The caped crusader has a long and storied history with video games. To this day, one of my favorites arrived on the original NES and it was simply called: Batman. It featured gameplay similar to that of Ninja Gaiden, but it plays like an excellent rendition of the World’s Greatest Detective and his more ninja-like tendencies. There have been lots of bad games too, and most recently, lots of even greater ones.
Rocksteady have delivered the excellent Arkham series of Batman games, delivering a wonderful balance of stealth, action, investigation, and cinematic storytelling. It doesn’t get much better than that. As a result, you’d understand how excited the world was when it was revealed at E3 this year that Rocksteady would be crafting a VR-exclusive Batman adventure coming directly to Sony’s PlayStation VR called Batman: Arkham VR. Some might even argue that it seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it seems like this is neither the Batman game that the VR community deserves, nor the one that it needs right now.
In Batman VR, you put on the cowl and become The Batman himself. The entire game is played from the first-person perspective and is undoubtedly, as a result, one of the most immersive Batman games ever made. Visually, it’s splendid, the music and voice work is fantastic, and the atmosphere alone is worth the price of admission for hardcore Bat-fans. There is certainly enough fan service in the game’s opening moments to warrant a giddy squeal of delight.
While playing, I got to peruse the entry hall of the Wayne Manor. I spun a world globe, played the piano, and listened to a music box. Family portraits and regal decorations adorned the billionaire family’s home and it truly made me feel like I was living out the life of Bruce Wayne — or at least peering into his life through my PS VR headset.
Once the descent down into the Batcave began, that’s when the game was as its strongest. Reaching out and putting on the gloves, placing the cowl on my face, seeing myself in the mirror, and testing out my gadgets in Batman VR made me feel more like the titular character than anything else I’ve played to date. Unfortunately, the opening 10-15 minutes are the best part.
After this montage of a power fantasy, the actual game begins with me ushered from short scene to short scene. I run into the likes of Penguin, his henchmen, Nightwing, Robin, and several other classic characters. I don’t want to spoil any of the details, since the actual narrative itself is worth experiencing, but it moves to quickly to really carry any weight.
From start to finish, Rocksteady are banking on you entering each moment with a high-degree of understanding for the events and characters. The entire experience plays out more like a highlight reel of a single episode of a Batman TV show than it does a completed game in and of itself.
When I first went hands-on with Batman VR at E3 2016, all of the warning signs were there. This was always marketed as a brief VR experience, but I didn’t quite think that strictly meant only a single hour of content. Once you’ve completed the core storyline, you can replay missions to find Riddler secrets, but that’s essentially all there is to do in the entire game.
I could stand on a launch pad in the Batcave and choose my vehicle, but then the loading screen plays the sounds of me driving without actually putting me in the driver’s seat. I can ignite a fire extinguisher to cloud a rooftop and make the jump on an enemy, but the sounds of fighting and scuffling are all I hear as the screen dims again and fast forwards to after the action. I can investigate the remains of a crime scene, but are forced to point and highlight specific “clues” without any real challenge or deductive reasoning required.
To be frank, plastering the Arkham label on Batman VR feels like a bit of a disservice to the legacy that franchise has built and a major missed opportunity. Its a beautiful, immersive, and downright believable simulation of what it feels like to wear the suit and don the cowl, but it forgets to let us feel the rush of excitement that comes along with actually doing something as Batman.
Final Score:5/10 – Mediocre
Batman: Arkham VR isn’t a terrible VR experience — it even manages to deliver a satisfying twist ending to the short narrative — but it’s a far cry from the type of game fans want or expect. What was shipped here is little more than a tech demo, or a museum of objects and features that are never fully realized. Just as each scene from the game starts to feel like its picking up some steam, it’s over and you’re onto the next vignette of content. Die hard Batman fans will find enough fan service to warrant a purchase, but if you’re looking for an actual game featuring the Dark Knight in VR, then you’re better off waiting a while longer.
Batman: Arkham VR will be available on October 13th exclusively for PlayStation VR at the price of $19.99. After March 31st, the game may be released on other platforms.
Note: The VR component of this game is still a work in progress which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game only at its current state and will not receive a numerical score.
After an extended period in Early Access, The Solus Project launched earlier this year for non-VR gamers and the critical reaction was mixed, with its blend of survival and storytelling missing the mark for some. Fast forward a couple of months to July and developers Hourences and Grip Games delivered a massive update that implements what they describe as “work in progress” VR support. Although technically not finished, this VR experience for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive offers a lot more than you might expect and leaves a lasting impression of its strange, alien world. Can VR elevate The Solus Project to new heights?
