Arktika.1 is a first-person VR shooter that makes more than a few smart choices in its design, something that may have you thinking twice before dismissing its admittedly limited node-based teleportation style lock, stock, and barrel (holographic sight and flashlight too). It’s not to say Arktika.1 isn’t without its clear flaws, but the end result is decidedly a net positive that gives you exactly what you came for in the first place: a ridiculously good looking game that goes pew pew pew.
Developer: 4A Games Publisher: Oculus Studios Available On:Oculus Reviewed On:Oculus Rift Release Date: October 10, 2017
Gameplay
In an effort to combat climate change, humans have accidentally flung the world into a new ice age, the results of which are much worse than just having to knock a few icicles off your dual-wielded pistols. As an elite mercenary, your job is to protect Arktika.1, a settlement in a frozen wasteland outside of what used to be Vostok, Russia. Machine gun-wielding bandits are a big concern, but at least they’re human. Mysterious beasts called ‘Yagas’—named after the Russian folktale monster-witch ‘Baba Yaga’—roam the multi-level facility looking to feed on anything with a pulse. And these overpowered freaks of nature are genuinely gruesome creatures that like popping out of the shadows and rushing at you hissing and screaming—just the thing to get your heart racing.
Arktika.1’s levels are giant and while you’re gifted with the power of teleportation to traverse them, you’re only allowed to teleport to nodes that the game chooses, creating something that I’m tempted to describe as a ‘mobile wave shooter’ experience. You’ll enter a room, see two bad guys, kill them, which triggers 4 more bad guys to come rushing in. Once you clear the area, you’re then offered a new forward node to teleport to, which effectively functions as a signal that you’ve eliminated all possible bad guys and can move to the next room. I say I’m tempted to call it a ‘mobile wave shooter’ because of the, well, waves of bad guys that you swim straight through, but levels aren’t always big rooms with well-timed waves of enemies rushing in. Oftentimes you’re traversing through tight corridors and elevators, and you just don’t know what’s waiting for you on the other side, be it a trap, puzzle, or one of those terrible Yagas ready to tear your head off.
Image courtesy 4A Games
While you don’t have the freedom to move forward without first eliminating everyone, and you are only given predetermined angles and shooting spots, that doesn’t mean you won’t be physically ducking and hiding around corners to land a decisive headshot, or getting your heart rate up in excitement though. It just tends to structure gameplay in a way that feels a little more ‘paint by numbers’ than genuine exploratory combat would. Outside of that, there are clearly timed waves of baddies in larger rooms, sending a fresh wave your way once you’ve killed the remaining guy in the last wave, which adds to the experience’s overall artifice.
There aren’t a lot of VR shooters out there featuring customizable guns, and Arktika.1 does it right, giving you a mix of clip-on and embedded accessories that both cater to your individual shooting style and also effectively work like physical difficulty sliders; you can stay with your basic iron sights for the most authentic shooting experience, or customize all the way up to an x-ray sight so you can see bad guys through walls, letting you anticipate attacks and even see them in the dark. It’s up to you if you want to deck out any of the ten or so pistols available, and which pistol or upgrade fits your shooting style. That said, I wish the upgrades were a little harder to achieve, as half-way through the game I felt like I had everything I needed.
Image courtesy 4A Games
The shooting experience itself is really well done, and it’s nice to see that the creators didn’t compromise it with awkward-to-hold rifles, instead offering a wide enough selection of pistols and sight types to make you feel like what you had in your hand was enough.
There are two basic reloading styles, and having a mixed set-up (one semi-auto and one revolver) can kind of screw with you at first, but reloading quickly becomes a fast reflex. Holsters are conveniently placed above each shoulder, so you can easily stick them away for button pressing and puzzle-solving.
Bandits are your main foe in Arktika.1, which boil down to three classes: basic infantry, heavy, and sniper. More variety here would have been gladly welcome, because after killing the same identical three guys (with the same voices) umpteen times gets a little tiresome, but the same could be said about established shooter franchises like Halo too. The three classes (plus the odd drone) add enough of a mix to keep you on your toes though, as the heavy really only dies on headshots and the sniper always seems to materialize over your head and land a laser-scoped rifle round to your head. There are a surprising lack of level boss encounters—not a requirement, but an interesting choice nonetheless.
Image courtesy 4A Games
Some of you have been skimming this article for gameplay length, so here it is in bold: it took me five hours to complete, but the usual caveats apply; you’ll probably spend more time if you’re one who likes hunting hidden easter eggs and completing ‘Objectives’ (optional challenges) on each level. Rolling out with the most game-cheapening gun accessories, I only died twice (albeit on the default Easy difficulty), both of which were because of laser traps that I didn’t shut off in time.
Puzzles, although at an impressively wide variety, are an absolute breeze, and are really only momentary tasks on the road to more shooting. This isn’t really about that, so it’s an easy charge to forgive.
Immersion
Eventually clicking into the frantic task of managing your corners, and making sure you can anticipate the move of every bad guy as he pops out behind pillars, you start to sense a flow in the game. Getting used to the game’s various tasks and locomotion system is really only one part of immersion though, as the world itself has to entice you into forgetting you’re really in your living room wearing pajamas.
Image courtesy 4A Games
Arktika.1 excels visually with its overwhelmingly atmospheric levels, elevating it among the best looking VR titles to date. There’s a thick varnish of neglect and ice on everything, and it’s hard not to feel the biting cold come through. I have some minor gripes with the incorrectly scaled scaled hands of the player, some chairs, and a harmonica the size of a chalk eraser, but these are few and far between.
If you’re looking for a deep story with character arcs that give you a reason to fight, you’ll be a little disappointed in Arktika.1. You’ll only ever get to know one person in the whole game, Viktoria, and while her story does develop, I can’t say I really felt attached. I never had that moment where I said to myself ‘this is a real person worth my attention.’
The opening sequence, a part of the first 25 minutes of gameplay, seemed like a promising start with Viktoria, but she quickly becomes an immobile task master holed up in her command center; the virtual voice in your ear telling you where to go, what to do, why to care, etc. Positioning Viktoria as a chattering task master feels like a cheap solution to the complex problem of telling an in-world story, which in the end makes it feel like a thin guise to get you into that next mission. For many, that’ll be just fine (pew pew pew, amiright?), but a rich story that compels you to care about what you’re doing and drives you forward is a big plus for immersion, though Arktika.1 felt more like dangling the carrot of more money in front of my face.
Image courtesy 4A Games
I’m supposed to be a mercenary, sure, but it would have been nice if maybe a grandmotherly figure popped her head in and made me a hot cup of tea, or if I got to see a group of settlers going about their lives to signal some semblance of humanity worth saving. Viktoria doesn’t even get mad at you when you throw things at her face, and she never asks you questions that may require a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ nod. She talks at you until the game is done, but you never actually speak back or interact with her.
All in all, these sorts of narrative misgivings filter into the back of your mind when you actually hit the action, which on its own is cohesive and varied enough to hit all the right beats.
Comfort
Image courtesy 4A Games
Even though the Oculus store page says the game supports 360 setups, the game is entirely a front-facing experience. Teleportation nodes place you right where the action is going to be, which again makes it feel a little too ‘paint by numbers’, but makes it ultimately super comfortable. And no, this game probably couldn’t work as-is with smooth forward locomotion, as many levels require you to teleport over large gaps.
Playing this one all the way through, I really would have appreciated a seated mode that placed me at the right standing height so I could finally give my dogs a rest, but this is more of a 30 minute-per-mission type of game, meaning you’ll probably digest this one in bite-sized pieces.
Thanks to its comprehensive VR support on PC, Project CARS 2 is another great showcase for VR sim racing, offering better performance than Project CARS (2015) in a much more compelling package. Addressing many of its predecessor’s shortcomings, the sequel is a welcome addition to the sim racing scene—but rather like the original, it needs more time to bake.
Developer: Slightly Mad Studios Publisher: BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Available On:Steam (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Release Date: September 21, 2017
Note: This review covers the PC version of Project CARS 2, from the perspective of a sim racing enthusiast. (There is no PSVR support on PS4.) The game was mainly tested using both VR and triple screens, using a dedicated sim rig, but gamepad control was also briefly tested. The VR-specific parts of this review are covered in the ‘Immersion’ and ‘Comfort’ sections.
Gameplay
At first glance, Project CARS 2 might induce a concerning feeling that not much has changed. You’re presented with similar splash screens, the same music theme (nestled among new tunes), and a UI with a sensible makeover, but still the same underlying interface. The menus still contain oddly low-resolution images of each car, Career Mode has a similar ‘multiple paths/start points’ structure as before, complete with fake emails from your team. (The ‘fake Twitter feed’ from your ‘fans’ has been removed however.)
Image courtesy Slightly Mad Studios
And to the casual observer, the simulation itself might not appear to be much different either. Weather and lighting effects are impressive, but the same could be said of the original. Graphics have improved, but not to a huge extent. And many of the audio cues seem all too familiar, including the ‘Captain Obvious’ engineer calls. Many vehicles (and the same liveries) and tracks carry over, and the overall presentation feels like ‘more of the same’.
Underlying Brilliance
But there is much more to Project CARS 2 than meets the eye. And it boils down to physics. The improvement in this area is so dramatic, it’s almost unbelievable. Project CARS arrived on the scene with bold claims: detailed vehicle physics, a cutting-edge tyre model, and handling tuned with the help of ex-’Stig’ Ben Collins and Nic Hamilton, and several other pro drivers; track surfaces would evolve as you race, with the grip changing due to weather, time of day, the amount of rubber being laid down, and so on; dynamic weather and a 24-hour lighting system tied everything together. The sequel makes very similar claims, but this time, thanks mainly to a completely overhauled tyre model, it actually works pretty well.
