it was purely a case of joining the dots to reach the end.

Ahead of the player’s starting point is a piece of tech with a missing component, which the player is informed by an adjacent screen that they must find to engage the required process. Next is moving to a PC to gather information, solving a puzzle through hidden messages on whiteboards, recycling items to create blocks of specific types of matter; the same kind of puzzles as seen in the original Prey but with far less obvious signposting.

Prey: Typhon Hunter VR
The experience culminates as the player finds typhon energy littered throughout the space which, upon collecting a certain amount, things take an unfortunate turn. It’s the first instance of any kind of obstruction that the player will encounter, and is remains very limited in such a way even then.

As interesting as the potential for a Prey VR experience could seem, TranStar VR has some significant issues at present. As stated throughout this preview, there is neither reason nor rhyme for completing the objectives in front of you. There’s no time pressure, no risk of failure and no opposition. All of the objectives feel somewhat disjointed; while it’s often very appealing to find a videogame which doesn’t attach obvious signposts to each and every interaction in the modern industry, it’s also not particularly encouraging to be left without anything other than a breadcrumb trail of ‘this object goes here, generates new object which goes here’. Furthermore, at present Prey – TranStar VR only allows for teleportation movement. There is no smooth locomotion option in the E3 2018 preview build.

Whether or not Prey – TranStar VR will find reason and perhaps even tension in later areas of the videogame remains to be seen, however at present it feels like a step backwards into the type of VR experience that early adopters were witnessing back in 2015. Given Bethesda Softworks VR output to date it’d be hard to bet against Arkane Studios, but at present the hopes rest upon the shoulders of the as-yet-unseen VR multiplayer mode, Typhon Hunter.

 

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Wolfenstein, Prey and The Elder Scrolls: Bethesda Look to Continue VR Games Bull Run in 2018

2017 was a landmark year for virtual reality (VR), with not only the hardware maturing but also a number of huge entertainment properties making their way to the medium. Leading the charge was Bethesda Softworks, with adaptations of three of their most popular videogame experiences. Now, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2018, the publisher has confirmed three more titles are on their way, and this time VR is coming closer to home.

The first VR title confirmed at this year’s event was a brand new standalone experience set within the Wolfenstein universe, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot. Following a fashion similar to DOOM VFR, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot takes place two decades since the events of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. It expands on the storyline presented within the bloodline titles while casting the player in a new role: in this case, a fire-breathing Panzerhund and other familiar war machines. The second title, an expansion to 2017’s Prey reboot, presents an interesting new competitive mode, playable against non-VR players. Set to be offered as part of the with Prey: Mooncrash update later this year, Prey – Typhon Hunter pits one player against several others cast as Mimics with nothing more than survival being the objective.

An additional new gameplay mode coming to Prey offers a single-player escape room scenario, called TranStar VR. As one of several TranStar employees the player will be faced with finding a solution for puzzles laid out ahead of them in different environments from the Talos I space station.

While these all sound like incredibly enticing gameplay opportunities and potentially huge boons to the entertainment side of VR, the third title is undoubtedly the most interesting. Presented as a videogame built for smartphones, The Elder Scrolls: Blades is apparently coming to every conceivable format; including consoles, PC and VR. In fact, according to Todd Howard, Director and Executive Producer at Bethesda Game Studios, it would appear that The Elder Scrolls: Blades will hit ‘most every head-mounted display (HMD) aside from PlayStation VR.

“This is an Elder Scrolls game that you can play however and wherever you want,” stated Howard during Bethesda Softworks’ pre-E3 press conference yesterday. “And we are going to bring Blades to every device and system we can; phones, PCs, consoles, also virtual reality on mobile, all the way up to high-end VR on PCs.”

That is of course not confirmation that The Elder Scrolls: Blades won’t launch on PlayStation VR, but the wording seems very specific. Time will tell on that front.

Right now however, what we do know is that with The Elder Scrolls: Blades, VR is being treated as part of the standardised array of formats. Players will be able to enjoy playing The Elder Scrolls: Blades on their smartphone against players in VR, or on their console with VR players. Exactly how this will play out is not yet known, but the fact that one of the biggest videogame producers in the world is looking at VR as a peer to smartphone, console and PC gaming is undoubtedly an exciting takeaway from this year’s E3.

But given last year’s successful VR push it’s no wonder Bethesda Softworks are looking to bring more titles to VR. The publisher has quickly become synonymous with some of the most exciting and enduring experiences available through the relatively youthful medium and in 2018 will be looking to cement that position way ahead of the maturing of VR for mainstream audiences. There’s still a chance that Ubisoft might pull something out of the bag during their pre-E3 press conference later today, but as things stand Bethesda Softworks are looking to take home not only the E3 mantel for VR, but also 2018 as a whole.

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‘Prey’ to Get Two VR-compatible Game Modes in ‘Mooncrash’ DLC This Summer

Bethesda today announced at E3 2018 that DLC for Prey (2017) is coming, and that two VR-compatible game modes will be available soon—a single player escape room game and a multiplayer game called ‘Typhon Hunter’, both of which will be available later this summer as part of the Mooncrash DLC, or in the Prey: Digital Deluxe.

In Prey, the main baddies are the typhon, an alien race of mimics that can turn into things like moon rocks, mugs – basically anything.

Typhon Hunter is a multiplayer gamemode in Prey: Mooncrash, which essentially plays out like a game of cat and mouse; hunt the typhon disguised as a trashcan or Windex bottle. According to Bethesda, the new competitive VR mode pits the series’ protagonist Morgan Yu against mimics that will stalk, hunt and hide in plain sight as they try to take Yu down.

Typhon Hunter will also be available outside of VR, which is good news for keeping the playerbase healthy.

Arkane’s Typhon Hunter update is also said to include a solo escape room in VR mode called ‘TranStar VR’. In TranStar VR, you solve puzzles in the Talos I space station. TranStar VR will also be downloadable later this summer, as a free update with the Mooncrash DLC or the Prey: Digital Deluxe.

The news of fresh Prey DLC came in tandem with the the announcement that a VR-compatible standalone game Wolfenstein is coming too.

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