Gameplay
There’s a moment in most people’s lives where they confront their irrational fear of the dark. Standing in pitch black, hair on the back of the neck stands on end as primal instincts woven into the animal parts of our DNA collide with the rational brain that knows there’s nothing to fear. The Solus Project in VR delights in messing with those lingering animal instincts.
Another in a long line of in-vogue survival games, The Solus Project sensibly lets the threat of your imminent demise fade into the background. Exploration and a sense of mystique are more important than making sure you have enough burgers and Coke to survive.
Starting in orbit around a distant world as part of a crew tasked with finding humankind a new home, disaster strikes and your ship crashes spectacularly onto the surface. You find yourself alone on an alien world surrounded by twisted metal and flames. Survival is the first order of business as you rush to meet your basic needs; huddled in a cavern against the freezing cold, but you need to press on. Are there other survivors? Can you make contact with anyone back home? Will you ever get off this planet? If you want to find out, you will need to leave the relative safety and warmth of the crash site.
At first you will explore timidly, greedily gathering nearby supplies and rapidly filling your inventory, before building enough confidence to strike out further and further. This is a rare game that makes you feel like you are embarking on a journey into the unknown; one that will take you across alien terrain, through caves, and deep underground. Inside VR, The Solus Project has an incredible sense of place, of scale, and of wonder. This is a singularly alien world with moons that loom large on the horizon, throwing the outline of distant and enigmatic shores into sharp relief, and it only becomes more unsettling as you make your way through the game’s eight hour run time.
Most of your time is up with the exploration of large though not vast areas, incurring loading screens as you move between them via caves or tunnels. You’re going to need to bring some light with you because there’s a full day-night cycle and when you find yourself underground the world falls into an ominous pitch black. You will cower at strange sounds and imagined movement from beyond the aura of your flaming torch, or the eerie glow of luminescent shards. There will be objects to discover and collect as you solve rudimentary puzzles and combine items to overcome obstacles. The more things you find the more things you can do and therefore the more progress you will make towards your goal.
The survival elements of the game will require you to find food, water and medical supplies, all of which follow sensible rules: if you’re active, you’ll burn through calories and water, both of which will need to be topped up with food and good old H2O. Go out in the cold and you’ll expire through hypothermia; get wet and then go out in the cold and you’re going to very quickly turn into a popsicle. Try not to fall off a cliff, as this has predictable consequences. Rain storms and meteor showers—genuinely terrifying the first time—ensure that even getting from A to B isn’t always as simple as you’d imagine. Your trusty PDA holds all the key information you will need, and the computerised voice of your suit will delight in telling you your condition; “Operator wet,” nice observation, genius, it’s raining!
As good as the setting is, the game does indulge itself with some clunky storytelling at times. At one early point your character delivers a monologue to impart some sudden realisation… except it’s not sudden, and you will have had this realisation yourself a good half an hour earlier. You are left to construct much of the backstory yourself, by observing your surroundings and reading crew logs conveniently strewn about the place. It’s good to know that even in the distant future humankind still write their logs on paper. Fireproof, crash proof, waterproof paper.
Compounding the inconsistent quality of the storytelling is the fact that the VR support isn’t final, with the game itself referring to it as a work in progress, and this does intrude on the fun from time to time: the tutorial is poor, regularly it’s evident that the environment wasn’t built for VR navigation, there are occasional UI oddities, and the controls can be really fiddly. Over time I’m hopeful that those rough edges will be smoothed away, especially given the already impressive support, but be aware that the present build will require you to make more effort than most other games would demand. Once you have spent some time playing it all starts to make sense, however. The interface is fairly complex; it’s convoluted, but it’s fully functional and after an hour or so becomes almost second nature.
The Solus Project offers up a very compelling world to explore and secrets to unravel. Revealing too much of the story or the setting would be to ruin the sense of unfolding mystery the game builds so well. It wasn’t built with VR in mind, but aside from some clunky interface and control issues you wouldn’t know. It is a world that begs to be experienced in VR… unless you’re afraid of the dark.