Look deeper, and you’ll find many other indications that developer Slightly Mad Studios have listened to user feedback. For a start—while this has little relevance to VR—the game now has proper triple screen support, a Big Deal for the hardcore sim racer. There’s improved support for a wide variety of wheels and pedals, fully manual pit stops, more replay and broadcast options, massively improved vehicle setup pages, and even a delta bar for sector timings (finally!). Almost the entire wealth of options, including assists, control assignments, graphics and audio settings are adjustable from the pause menu. In the first game, you couldn’t even change a button assignment without quitting back to the main menu.
What’s more, every option in the menu has a written explanation. As a result, the intimidating setup screens are more approachable, and there is even a simple ‘ask the engineer’ feature for those looking for a quick recommendation.
But it’s not without problems. The vehicle setup pages should be a joy to use, but for some reason the game forces you to save (either in a new file or to overwrite an existing one) every single time you change something—rather than having an active, work-in-progress setup—which quickly becomes frustrating. You can’t even drop the fuel load on a setup without re-saving it.
Project CARS 2 is in a constant battle with itself to please its wide audience, from casual gamers to hardcore sim racers. The dilemma between realism and accessibility is highlighted perfectly in the slow-down penalty system. Surprisingly, ‘off-track’ detection is, in many places, as strict as iRacing (2008), but the slow-down penalty that follows is far too easily cleared, resulting in some questionable lines. However, if you gain a position while triggering a slow-down, you’re also forced to let your opponent by, which is a great touch.
Motorsport Heaven
Image courtesy Slightly Mad Studios
A roster of 180 cars should be enough to please most petrolheads, with famous marques such as Ferrari and Porsche making their debut in the series. Unlike the original game, careful consideration has been made to ensure most cars have appropriate opponents, to recreate races from classic eras. There are some outstanding new models, but all cars carried over from the original have been given a new lease of life on the improved tyre model—an incredible transformation in many cases.
Track count has been boosted to 60 (over 130 layouts), delivering much greater variety, from brutal Rallycross circuits to the serene beauty of the Mercedes-Benz Ice Track. The new circuits are built to a high standard, particularly COTA, Long Beach, and the brilliant Algarve Circuit (Portimao). However, the tracks carried over from the original appear to have received largely cosmetic upgrades, meaning that there is unresolved track surface inconsistency compared to the most accurate examples in the genre. Some were already great (e.g. Oulton Park), but Bathurst still doesn’t look right, with strange cambers and track widths, and Monza remains the same, with very odd cambers through both Lesmos and the Parabolica, and kerb profiles are all over the place.
Claiming to represent 29 motorsport series across 9 racing disciplines sounds great on paper, but the developers have probably bitten off more than they can chew here. Various forms of sports/touring car racing, including magnificent historic eras, are well-represented, but modern open-wheel is largely limited to unlicenced interpretations and oval racing feels unfinished. The lack of accurate oval flag/caution rules, along with some questionable pit lane decisions (i.e. speed limit lines in strange positions, every limit set to 37 mph) makes for a frustrating oval experience that simply isn’t worth doing at this point. IndyCar is the most problematic, as wings fly off the car with the slightest touch, which would trigger a full-course caution for debris in reality, but here, you carry on regardless. And if you hit that debris, it’s game over.
On the one hand, the developers should be given credit for actually delivering a sim that has debris damage, but in this case the balance is wrong. Wings on open-wheelers in reality are very sensitive, but without a fully-realised caution system (there are no safety cars for example), it doesn’t make sense. Wing damage appears to carry across all the open-wheel series, with debris causing issues in almost every race. The Formula C, for example, will become undriveable (due to understeer) from the slightest touch to the front wing. And ‘slightest touch’ is not hyperbole—at Oulton Park in the rain, it always gave me 22% damage simply from launching off the line. (I could play the game with damage disabled, but where’s the fun in that?)
Image courtesy Slightly Mad Studios
One new discipline fares very well in particular: Rallycross. Simulating these four-wheel drive beasts was no small feat; the team needed to rework chassis, tyre and surface models to deal with the long suspension travel, massive slip angles and loose terrain. The result is cars that feel immediately more intuitive than DiRT Rally’s interpretation of Rallycross, a remarkable achievement.
If Only They Could Improve the AI…
Much like the first game, Career Mode is more interesting than the majority of racing simulators. You can start from the very bottom in karting, or pick something more grown-up if you’re feeling brave. Whichever route you choose, there is a satisfying feeling of progression, awarding accolades and ‘affinity’ to certain manufacturers, which unlock special ‘invitational events’ along the way. Quick Play has the entire car and track list unlocked from the beginning, but the near-limitless possibilities (due to season, time and weather options) can be overwhelming. This is where those invitational events come in, essentially a curated list of great combos that you could reproduce in Quick Play – and the best way to experience the full force of Project CARS 2’s content.
Image courtesy Slightly Mad Studios
This sim desperately needs competent AI. It’s unlikely to make a huge impact on PC sim racing in the multiplayer space, with the likes of iRacing and Assetto Corsa (2014) already filling that role, so offline needs to be fun and challenging. Unfortunately, the AI is often frustrating in its current form. Wheel-to-wheel behaviour has improved, resulting in regular nuggets of side-by-side magic, and the outrageous dive-bombing tendencies have been reduced, but as a whole it is disappointingly inconsistent. There are times where I’ve been able to pass a field of 16 cars in the space of three corners (on 100% strength) due to their painfully tentative starts. Once spread out, they’ll become competitive, but I could never find a comfortable setting; they’re challenging in one session, and seconds off the pace in another. If you start as tentatively as the AI do, you’ll be in for a better race, but this shouldn’t be necessary. It feels like I’m cheating every time I make a ‘normal’ start.
The Turn 1 carnage seen in some early footage hasn’t been completely resolved either. Fancy doing Le Mans in a field of 31 GTE cars? Not an unreasonable request. Well, currently, this causes a massive accident at the Dunlop chicane, every time. It can be partially resolved by doing a rolling start (which admittedly, is what they do at Le Mans in reality), but the rolling starts don’t feel correct either, with cars spreading out too far and driving single-file.
No doubt AI start logic is incredibly complex to code, particularly in a simulation that has so many variables. But there’s little excuse for some of the lines that the AI take in the middle of a race. For example, Britten’s Chicane at Oulton Park is no longer a mess, but instead they are too hesitant now, despite having driven at unbelievable pace around Island Bend. The AI takes a dangerously tentative line through the kink at Laguna Seca (Turn 6), manages to summon ‘alien’ pace at the highly technical Rainey Curve, followed by a disastrous rookie struggle on the simple, final left-hander.
As for Monaco, the pileups from earlier builds seem to have been solved, but it’s still a disaster zone. After a mere 10-lap race in the Formula C, practically the entire field had lost either its front or rear wing, or both!
Unproven Multiplayer
It’s too early to assess multiplayer at this stage; a number of teething problems made it difficult to test. In the brief period where I was able to connect, it was a clear improvement over the first game, with better filters, more admin controls, broadcast options, and so on. Netcode was poor over peer-to-peer, with limited input data being transmitted, resulting in inaccurate representations of steering and track position of your opponents (and the standard wreck-fest), but the dedicated server experience should be better. Most importantly, there is a ‘Competitive Racing Licence’, which enables a form of ‘safety rating’ and ‘skill rating’ that should, in theory, provide better matchmaking and cleaner racing—promising, but only time will tell.
The Tiresome Struggle…
My benchmark for road car simulation is Assetto Corsa. Project CARS 2’s impressive new tyre model seems to have the potential to match it, but there are too many inconsistencies. The Porsche GT3 RS is superb, the McLaren 720S is a blast, and the mad hybrid hypercars of LaFerrari, 918, and P1 behave similarly to Assetto Corsa’s interpretations, but many of the front-engine, rear-drive road cars lack the inherent balance you’d expect. The Toyota GT86 and BMW 1M are the pick of the bunch, ‘chuckable’ into every corner. But the DB11, widely regarded as a brilliant chassis, is incredibly difficult to drift, particularly at low speeds. The F-Type is similarly awkward. The C63 monster is better, with its realistic ability to eat its rear tyres in a couple of laps, but again, there are problems over the limit. Most of the road cars (with all assists off) exhibit a low speed, high slip angle problem, making tight drift transitions almost impossible.
Image courtesy Slightly Mad Studios
Race tyres are more impressive, if slightly too forgiving at times in the dry. The sensation of ‘being outside the operating window’ due to low temperatures is the best I have felt in any sim, as is the feeling of downforce building grip as speeds increase. There is some serious potential here, as the sim can, at its best, hold its own against iRacing, rFactor 2 (2013), Automobilista (2016), and Assetto Corsa.
But things start to become unrealistic when it’s wet. I’ve never driven a Lotus 49, but it seems fairly obvious that you shouldn’t be able to floor a 400hp car with zero downforce out of corners in the dry, let alone the wet, but you can do exactly that. I would suggest that the current state of the Lotus 49 grip in the ‘Rain’ condition is roughly how it should be behaving in the dry (and even then it’s nearly too forgiving!). The same applies across all cars. It seems there is, at least until the track is totally flooded, generally far too much grip in the wet; you can drive on slicks in wet conditions for far too long. Lap times tumble, so you’re forced to pit anyway, but slicks should quickly become undriveable, and that’s not the case here. The Formula A slick, for example, delivers wet grip levels that would embarrass an ‘intermediate’ tyre in reality. Incidentally, ‘intermediates’ are sadly absent, perhaps because there’s really no need for them when slicks have this much grip in the rain.
Criticism aside, I appreciate the technology on offer here. No other sim offers this level of environmental customisation, with good reason: it’s very difficult to pull off in a realistic manner, and is largely unnecessary. The most extreme weather conditions are almost entirely pointless for racing the vast majority of cars in the game. But the clinical nature of sim racing could do with some light-hearted fun, and it should be celebrated that you can drive the Nordschleife using an ‘F1’ spec car in the snow!
Image courtesy Slightly Mad Studios
And so we come to force feedback (FFB), which is a massive improvement, as it links directly to the new tyres. I thought the original game’s FFB was pretty decent, if let down by a poor tyre model. But the ludicrous number of settings were almost impossible to understand. Project CARS 2 has a much more sensible FFB options menu, offering just a handful of sliders (their effects are still fairly difficult to understand despite the descriptions).
Three preset modes are really all you need to worry about: ‘Immersive’, ‘Informative’, and ‘Raw’. VR is all about immersion, but the ‘Immersive’ FFB setting is truly horrendous, avoid! ‘Raw’ and ‘Informative’ do a much better job. I found that using ‘Raw’ and only playing with the ‘Gain’ slider worked well enough. The game would benefit from a ‘per car’ setting, because the difference in output between vehicles covers such a wide torque range.
Project CARS was heavily criticised for its gamepad support. Playing them back-to-back using an Xbox One controller, it’s clear that the sequel has more refined default settings, but they’re still problematic. The fact is, driving with small analogue inputs with simulation physics is very difficult. You either have to deal with some numbing, heavy-handed filters (or assists), or turn them down for more direct, but extremely sensitive control. There are a number of sliders to tweak the response; most people will need to fiddle with the steering damping and speed sensitivity to find something that works for them. Ultimately, a gamepad is the wrong controller for this type of game. It works, and it can be fun, but for VR in particular, only a steering wheel and pedal set can complete the picture.
Immersion
Project CARS 2 arrives with an impressive set of considerations for VR. Its predecessor received several VR updates over the course of its life, adding helpful features like world scaling, recenter on boot/race start options, near clip plane adjustment, a gaze-activated cursor, and seat adjustments in the pause menu – all of which carry over to the new game. The sequel adds further refinement, beginning with the UI.
As before, the gaze-operated cursor fades out if you override the control with a mouse or other controller, but it is now easily disabled, or switched to a dedicated select button (rather than auto-hover always being active). However, the ‘select’ button isn’t obvious from the control assignment menus, and you can’t control every menu easily with just head look (scrolling down through long settings menu lists requires a separate input), but it’s useful for dealing with the typical race-to-race inputs.
Performance has largely improved. Using the Performance HUD on the Oculus Debug Tool, I revisited the notoriously demanding original Project CARS using an i7 4790K, 16GB RAM, GTX 1080 system, and found that a 16 car GT3 grid at most tracks in heavy rain triggers the half-refresh rate effects of Asynchronous Space Warp at several points (if not continuously) around the circuit—on the absolute lowest graphics settings. The game simply can’t hold 90fps, and when it does (during dry weather with cars well-spaced apart), there is barely any performance headroom.
Project CARS 2 on the other hand, holds 90 fps in any weather on the same circuit/car combinations, even with 1.1 supersampling and ‘medium’ MSAA applied. But this still with everything else on lowest settings, and it was only just holding 90 at times, so you’ll need some serious horsepower if you want to turn up the settings.
That said, many Rifters will be comfortable with (or not notice) ASW absorbing all the drops, at which point a 45 fps Project CARS 2 experience can be run at much higher settings. That can’t really be said for the HTC Vive however, as SteamVR’s reprojection techniques simply don’t manage sub-90 fps performance as well as the Rift, so it’s even more important to have plenty of headroom when using that headset.
The troublesome VR image quality of the first title has also been addressed, with proper MSAA available in combination with supersampling. Even setting the original game to 1.2 supersampling and the mixed AA mode of ‘DS2M’ looks muddy compared to Project CARS 2 running at 1.1 with medium MSAA. Not only is wet weather performance far more manageable, but the jarring low-resolution alpha effects of water spray have been eliminated. Supersampling is now directly available in the graphics menu, and the pause menu adds mirror angle adjustments. The mirrors now operate as they do in iRacing and react to positional head movement. Sadly, like iRacing, they aren’t stereoscopic (Live For Speed is still champion there), which a subtle—but not insignificant—hit to immersion.
In addition to an improved mix, audio is now positional, meaning that a rear-engined car genuinely sounds like the revs are happening behind your head, and it’s easier to gauge where opponents are in close proximity based on their engine sounds, making the audio far more engaging than before. The quality of certain sounds can be one-dimensional at times; the gear shift ‘clunk’ for H-pattern cars and impact sounds are particularly harsh. Most importantly, tyre audio is now much more informative (a key handling cue in simulators), clearly benefiting from associating with the new tyre model.
And as for my pet peeve—hand animations—these have also been significantly improved, along with a realistic, well-proportioned driver model. The ‘canned’ high-speed shake of the wheel has been eliminated, and the hands stay mostly fixed to the wheel beyond the first 90 degrees of rotation each way. In most cars in the first game, the driver would inexplicably remove his left hand grip from the wheel when turning to about 70 or 80 degrees to the left, as it began to initiate an elaborate over-arm steering animation, and as a result, many basic left turns involved a ridiculous, distracting ‘hand wave’ from your avatar. Thankfully this is no longer the case, making for much more convincing 1-to-1 representation of your hands in VR.
Project CARS 2 has the ability to deliver one of the most immersive experiences in VR right now, assuming you can run the game at reasonable settings and you have suitable equipment for sim racing.
Comfort
As with the majority of VR racing simulators, the experience should be reasonably comfortable for most people. Being surrounded by a cockpit in a seated position is widely recognised as one of the more comfortable ways to move around a virtual environment at pace, but as ever, there are exceptions, and a small number of people may feel nauseous. After all, driving a real car at speed can cause people to lose their lunch, and this game can deliver a pretty convincing representation of reality, albeit without the g-forces (which can itself be disconcerting to the newcomer).
Note that the vast selection of content available in Project CARS 2 means that motion sensations can vary wildly between the different racing disciplines: pristine, modern F1-spec circuits are a far cry from the harsh jumps and bumps of Rallycross.
Default seating positions are well-judged across the cars, and the quick-access adjustments for seat, mirrors and world scale are very useful. Again, the mirrors sadly aren’t stereoscopic, so glancing at them is unnatural compared to reality, as you have to adjust your focal depth.
As with its predecessor, the optional ‘sense of speed’ effects like depth of field, FOV warping and camera shake are all disabled in VR. ‘World movement’ and ‘g-force’ settings allow you to determine how freely the car moves relative to your head position, often described as a ‘horizon lock’ in other titles.
The only slight discomfort I found in Project CARS 2 is the HUD, which floats on a layer within the cockpit, and will sometimes clip through geometry, which results in mismatched focus distances. This is a problem with most VR sims, and there isn’t really a solution other than allowing for specific HUD layouts per car, so that different elements can be moved to positions where they won’t clip. This game seems to be very limited (and buggy) with its HUD customisation, and would benefit from an update.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
The Gallery: Call of the Starseed (2016) is a first-person adventure from Cloudhead Games that’s unashamedly a ‘first’ in many categories. As a Vive launch title, it was one of the most cutting-edge adventure games of its time, and although it’s showing its age at this late review date, it remains an intriguing, well-realized cinematic experience that will leave you more than ready for the next episode. Since we didn’t have a chance to review it the first go around last year, we took a moment to go through in preparation for the sequel due this month, The Gallery: Heart of the Emberstone.
Developer: Cloudhead Games Available On:Steam (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift), Oculus Store (Rift), Viveport (Vive, Rift) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift Release Date: April 5, 2016
Gameplay
Created with the love of ’80s fantasy films like The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986), Call of the Starseed begins in the most patently ’80s way possible—you’re left a cassette tape from your twin sister, Elsie, beckoning you to meet her down by a deserted, windswept cove as she’s taken the liberty of running off on a wild adventure of her own; to what end, you’re not sure. Drawing you further with yet more tapes found along the way, you meet a sewer-dwelling, addle-brained professor who knows where Elsie’s gone, and sends you after her in what proves to be a mind-bending ride into the unknown. And what’s a Starseed? You’ll have to play to find out.
Like many adventure games, puzzles aren’t high on difficulty in Call of the Starseed, acting more as an interactive way of pushing the story forward. That said, the first puzzle you encounter doesn’t really make sense outside of the explanation of “Duh, it’s a game. Games aren’t supposed to be realistic,” which doesn’t really feel like a great start for something that should strive to create presence. If you can ignore it though, you’ll find the rest of the hour-long game much more thematically consistent.
Note the reader: This gripe has been marked for easy gripe-skipping. If you don’t wish to read this gripe, please jump down right before the ‘Immersion’ section for a less gripe-filled reading experience.
Gripe begins: Wandering along the beach, I pass by a seemingly important basket. Before I can inspect it though, the basket is automatically winched out of reach, almost as if the developers themselves are saying “nice try.” In fact, that’s exactly what’s written on the bottom.