Immersion
I can’t overstate how atmospheric The Solus Project can be. The day night cycle, the ominous looming moons, the distant shores, the strange architecture all combine to form a cohesive world – ambient sound effects and music combine well to round out the mood. Standing on a shoreline watching the waves roll in as a meteor shower explodes around you and a moon crests the horizon never gets old. As the rain started to fall heavily I felt exposed, and then genuine relief when finding some cover and standing under it. Caves with roaring fires feel almost cozy after being exposed to the wild surface of the planet. Pushing deeper into a cave, with only your small nimbus of light to see by, is exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds. At times I was completely immersed in the illusion.
There are some UI oddities that break the immersion somewhat: when you take a fall the glass in your helmet cracks, but it doesn’t feel like you’re wearing an helmet, it just looks like a perfectly in focus texture right up against your eyeballs. Same with the moisture effects when you’re caught in the rain. They’re neat effects, but not quite pulled off in VR. The focus dot in the centre of the screen also occasionally zooms toward you distractingly, as it focusses on something near to you – not a bug so much as the non-VR version peeking through. There’s the Rift bug when you sleep and the screen fades to black everywhere except at the extremes of your vision where you can still see through to the world. The loading screens are also just black empty screens, with the loading indicators slightly visible just out of your field of vision on the Vive.
Your main tool throughout the game is a chunky PDA that is ever-present in your left hand, but you also use your left hand to target the slightly twitchy system for Vive teleport motion; it only works when targeting a flat surface which makes, for example, climbing a staircase a lot more annoying than it needs to be. In your right hand is the currently active item from your inventory, in my case this was a flaming torch 90% of the time. The right hand also functions as a laser pointer for things that your PDA can examine. On the Rift these items appear in fixed locations that track with your gaze; suffice it to say this feels more like the non-VR version of the game and loses some immersion as a result, and you must use your head to point at items in the world rather than your hand as with the Vive.
In both cases it can be a little difficult to keep your arm or head steady as you wait for the readout on your PDA to tell you what you’re looking at; if you lose focus on the target the scanning process resets which became frustrating very quickly. The Vive’s motion controllers are more natural here, as you point imperiously at your target with one hand and raise the other closer to your eyes to get a better view of the readout in true Star Trek Tricorder fashion. After a while playing with the Rift I grew more adept at just shifting my gaze slightly rather than my head, but it is a distraction that took me out of the experience.
Using the Vive’s VR controllers and holding a torch in your hand, sweeping around and illuminating the environment, makes you feel much more the rugged explorer; there’s a real Tomb Raider quality to some of the environments and reaching my arm high above my head to expose details of a cavern was a constant delight. When I first jumped down into a pool of water the torch was doused and I was plunged into terrifying darkness. I had a visceral panic response, and scrambled to reignite it. Through my own stupidity I had my hand too low and let the torch hit the water, and thereafter I became much more aware of my limbs and the world around me. The game became much more real to me as a result. Using a traditional controller just isn’t the same. Given the impressive support from the developers so far I’d imagine Oculus Touch support will be added to The Solus Project later in the year, and that really would be the better way to play compared to a gamepad.
Comfort
HTC Vive users are offered a teleportation solution for getting around the world, although this is slightly confused by there being an actual teleporting tool you get in the game which becomes a core part of some later puzzles. There are those that find teleporting around a VR world completely breaks the immersion, and for them there’s the option to directly control your forward and turning motion with the track pads. When using this method of locomotion, the direction of travel is wherever your head is pointed, but the track pad can also be used to swing your view around.
Oculus Rift users lose the teleportation option, but retain everything else and gain the ability to strafe. Both sets of users get a comfort mode option that snaps turns to 90 degrees and also have the ability to reduce walking speed from 100% down to whatever they find comfortable. Best of all, the game lets you mix and match. I am highly susceptible to simulator sickness, so many games with joystick have been known to ruin me for hours after taking off the headset. But there are also times when teleportation—especially in games where it wasn’t designed in from the start—can be an hinderance or reduce the immersion. The Solus Project doesn’t make you choose one or the other, you can move between them as you wish while you play.
I found my perfect balance to be the Vive with a combination of teleportation, with occasional snap-to-turn to untangle me from the cables, and smoothly moving forward with direct control of my forward motion using my gaze to fine-tune. When first exploring an area I’d take direct control to soak up the ambiance, but when I was backtracking or just wanted to get somewhere fast, the teleportation is excellent and actually lends the game a feeling not unlike the original Myst or the recent Obduction. This lets me choose how much of the joystick locomotion I wanted from moment to moment, rather than having to make an upfront choice or, worse, not having a choice at all.