Continuing forward, I walk into the professor’s cave hideout where I decipher a message written in Morse code that tells me to ‘shoot the bells’. Finding myself with the task of using a flare gun to shoot a number of bells to distract an inexplicably sentient lighthouse, I dutifully aim and take fire without the slightest idea why. Once you’ve shot the right bells and sufficiently distracted the lighthouse, the epic music swells, telling you you’ve done something magical and important. Did I? I wasn’t so sure. And I still feel like I’m missing something.
Clattering down to the beach, you return to the basket which you find lowered to reveal a door handle to the sewer where the old professor can be heard crowing away about the CIA or some such. Why was the basket lowered? Why did the old man keep an extra handle there? Why did he write “nice try” on it when any able-bodied person could hit the damn thing down with a bat? Maybe I should lighten up. After all, it’s just a game, right?
Gripe deescalates: While These things can’t go without saying, the first episode of The Gallery has to be viewed within context. As the first class of motion controller, room-scale games that allowed full object interaction, its job was much bigger than to just tell a logically consistent story with equally consistent puzzles. It had to teach us how to move through the world and pick things up; it created a unique inventory system, pioneered blink teleportation, and it did it all without tutorializing the player to death.
Despite my overblown gripe, Call of the Starseed could have suffered a much worse fate as one of the first built-for-VR adventure games for motion controllers, and while it’s hard for me to judge it with the same temerity that I would a modern game that’s necessarily had the benefit of learning from Call of the Starseed’s misgivings—i.e. short gameplay length and some less than perfect locomotion—the game is decisively a joy to play, offering something truly out of the ordinary, even with a year and half of games between its debut and now.
Immersion
Again, as one of the first games of its kind, there’s plenty of slack to be cut for Call of the Starseed when it comes to some of the more negative visual aspects. Both Oculus and Valve have done much to optimize VR’s graphical load on GPUs, not to mention NVIDIA and AMD have brought out new, more powerful GPUs in the meantime. That said, even on high settings, textures seem a little too basic for such a well-realized atmosphere, detracting from the game’s ingenious lighting and frankly awe-inspiring cinematics.
Object interaction isn’t nearly as fine as you’d see in later titles either, the exemplar being Lone Echo (2017)for its dynamic hand poses that allow you to grab items at any angle and grip them realistically. Holding items never quite feels ‘right’ in Call of the Starseed because you’re given only a few specific handholds for each item, giving a knock to immersion somewhat.
Story-wise though, Starseed nails the plucky ’80s fantasy vibe it was going after. Its cast of characters, although cartoonish, are undeniably real people. You can attribute this to a well cared for script, and top-notch voice acting that really make the world’s characters come alive.
Comfort
Cloudhead Games was one of the early developers of teleportation and snap-turn comfort mode, both of which are industry standards of locomotion. There’s a few different styles of teleportation, so you’ll have to experiment to find what’s right for you. Despite this, the locomotion scheme shows its age somewhat, as I often had trouble getting a lock on an appropriate place to teleport.
Smooth-turn junkies will find the settings menu critically lack their world-twisting yaw motion. Better luck next time, guys.
You can also force-grab items from a close enough distance, removing the labor of constantly bending down to pick things up. This was also a bit inconsistent though, the best example being fiddly puzzle that required you to grab battery cells floating in zero G. This puzzle took its toll on my patience as I practiced force-grabbing batteries rather than physically plucking them out of the air like I would naturally, simply because as soon as you tried to grasp a battery, it would invariably fly away in the opposite direction.
Frustrations aside, all of this makes Call of the Starseed an exceedingly comfortable experience for anyone, seated or standing. We’re hoping to see some seriously smooth second generation-level improvements in all of these departments when the sequel launches.
The Gallery: Heart of the Emberstone is almost here, so check back on launch day (TBA) for our full review.
ProjectM: Daydream is a VR dating experience from Korean studio EVR Studio. While it’s fairly short and only offers subtitles in a number of major languages to go along with the Korean audio, the experience of sitting across from a very life-like person as she laughs and smiles, talking about her vacation as you jump into immersive interludes, makes me wonder what the future of VR dating sims will look like. From what I can gather from Daydream, they’re going to be a whole new ballgame.
Developer: EVR Studio Available On:HTC Vive, Oculus Rift (Touch not required) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift Release Date: September 5, 2017
Note to reader (09/11/17): This is a paid, non-Early Access experience. From a consumer’s perspective, it is a finished, purchasable product. The developers told us initially that ProjectM: Daydream is merely “a preview of one of the digital characters that will appear in [their] main VR adventure game that’s slated for a launch next year.” We don’t review unfinished projects, but considering none of the quoted information is provided to consumers, we are obligated to treat this experience like any other paid, finished product.
Taking over the role of Dong-Woo, a school-age Korean guy just back from summer vacation, you head over to Seung-Ah’s house, your friend and apparent love interest. Inviting you into her home, she prepares a small snack and proceeds to tell you about the details of her summer vacation to Europe. Her most memorable bits: a skydiving trip to Switzerland and a day at the beach in Spain. Excluding a brief bikini scene, this is a ‘safe for work’ experience.
Let’s put this out on the table before I go any further:
I’m a happily married guy, and don’t have interest in VR dating sims outside of their technical abilities to provide some form of artificial emotional connection, however imperfect and sometimes misogynistic they can be.
I don’t speak Korean, so my impressions are skewed by the obvious cultural barrier.
Barring that, ProjectM: Daydream features some pretty impressive character animations that really make you feel like the girl in front of you is only a few degrees away from real. Her posture, facial expressions, body language, voice acting, her gaze that follows you—all of it feels convincing enough to click on the part of my brain that says “please don’t fart, for Pete’s sake.”
image courtesy EVR Studio
As she continues to tell you about her experiences in Europe, you quickly drift off into an imaginary trip along with Seung-Ah, taking you for a stint of skydiving over Interlaken, Switzerland and looking out over an ideal sunset on the beach in Nerja, Spain. Of course, these never happened within the context of the game, so you’re returned back to her house, supposedly with stars in your eyes for the beautiful time you could have had together as a proper couple on vacation.
Technically, the experience delivers competently rendered interiors which feel like genuine places. The home is a comfortable, inviting space that feels real enough to keep you on company manners. I can’t say so much for outdoor scenes though, as textures appear too basic and uncared for, clearly not sharing the same polish as Seung-Ah’s Korean suburban home.
image courtesy EVR Studio
Dialogue suffers from two big pain points. The game’s dialogue tree is a wooden and wholly uninspiring way to interact with another person in VR, but seems like a necessary evil in lieu of some future version of AI-driven voice recognition that ought to be next to perfect to maintain the illusion. As for the dialogue itself, I often felt my gaze wandering (not what you think) to rest of the room because of how painfully boring the conversation went. We broached subjects like “Where did you go on vacation?” and “Why […]” and “With whom […]”—all riveting stuff that didn’t personally keep my attention. Of course, if you say the “wrong thing,” she loses interest in you and is less receptive to your jokes and other advances—to what end, we don’t know. The experience ended with her thanking you for a dress you bought her.
Clocking in at 25 minutes, ProjectM: Daydream is decidedly too short to be considered a buy for anyone earnestly looking for a VR dating sim (it only promises to be a preview, for reasons we explain above). Looking past the gameplay length though, Daydream provides a serious peek into the future of the VR dating sim genre and what it might become. The ability to go anywhere and do anything could be valuable in creating “bonding moments,” which users may appreciate as they delve deeper into keeping their virtual companions happy.
image courtesy EVR Studio
Comfort-wise, the experience makes a few missteps with the way it handles artificial locomotion. Skydiving was stomach-turning due to the forced yaw-turn, which spins you to seem more cinematic. It tries to do this slow enough, but it was still off-putting.
If you look past the game’s traditional canned responses, what remains is another person looking at you, and talking to you sweetly and affectionately; sitting on your lap and whispering in your ear. I personally found that last bit pretty off-putting, but again, I’m obviously not the target demographic here. The developers say their most important goal is “to ultimately provide a sense of comfort to the user at the end of the day.” Whether that’s right or wrong for whatever reason isn’t within the scope of this review, so we’ll just leave it at that.
If you want to get a basic look at the studio’s character modeling ability, check out the ProjectM: Dream demo on Steam.
Prison Boss VR is out on Quest today. Below is our original PC VR review published in September 2017.
Job Simulator is still, even a year and a half after its release, one of the very first VR apps I put a new user inside. It just does so much right. The visuals are bright, colorful, and easy on the eyes. The setting has just enough humor to make someone smile but isn’t bombarding you with distracting jokes. It encourages experimentation and exploration as you poke and prod around each area. And above all else there is no tutorial necessary. I hand someone the controllers, tell them to pick a job, and they’re off. That’s all there is to it.
Prison Boss VR shares a lot of similar themes and design principles as Job Simulator, namely its whimsical style, visual flair, and game mechanics of picking up and messing around with stuff. However, it also differs in some major ways too and lacks a good deal of the polish that Owlchemy Labs is known for since Trebuchet is a much smaller development studio.
The premise of Prison Boss VR is simple: you’re in jail and you need to grow your empire of trading illicit materials such as cigarettes and alcohol. During the day you take different jobs at the jail to earn resources, trade for money, grow your influence and reputation, and unlock different lines of crafting. It’s almost like a tycoon-esque meta game of balancing your earning and productivity.
But when night falls you have free reign of your jail cell to move around and craft whatever you have the materials for. But you have to be careful because if a guard spots you working on any of that or sees any of your materials then you’re busted.
This creates an interesting dynamic of keeping an eye on the guards and making sure to hide things so you don’t get caught. It creates a lot more stress and anxiety than you’d expect and makes for a satisfying gameplay loop.
There are different jails (four prisons with a total of 80 different day jobs and 11 different items to make) to conquer and even an arcade-style quickplay game mode as well. Visually it gets the job done but doesn’t seem as inspired or original as the bold direction in other VR titles we’ve seen.
The jazz-style soundtrack fits the mood well and does a great job of making you feel like you’re starring in your own 80s crime movie. Except instead of trying to break out you’re content to become the kingpin instead.
Prison Boss VR was a lot longer than I expected and has several hours of content. It’s easy to get lost in the loop of performing jobs, making items, hiding materials, and so on. Ultimately though by the end it does eventually start to feel quite repetitive.
There are a lot of jobs and items to make, but the mechanics of actually making them end up all feeling very similar. Whereas Job Simulator aimed to focus on delivering a handful of highly interactive and dense jobs, Prison Boss VR appears to have aimed for the breadth over depth approach for the most part.
Another game mode or two — or better yet, some form of multiplayer — would have gone a long way towards expanding the feature set and replayability of the game. It never quite achieved the zany intensity of similar non-VR titles, like Shoppe Keep, even if it was able to etch out its own personality on the way.
Prison Boss VR is a breath of fresh air. In a market that’s over-saturated with shooters, and blood, and gore, and zombies, it’s nice to experience something with a much more light-hearted and whimsical tone. Fans of Job Simulator and tycoon-style games will find a lot to love here and far more content than expected, but what it gains in breadth it sacrifices in depth. Even still, this is a VR game we’d happily return to as a reward for good behavior.
Prison Boss VR is available for HTC Vive on Steam at the price point of $19.99. Check out these official review guidelines to find out more about our process.
Sometimes sci-fi games need only put you head-first into a shiny new world, let you inhabit a universe seemingly ripped from TV and film, and call it a job well done. Then there’s games that use science fiction as a backdrop to a more human story, one that’s been told a million times and in a million ways before, but because we’re human, we always love to hear. These stories co-exist alongside the awe-inspiring technology of holograms, faster-than-light travel, giant space ships, etc. Lone Echo, a first-person narrative-driven adventure,is one of those intensely human tales; a pretty big undertaking considering you’re a robot from the 22nd century.
Developer: Ready at Dawn Available On:Oculus Rift (Touch required) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift Release Date: July 20, 2017
Note to the reader: Like all of our reviews (unless otherwise marked) this article contains NO SPOILERS. Read away with the confidence that we we won’t ruin it for you!
Gameplay
The year is 2126. As an Echo-1 artificial intelligence aboard Khronos II, a mining facility just off the rings of Saturn, your programming compels you to assist Captain Olivia “Liv” Rhodes with her daily tasks as the sole human aboard the space station. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise her right-hand android has become a close friend and confidant, but it’s almost time for Captain Liv to rotate out. Despite Liv’s characteristically British stiff upper lip, the thought of saying goodbye to her Echo-1 buddy, who she affectionately named Jack, is palpable.
Everything is going well until an anomaly suddenly appears in the distance, knocking out systems all over the ship. Snapping back into action and leaving the thought of teary goodbyes behind, you both set out to undo the damage the anomaly has caused, investigate a strange ship that’s suddenly warped into view, and go further than a little prospecting Echo-1 unit has ever gone before.
image courtesy Ready at Dawn
In the beginning, Captain Liv acts somewhat as a taskmaster, sending you out to repair parts of the vast station complex, which includes areas far away from the main station that require small (‘on-rails’) ‘Fury’ transport vessels to reach. Although she’s the boss, she relies upon you for advice, which you can give via a dialogue box that provides you with a number of canned responses. You can alternatively choose to not answer Liv, leaving her wondering what she did to upset you. It comes off like a normal conversation at points, as she even frets about your well-being when you inevitably head out into the wild black yonder to repair systems.
Even though she is a taskmaster, the action doesn’t feel over-tutorialized by Liv because basic instruction is carried out by Hera, Khronos’ resident AI—conducted in independent, in-software learning modules. This leaves you more room to experience the narrative with Liv as your captain and friend, and not your schoolmarm. We’ll talk more about Liv in the ‘Immersion’ section.
Through these training modules, you learn to maneuver in zero-G and use the two tools at your disposal; a blowtorch and a scanner that doubles as a radiation meter—both of which are activated by pressing a button on either side of your robotic wrist. Radiation is the number one killer in the game, and the scanner helps you navigate around hot spots that present themselves throughout. There are plenty of things to slice open too with your torch, like access hatches and control panels, although at times I found the game’s order of operations a little frustrating. First you have to inquire what something is by using the dialogue box, at which point the game lets you use your torch, evidenced by a blue print superimposed on the metal panel.
using the blowtorch
Trying to cut before ‘officially inquiring’ renders your torch ineffectual, as it is on everything in the game (yes, I tried to torch Liv, I’m sorry). This only happened a few times, but it’s always show-stopping, making you look for the little arrows above everything to determine they aren’t important, story-moving elements. Once you understand that the order of operations is infallible, and that skipping ahead will get you nowhere, you accept what must be done and move on. Once you get the hang of things, flipping out the little torch and slicing through stuff becomes natural, if not an interesting exercise in turning something seemingly banal into a cool, immersive way of interacting with the world.
Let’s talk about death. As an artificial intelligence, you can’t really die. Every time you take on too much radiation, or get damaged in some way, you automatically transfer your consciousness to another fresh body. This pretty much removes some of the sting from dying as you step out of another pod, but there’s still the frustration of having to navigate back to where you were originally. You can also recharge your mobile radiation shield by visiting recharge sites periodically placed throughout. As a human, Liv doesn’t have this luxury.
I clocked around 6 hours to complete Lone Echo, although there are plenty of optional side tasks, audio logs concerning Liv, and Easter eggs to find throughout the game. If you’re like me, you’ll blow past most of these unless they’re right in front of you as you try to move the story forward—something I would consider to be one of, if not the most suspenseful and artfully-crafted narratives in VR to date.
Immersion
Presence (with a capital ‘P’), like in many games, tends to grip you when you least suspect it: you’re grabbing a tool from Liv, trying to figure out how to fix a satellite, or cutting open a vent with your blowtorch. You just… forget you’re actually in your underwear work appropriate clothing in your apartment for a brief moment. Granted, there are times when you buck up against the technical limitations of the game (a 3×3 meter play area is highly suggested) but from tip-to-toe, Lone Echo absolutely entranced me.
image courtesy Ready at Dawn
Despite her space-hardened exterior, deep down Liv cares about your safety even though she knows you’re effectively immortal. Because she imbues you with humanity, you want to return the connection by helping her, by being her only human despite the fact you have a hard time understanding her typically acerbic jokes with your near-human AI. Lone Echo masterfully sets the scene for this connection to organically grow from the start, so that through and through, Liv feels like a sweet, caring older sister—truly the real star of the show.
Ironically, her own game AI predictably has its limitations, and sometimes her gaze-tracking isn’t quite right, leaving you with a stare that might shoot over your shoulder instead of directly in your eyes (in VR it’s easier to see those smaller details, and they’re more important)—but Liv is undeniably human. This is thanks to a number of factors including competent voice acting, obsessive work in character modeling, and excellent motion capture that puts her nearly on the other side of the uncanny valley. It’s amazing to say the least.
image courtesy Ready at Dawn
As for your own body, the game’s inverse kinematics are as good as I’ve ever seen in VR, with your arms and hands matching well-enough with your physical body to be believable—besides your feet which naturally trail behind you as you float in the zero-G environment.
Looking down at your robotic hands, covered in a swath of different textures like rubber fingertips (complete with raised fingerprints for added grip) and openly visible connections, combined with the ever-present whir of tiny servos as you flex your robo-appendages, all adds to the cumulative immersion. The developers also innovated procedural grip animations, which conform to the world around you dynamically for a more realistic hand pose.
image courtesy Ready at Dawn
Then there’s the scale. Suffice it to say that the world is jaw-droppingly massive, and rendered in sufficient detail—strange ships and their alien weirdness included—to hit all the right beats in what feels like an intimidating, but ultimately real place.
Comfort
The game’s world-shifting locomotion scheme has been proven to work in other titles before, including Climbey (2016) and The Climb (2016) for Oculus Touch. If you haven’t tried either of those—or the free multiplayer game Echo Arena (2017) launching alongside Lone Echo which uses the same scheme—the best way to describe it is “grabbing the world and flinging yourself.”
There’s a high degree of predictability to moving through the world of Lone Echo as you grab onto the ship’s structure and use it to propel yourself, which is partly why Echo Arena has celebrated so much fanfare in the recent weeks of beta access. It’s easy to wrap your head around how to move through the world at a fast clip with your hand-mounted boosters and it’s—a phrase I use all too often—exceedingly comfortable as a locomotion scheme.
Of course, with elements in your peripheral vision helping to ‘anchor’ you to the world, much like a cockpit does in games like EVE Valkyrie (2016), the zero-G element becomes an easier proposition to handle as well. Important to note: Lone Echo starts up with a default ‘horizon lock’ that keeps your constantly oriented with a verifiable up and down that never changes. This can be toggled off, but isn’t recommended for comfort reasons.
That said, popping out of the headset and walking around my gravity-burdened house after learning to navigate in virtual zero-G was an interesting experience to say the least. In the back of my mind, I kept imagining myself grabbing onto door jams, my couch, anything and using it to fly off into another room. If that doesn’t speak to the impressiveness of the game’s rock-solid locomotion scheme, I don’t know what does. The only niggling bit is the game’s transport vessels, that take you on a somewhat twisty-turny ride to your medium-distance points of interest. These introduces some artificial (i.e. unwanted) turning, and can be somewhat uncomfortable.
image courtesy Ready at Dawn
For the hardcore smooth-turning junkies, the game’s settings allow for smooth turning on all axes, meaning you can effectively ‘pilot’ yourself through the world without having to so much as move your head left or right. For many this will be unsettling, which is why a more comfortable snap-turn is available by default for players using a two-sensor, front-facing setup. Lone Echo users with three or more Oculus sensors will undoubtedly benefit in terms of comfort and immersion simply by virtue of the fact that you can spin 360 degrees without your body blocking view of your controllers.
As a user with only two sensors, there was a certain amount of frustration with this. I kept naturally turning my body to face the action, which invariably meant I was occluding my Touch controllers. Eventually I sat down in a chair, which limited this somewhat, but I was still so immersed in the game I would only notice I was physically positioned away from the sensors when my hands would do the weird skittery dance I’ve grown to dislike intensely. This can be solved by adding another sensor, but it’s neither standard, nor requisite if you can keep your feet more or less planted in the same place physically.
If you’re looking for info on Echo Arena, Lone Echo’s free multiplayer mode, head over to our coverage on the pastEcho Arena open beta.
Having announced ‘Vive Studios’ at the end of 2016, HTC is steadily building up its first-party VR content offering. After a number of relatively well received titles launched under the umbrella of Vive Studios, we take the latest, Front Defense VR, for a test drive.
What is it that makes the HTC Vive special and different from the other VR platforms on the market? It depends who you ask. It used to be the tracked motion controllers, but that is no longer the case. Is it the room-scale? That’s a huge plus for sure, but with a little jiggery-pokery the Rift can get close enough for some people. Is it the tracking? This at least is still best in class, for my money. Content? While you might argue that Rift and PSVR with their exclusives rule the roost here, there’s still much to recommend the Vive ecosystem.
Crawling around on hands and knees behind the virtual sandbags of Front Defense VR, there’s no need to wonder how HTC would answer the question. With its first release from internal developer Fantahorn Studio for the Vive, we find that the answer is resounding: room-scale. Specifically a play area so large that no competing platforms can come close. Hope you’ve got a nice big play space, people, because anything less than three metres square just ain’t gonna cut it with Front Defense VR. Time to build that underground VR bunker in the garden.
Front Defense VR Details:
Publisher: HTC / Vive Studios Developer: Fantahorn Studio Available On: HTC Vive (Viveport, Steam) Reviewed On: HTC Vive (Steam) Release Date: June 27, 2017 (Viveport), July 7th (Steam)
Gameplay
Front Defense VR is a World War II shooter spread over three (yes, just three) stages, and your position is entirely static so there is no question about methods of locomotion or anything like that—it’s completely ‘real’ locomotion within your room-scale playspace. For the vast majority of the time you’ll be hunkered down within your small sandbagged enclosure to avoid being riddled with bullets. You’ll pop up occasionally to start thinning out the waves of enemy troops that will swarm the area in increasing number as the situation escalates from foot soldiers to motor vehicles, mortars, armoured cars, tanks, and strafing runs from squadrons of enemy planes.
Standing against this tide of enemy combatants are you and a motley crew of anonymous friendly soldiers that appear around you, there to provide the illusion of a cinematic battle just like all the other militaristic shooters of the last two decades. There’s not much going on in their heads though, and the stilted animation fails to convince. Likewise with the enemy soldiers, their behaviours much more in line with arcade classic Operation Wolf (1987) than anything more contemporary. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in an arcade shooter.
There’s nothing to link the three stages, they exist as standalone entities and entertain to varying degrees. There’s no attempt at real depth aside from score attack leaderboards, but it really does scratch that score attack itch—it’s fun to go back into the stages and eke out a little more progress, to see the scenario escalate another notch, to survive against increasingly ridiculous odds.
My favourite is actually the first scenario, a relatively simple setup on some classically European back streets, with enemies appearing on balconies, from side streets, around corners and through distant archways. While the second encounter—defending an HQ inside a church that opens onto a town square—adds in the ability to call in an airstrike, it lacks the focus of the first. The rail yard of the third encounter, with its strafing aircraft, introduces move overt destructible scenery and acts as a challenging climax.
The weapons at your disposal are drawn from predictable stock: a pistol, a rifle, a bazooka, some grenades, and the odd fixed emplacement, like a mounted machinegun. Each is enjoyable enough to fire, with a convenient red dot projected onto enemies for the pistol and rifle making it easier to pick off distant targets. The fact that fixed emplacements are located near to the edges of the play space means that if your physical area is hemmed in by walls or furniture then you won’t be able to fully interact with and aim these elements so easily.
Most weapons are picked up by reaching into them and picking them up with the trigger which then locks the weapon to your hand while the trigger reverts to its traditional firing role. Reloading the rifle is as simple as ripping out the old clip, grabbing a new one from your side, and ramming it home. This is the best of the bunch, and feels as intuitive as some of the best games in the genre. The pistol uses a press of the touchpad to release a clip but you can’t fully slide the new clip in because you’d crash the two controllers together, so you’re left with the unsatisfying act of holding it near the bottom of the gun and releasing it to reload.
Not that loading the rifle is easy all the time; the game does its best to guess where your waistline is based on head and hand positions, but all too often the ammo belt actually appeared ‘inside’ me as I was crouched down, making it impossible to retrieve ammo without committing accidental seppuku with my Vive controller. Even aiming the fixed weapons can be fraught: if you move your hands too far away from the handle you become detached, and it’s often a second or two before you realise what has happened.
How Front Defense VR handles grenades must have sounded awesome in the planning meeting… “Guys, I’ve had a great idea! Let’s get the player to pull the pin out with their teeth before throwing the grenade!” Sadly the reality—after a few aborted attempts at punching oneself in the face—is that you sort of hover the hand grenade in front of your nose for a second until you hear the pin eject. It gets the job done, but it’s a far cry from the marketing vision. The bazooka suffers a similar fate, with the loading of a rocket into the rear of the weapon reduced to simply holding it in the rough vicinity and letting go, whereupon it instantly disappears into the tube. It’s pragmatic, but not exactly immersive.
Actually, the whole experience falls well underneath the expected bar for quality in mid-2017. It’s a small scale, uninspiring setup in a fairly crowded genre, riddled with some of the hoariest clichés of VR interaction and a strangely ugly 2D menu system with incongruous blue floating buttons. The visuals can’t be configured in any way, so supersampling isn’t an option for people on more capable machines. As a result, prepare to squint at distant, muddy pixels as you try to figure out which burnt out window frame the enemy soldier is occupying, or which piece of cover they are hunkered down behind.
Note: we’ve asked the developers to confirm that the lack of any graphical settings isn’t just a limitation of our review copy, and will update when we hear back. It’s possible some auto-setting of detail is in play, but if so my 980Ti was still sadly underutilised.
Mostly it’s just more of the same that we’ve seen before. There are occasional moments where the game’s own blend of enemy waves and the excitement of being hunkered down in such a large play space combine to truly immerse you in the moment, but it doesn’t last long. There’s never a sense of danger. Death often comes as something of a surprise, usually via an enemy soldier with a bayonet that manages to evade attention and puncture your spleen.
The biggest missed opportunity of all is that the developers have doubled-down on the large play area, but then only really used half of it. Only the area in front of the player is meaningfully utilised, with no threats ever coming from behind. It suits the nature of the game—defending fixed entrenchments, which logically would be set up to defend against one direction—but does seem at odds with a clear mission to promote the awesomeness of the Vive’s room-scale tracking capabilities.
There’s potential here, but it needs more iteration and polish. It needs more unique content, or even clever reuse of what’s there. Mostly it needs a package that ties it all together in a more interesting fashion than these three isolated stages. There’s fun here for sure, but I’m not really certain what Front Defense VR brings to the party beyond its commitment to a large play area. It’s as fun to shoot things in VR as it ever was, but as the market has matured a little over the last year, so too have our expectations, and Front Defense VR sadly fails to meet them.
Immersion
When it all comes together, Front Defense VR does decent job of convincing you that you’re in a war zone, battling against the odds. As much as I’m not a believer that the majority of Vive owners have the sort of space this game demands, I have to admit that if you do, it’s on another level compared to other experiences. Being set within a large fixed space really aids the immersion—if you happen to have a few dozen sandbags to hand you could probably concoct the ultimate version of this experience.
It’s not all roses though. Accidentally squeezing the hand grip in the heat of battle and unintentionally dropping the weapon while under heavy assault? Immersion killer. Clanging controllers together when reloading the pistol? Immersion killer. Smashing a controller into the headset when trying to prime a grenade? Immersion killer. The same two or three sounds/barks issuing in quick succession? Immersion killer. Trying to aim a fixed machine gun mounted in a corner of the play area and smacking into a wall? Immersion killer. Stilted people animations? Immersion killer.
Many of these issues have been solved by other developers, and clear solutions exist. Quite why the developers in this case have persisted with such obviously bad design decisions remains a mystery.
To end on a high note, though, the necessity to get down low and crawl around on the floor a little really helps to set the experience apart from others that are primarily standing. In this regard at least, the game is in rare company.
Comfort
As there is zero artificial locomotion, comfort is perfectly fine throughout. The only caveat is that—if you intend to survive for more than ten seconds in the game—you will need to get down low either by crouching or crawling around on the floor. Depending on your fitness (my aging bones were protesting at the end of a protracted session with the game!) this may or may not be an issue. Knee pads optional.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
Stepping into The Mage’s Tale, a first-person dungeon crawler RPG that puts you in the enchanted boots of an apprentice mage, is a bit like jumping into your own personal ’80s sword and sorcery flick. With elemental magic at the ready, you get to experience classic dungeon crawler stuff like exploration, spell crafting, puzzles, and battle against a number of monster types—and all of it in the immersive realm of VR. While at times a little rough around the edges, The Mage’s Tale is a charming throwback that vaults you head-first into a dank and mysterious universe of inXile’s other series, The Bard’s Tale.
Developer: inXile Entertainment Available On: Oculus Rift (Touch required) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift Release Date: June 20, 2017
Gameplay
The evil wizard Gaufroi has kidnapped your master, Mage Alguin. As his apprentice, it’s your job to get him back by finding his powerful fellow mages, a quest that takes you through ten dungeons where you’re confronted with various puzzles, traps, and monsters—where there’s always a chest that needs looting at the end.
Walking into a puzzle room usually elicits a hint from your Alguin’s familiar, a magical goblin whose name I can’t remember. For the purposes of this review, he shall henceforth be known as ‘smarmy turd’ (ST for short).
image captured by Road to VR
ST is a constant thorn in your side, and tends to tutorialize puzzles and generally point out the obvious. He does however make the dank dungeons placed before you a little less lonely, so I guess he’s got that going for him. When not tutorialized by ST, puzzles are explained by a changing cast of ever-present talking wall monsters, who offer riddles to help you along the way. Puzzles tend to be fairly simple, but because The Mage’s Tale offers so many varied types, you’ll always be on your toes figuring out the next one (if ST hasn’t spoiled it already, that is). You’ll find yourself fetching missing parts to puzzles, looking through magical orbs to locate important runes, cranking machines, freezing water in pipes so you can light a torch that’s being dowsed; the variations are so rich, that even the smarmiest of turds can’t ruin it for you.
When you’re not cranking weird machines and blowing out walls to reach hidden chests though, you’re probably blasting away at the world’s many monsters. Enemy types tend to be mostly ranged, like archers and mages, so they usually keep their distance allowing you to block with your arcane shield or plink away with your magical abilities. There are however a number of melee fighters to watch out for later in the game including shielded goblins and hammer-wielding giants. Enemies don’t have health bars, so you usually end up blasting away with whatever appears to work best on each enemy type.
image courtesy inXile Entertainment
To my utter dismay, dual-wielding is not a thing in The Mage’s Tale. Oh well.
A big personal attraction for me to the game is spell crafting. I would have loved to find ancient books filled with spells, but unfortunately crafting is done entirely through trial and error, as your cauldron will unhappily vomit out bad combinations, forcing you to start over again until you find something that works. Because there are more than 2 dozen ingredients and over a 100 combinations, you’ll spend plenty of time mixing and matching until you get that perfect lighting spell that has both impressive range, rips health from your enemies when they die and tosses out confetti on the monster’s dead body.
image courtesy inXile Entertainment
Chests usually offer some sort of magical ingredient you can use in crafting, be it base elemental spells like lighting/fire/wind/ice, or a modifier like poison, extra recharge, or triple shot. My absolute favorite part of opening chests isn’t receiving points for upgrades, or new magical reagents, but tossing them into the awaiting mouth of my teleporting frog-buddy, whose name was mentioned once and forgotten forever.
Without revealing too much, the story line isn’t anything you wouldn’t find ripped from a Dungeon Master’s Guide, so don’t expect any great innovations in story telling here. But then again, that’s exactly you’re in for with The Mage’s Tale, a faithful classic that lets you fire lighting at wise-cracking goblins.
For those of you mashing ctrl+f and searching the article for ‘gameplay length’, you’ll see I finished in a little over 7.5 hours, a slight tick under the advertised 10+. I’m far from a completionist, so I don’t mind leaving the game’s many collectibles behind in the dark dungeons where they belong, so you may well spend 10+ hours collecting everything, not to mention trying your hand at mixing together ingredients to get better spells.
Combat can feel a little repetitive at times. This is dampened somewhat once you get a good number of reagents to add to your base spells and start to naturally rotate through different attacks instead of just picking the strongest one. Just like classic games of yore, combat can be a process of trial and error, so expect to get smashed a few times by a giant before you know his weak spot. To get a good idea of what combat looks like in The Mage’s Tale, check out the video below. And no, you can’t get a sword or any other melee weapon.
Immersion & Comfort
Relying on classic dungeon level design and an appropriate mix of irreverent campiness (a goblin told me to “kiss his ass”), it’s easy to like The Mage’s Tale, especially as it follows some well-established practices in RPGs that date back to the pencil and paper era of Dungeons and Dragons. Bringing those places to life, and in a grand way, is ultimately one of the coolest things about The Mage’s Tale. It’s truly a breathtaking adventure into the known unknown.
Despite this, one thing that I can’t quite get around is the game’s character animations. An otherwise good-looking game with a varied palette, awesome magical effects, and impressive architecture, The Mage’s Tale is blighted by its clunky and wooden characters, that when confronted in VR look just terrible. A competent swath of Scottish and English voice actors do their best to bring the characters to life, but I can’t shake the feeling that every NPC is actually chewing on a magically invisible potato.
Another gripe is the game’s ‘force grab’. Striving to make your life easier by giving you a telekinetic powers and saving you from constantly bending over and letting you get to items just out of reach, actually activating the force grab it is somewhat of a pain. Instead of using the omnipresent gaze-based cursor to highlight objects, you actually select the item by pointing your finger at it, which is extremely fiddly. It doesn’t sound difficult to grasp at first, but I can’t count the number of times I waved my hands to no effect at a nearby bottle or mushroom. Also, force grab seems to take precedent over natural object interaction, and trying to lift open a chest or grab one of the many collectible monster cages without critically highlighting it first, usually means your hand will pass right through it without the slightest bit of recognition of intent. Because force grab is usually used during downtime from battles, its more of a constant annoyance than a game-breaking feature.
wall monster riddles, image captured by Road to VR
During battle however, the game’s UI is remarkably intuitive, giving you access to either a spell menu with 4 selectable elemental spells, or an arcane shield that lets you reflect incoming arrows and enemy magic. You can access these on the fly, and mix and match your attacks/defense to the best effect. Popping the menu open and quickly shooting out a flurry of different spells is just so gratifying.
To the dismay of some players, locomotion is teleportation only, and is done by one of two ways; you can select the teleport spot and potentially move farther (and quicker) using your right thumbstick, or use your left thumbstick for a shorter blink teleportation. Even in close, quick combat, I felt ultimately very comfortable using either method. A snap-turn (aka ‘VR comfort mode’) exists so people using a two-sensor setup can adjust themselves for optimal hand controller tracking. As someone who owns a two-sensor stock Rift/Touch setup, I would highly recommend getting a third for better coverage, because it seems I was constantly facing the wrong direction at crucial moments.
Comfort-wise, I was very happy with The Mage’s Tale, but once battles really popped off and multiple enemies force you to go mobile, you really start to buck up against the limits of the locomotion style. Snap-turning and teleporting at high-speed can start to feel like a bit of a slide show, and while it’s ultimately comfortable, it certainly dampens the immersion. I hate to think how much I missed in the dark corners of the game by spamming the far-teleport button.
inXile developer Brian Fargo says in a recent tweet that The Mage’s Tale will be available on other VR platforms in 12 months.
The word ‘surreal’ invariably falls short when it comes to trying to lift the shroud surrounding the VR first-person puzzler FORM. Transporting you to a strange inner universe via an enigmatic black obelisk, you experience what it must feel like to make contact with a higher intelligence, with its intense interlocking geometric constructions and imposing, dream-like architecture—FORM is an unexpected delight for anyone looking for something truly out of the ordinary.
Developer: Charm Games Available On:Steam (HTC Vive), Oculus Touch (Coming Soon) PSVR (Coming 2018) Reviewed On: HTC Vive Release Date: June 1, 2017
Gameplay
It’s another day on the job for Dr. Devin Eli, a brilliant physicist working at a special research facility in the Alaskan
wilderness. Housed at the facility is ‘The Obelisk’, a seemingly alien artifact emanating a mysterious signal. Spiriting you away into an environment like none other on earth, a place where thoughts manifest visually and the machinations of the human mind are displayed as complex machines, it’s your job to uncover the secrets of The Obelisk as you journey further to the center of the human mind and the alternative realities that reside within.
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image courtesy Charm Games
image courtesy Charm Games
image courtesy Charm Games
image courtesy Charm Games
FORM shows a command of the medium that few have grasped with such clear intention. Every puzzle is an alien relic that demands your curiosity and experimentation. Every puzzle, while mysterious in its ultimate function, always injects you with the feeling that you’ve actually accomplished something wonderful. It’s like stepping into a machine of pure novelty, and it manages to deliver its intuitive puzzles without the need of a tutorial, i.e. no condescending robot voice guiding you through the world.
Puzzles are mostly spatial in nature, meaning you’ll be slotting glowing geometric shapes into manifolds, opening up mysterious machines and pulling levers. If you’re looking for a super hard puzzler though, FORM may let you down in that aspect. Although it would be hard to walk away without some appreciation for the visual complexity and unique variety of the puzzles displayed before you, there are some moments when I wished for a real stumper.
In the end, the story left me feeling a bit confused, probably necessitating another playthrough altogether to fully grasp. Considering it took about an hour for me to play from start to finish, it’s not unthinkable that even after solving all the puzzles that you’d want to play again to understand the intentionality behind them, and understand exactly what you’re reconnecting and discovering. In any case, I attribute it to the game robbing my attention with all of its strange and fulfilling abstractions.
Immersion and Comfort
Like a lucid dream, or being under the influence of a psychedelic, the visual complexity is really something to behold. The world morphs around you, drawing your gaze further and further, and you have to tell yourself to not give into the awe to complete the puzzles. Its humbling to think it all lives inside the human brain and you can access it (and interact with it) just by putting on a VR headset.
At some moments, when the world was whirring around me and dozens of tiny puzzle pieces were floating in front of my face, I did feel my computer choke a bit (reviewed on i7-6700, GTX 1080, 16 GB RAM). This may be helped somewhat by turning down the graphical intensity in the settings, although the pre-release copy didn’t include access to the settings menu, so we can’t say for sure. These moments were few and far between though, as most of the time things went by smoothly.
There isn’t any artificial locomotion to speak of besides the times when you teleport into puzzles, and that’s not a user-controlled mechanic anyway. Everything is basically presented to you in forward-facing position within a square meter area, making it an exceedingly comfortable standing experience with no risk to the first time VR player.
Ubisoft’s long-awaited Star Trek: Bridge Crew, the co-op space sim that puts you at the bridge of your very own Federation vessel, is nearly here (coming out May 30th), but we’ve had our mitts all over a pre-release copy for a few days now. Wherever you may fall on the spectrum of Trek fandom, Bridge Crew promises more than just a genuine Trek experience with its exciting gameplay and a social component that is sure to immerse.
Stepping back a bit from my affection of the many iterations of Star Trek universes—explored in the recent re-boot films and older TV series spanning back to Star Trek (1966), aka “The Original Series” (ToS)—what I experienced in the last few days with Bridge Crew was a profound realization that I am not a Federation captain, not yet anyway.
Piloting the fictional vessel, dubbed the U.S.S. Aegis, on an exploratory mission to the uncharted sector ‘The Trench’ in efforts to find a new planet for the Vulcan race after the Romulans destroyed their home-world, I quickly found out that when the Klingon Empire is breathing down your neck and real people are counting on you to make the right decision, that I still need a lot more time with Bridge Crew before I can put on the well-deserved swagger of a Kirk, Piccard, or Janeway. That’s not to say you can’t have your ‘captain-y moments’ in the beginning campaign with your friends though, but when the goings get tough, role-playing that Starfleet swagger quickly deflates in front of the very real barrier of 2 Klingon warships and 4 scouts coming in for the kill.
And even though the game promises only 5 ‘episodes’ that range from 20-30 minutes of gameplay a piece, the difficulty level spikes significantly around the last two missions, so be prepared for the likelihood of an entire play session getting scrapped because you didn’t get a critical instrument back on-line while taking heavy fire. Despite some hypothetically quick mission times, you can easily invest several hours alone trying to beat the last two campaign missions.
flying high at Helm, image captured by Road to VR
I found the campaign mode, which can be completed with or without a fully-manned, live crew (AI can fill in the gaps), to be much more difficult as a lone player. Because AI can’t really take on detailed orders like, “avoid that gravitic mine while running away from that anomaly while shooting at the upcoming Bird-of-Prey,” you sometimes have to jump into the AI’s position to get what you want out it. You can also issue crew-wide orders to the AI from your captain’s chair that make some things a bit quicker, like aligning warp vectors and repairing critical ship functions, but that’s not really what Star Trek: Bridge Crew is all about.
When playing alone, I found that micromanaging a ship’s AI effectively photon-torpedoes the fun right out of the sky. Instead, the soul of the game is more about becoming an effective communicator with like-minded players and having those deeply surreal moments when your ego jumps into the shoes of a bridge officer commanding, responding, and caring about the world around you. Those are the deeply satisfying moments of the game, when you can cheer for victory and bond—even with perfect strangers.
at the Captain’s chair, image captured by Road to VR
Without going too deep into each station’s duties (you can a video of the full explanation here), the intensity of the enemy and the various objectives flying your way can quickly overwhelm any station. Besides requiring effective communication between players, the game hinges on your ability to keep systems repaired, and correctly balanced for the task at hand. At engineering, you can overcharge engines, phasers, shields at the expense of all other systems, or lower your output entirely to maintain a low profile radar signature for moments of stealth, a requirement for some missions. Engineers can repair everything except your hull, meaning once your shields go down, you’ll be accruing permanent damage.
As a captain in the co-op mode, you keep an eye on mission objectives, and also the game’s three maps; a local map, an impulse map for farther objects of interest, and a warp map displaying far-flung locations. Only mission-relevant locations can be accessed during the campaign mode, so exploring is a bit ‘on rails’ as it were. Here it’s your job to efficiently order the crew according to their roles and keep an eye on everyone as they go about their individual jobs.
Tactical can fire torpedoes in limited supply, phasers that need charging, and subsystem intrusions that let you knock out the enemy’s engines, phasers, etc.
Helm’s job is to maneuver the ship from point A-B, keep targets in sight, and be on point when it comes to aligning impulse and warp vectors for quick getaways.
Outside of campaign mode, Bridge Crew also offers ‘ongoing missions’, which serves up a selection of procedurally generated challenges available in both solo and co-op mode. These entail rescue, defend, attack, and exploratory missions. To add another level of difficulty, you can also fly the original Enterprise (NCC 1701) during ‘ongoing missions’, which is more powerful but less stealthy. To my surprise, the old Enterprise is fairly dead-on with screen accuracy, replete with a charming array of unlabeled flashing lights and buttons (you can toggle labels on if you need help).
Aboard the Enterprise, NCC-1701, image captured by Road to VR
In the end, Bridge Crew is more about ‘pew pew pew’ and less about peaceful exploration than I personally care for, but that’s probably better for everyone’s enjoyment in the long run.
Cross-play between Vive, Rift and PSVR was switched off in the pre-release version, but Ubisoft says it will be ready at launch.
Immersion
The look and feel of the game is nothing short of amazing, and fans are sure to appreciate the attention to detail. The ship’s interior, although taking after the J.J. Abrams re-boot films (love it or hate it), it thankfully lacks the director’s penchant for lens flares and dramatic camera angles, instead putting you in a very real, very well-crafted ship’s bridge.
Space exteriors are graphically less involved however, and seem too cartoonish to be believed. Science enthusiasts will undoubtedly shake their heads in anguish when they see the game’s lumpy-looking stars with equally lumpy-looking planets far too close to each other. That’s not a big concern, but it does detract a bit from the game’s wow-factor.
image courtesy Ubisoft
As for the interior, controls are logically represented and well-labeled for each station. Some buttons become unresponsive during and a bit after impulse and warp travel is concluded though, which isn’t exactly helpful when you’re trying to get a jump on your respective duty. This leaves you effectively tapping a button until the game decides you’re allowed to use it; annoying, but you get used to it.
image captured by Road to VR
Avatar creation falls slightly flat because its done via a collection of very rough presets, letting you choose between man or woman, Human or Vulcan, and a number of ethnicities via a slider so you try to create something unique. You can also make them stockier, older, and cycle through a few hairstyles and colors. I never really found an avatar that fit me though.
Thankfully the game lets you play either with gamepad or hand controllers, which means anyone with a high-quality VR headset can join in. Players with hand controllers will notice that console screens stop your virtual hands, which is helpful when it comes to accurately hitting a button. While this technically screws with your body’s proprioception, or the ability to innately understand where your body parts are without looking, it didn’t really bother me after hours of play time.
Comfort
As a seated game, Star Trek: Bridge Crew is an exceedingly comfortable experience. With the bridge and consoles acting as physical anchors, and the ship’s slower turning radius and speed, you likely to have minimal problems if you’re usually averse to artificial locomotion-induced nausea.
sitting never felt so exciting, image captured by Road to VR
The developers at Red Storm Entertainment are well-studied when it comes to VR game design, and offer plenty of near-field space debris and particles to give you the sense that you’re moving in space without the discomfort of artificial locomotion.
Conclusion
The big question remains whether Star Trek: Bridge Crew will be a flash in the pan with an initial period of hype, or a long-lived success with a steady player-base. I can see myself logging on and playing through the campaign with buddies and maybe even making the procedural missions a weekly addition to my routine amongst friends (as long as everyone is having fun). Even playing with random people was a blast, but the fact remains that fresh content like new campaign missions, ship types, and greater multiplayer-driven game modes, are all needed to keep users interested and coming back to have what I would consider one of the funnest social gaming experiences I’ve had to date.
A special thanks goes out to social VR industry pro Shawn Whiting, Road to VR exec. editor Ben Lang, and a random English guy by the moniker ‘the_weird’ for helping with the review of this game.
Arktika.1’s levels are giant and while you’re gifted with the power of teleportation to traverse them, you’re only allowed to teleport to nodes that the game chooses, creating something that I’m tempted to describe as a ‘mobile wave shooter’ experience. You’ll enter a room, see two bad guys, kill them, which triggers 4 more bad guys to come rushing in. Once you clear the area, you’re then offered a new forward node to teleport to, which effectively functions as a signal that you’ve eliminated all possible bad guys and can move to the next room. I say I’m tempted to call it a ‘mobile wave shooter’ because of the, well, waves of bad guys that you swim straight through, but levels aren’t always big rooms with well-timed waves of enemies rushing in. Oftentimes you’re traversing through tight corridors and elevators, and you just don’t know what’s waiting for you on the other side, be it a trap, puzzle, or one of those terrible Yagas ready to tear your head off.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the 