Using joystick locomotion, you will frequently find your viewpoint jumps up and down as you walk over items in the world, or if you use the jump button. This could be uncomfortable for some, and can be avoided almost entirely by using the teleportation to move. Rift owners susceptible to simulator sickness will just have to suffer through it until/unless Touch support is patched in. That said, Rift owners will doubtless already know where their comfort limits are with these things. I found I couldn’t play The Solus Project on the Rift for more than 20 minutes before starting to feel simulator sickness kick in. If you know you have a higher tolerance, or are impervious to the effect, then you could doubtless go for much longer. Conversely, on the Vive, I was easily able to play for 90 minutes in a session without issue by using teleportation mixed with joystick locomotion.
On the framerate performance front, the game offers a lot of configuration options to give you the optimal experience for your machine. It recommends that you set detail much lower than you would normally in order to run well in VR, as you’d expect, but I found that my 980Ti and i7 6700K was able to run with almost everything cranked up to maximum. For those running closer to the entry level, you’ll want to turn down the world detail and shadow quality.
The only essential setting is supersampling, so those on less powerful machines will want to sacrifice other options to enable this. At 150% it took the PDA from an unreadable mess to a sharp, crisp readout. This will save you squinting too hard at the PDA, or bringing it so close to your eyes that you smack the controller into the headset, which totally didn’t happen to me, repeatedly, until I ramped up the supersampling.
Conclusion
Despite some rough edges The Solus Project in VR is a great experience. The eerie atmosphere is expertly built, and the game lingers with you long after you’ve removed the headset. With so many options for comfort and control, and support for both high end VR offerings, aspects of the game stand as an example that other VR developers would do well to follow.
Important Note: I ran into some severe performance issues with the game at first. This manifested itself in seemingly random spikes where the frame rate dropped low enough to break the head tracking and induce significant simulator sickness – it literally rendered me unable to go back into VR for a full 24 hours. A little bit of Googling revealed that others had suffered a similar problem, and the developers offered some INI file tweaks to address them. I had to go a step further and make a change suggested by other users but, thankfully, in the end I was able to achieve perfect frame rates and resolve the problem completely – if there was a visual trade-off for disabling these features I didn’t notice it. If you find the performance dropping, and you know your hardware should be able to cope, perhaps these INI tweaks will work for you:
Feral Rites is a third-person VR adventure-brawler from Insomniac Games released for the Oculus Rift. Set on a mystical island, you play as a beefed-out warrior trying to avenge your father’s death by kicking, punching and slashing everyone in your way.
Feral Rites Details:
Official Site
Developer:Insomniac Games Publisher: Oculus Studios Available On: Oculus Home (Rift) Reviewed On:Oculus Rift Release Date: September 13th, 2016
Gameplay
At the beginning of the game, you’re introduced to Bokor, a powerful shaman from your tribe who leads you on your way to avenge your father’s death, an act perpetrated by the evil Sombro. Blinded with rage and taunted by Sombro along the way, you tear through each sector of the island, killing everyone with your newly acquired beast powers, which lets you turn into a slow and hulking man-jaguar—the tank of the game—or an actual jaguar that is faster at (but has no combat abilities) moving and auto-smashing the world’s inexplicable surplus of terracotta vases.
slashing an enemy in beast form
Much like Insomniac’s Spyro the Dragon or Ratchet and Clank series, Feral Rites is jam-packed with collectibles of all sorts spread out through the game’s maze-like map. Raw material for armor upgrades, gold, journals, and talismans used to increase the number of moves you can do, are to be found in every nook and cranny of the complex map set out before you.
With multiple temples in a single level, it’s easy to get lost, which is probably why the developers included a ‘spirit sense’ mechanic that lets you find the most direct route to your objective by tracing a temporary line to wherever it is you need to go. While this is arguably better than quest markers or mini-maps, which can spoil the fun of real exploration, I (predictably) ended up abusing it. Since there’s no penalty for using the mechanic to your heart’s content, it personally became a part of the game’s natural flow, where I would enter an area with a fork, pound the ‘spirit sense’ button, and go on my merry way. In terms of real exploration, your mileage may very depending on how much you use (or abuse) the ability.
So maybe exploration isn’t your thing anyway and you just want to smash some shit up? Feral Rites has you covered.
Combat is high-energy, visceral and extremely gratifying in Feral Rites, featuring a large enough array of moves to make fighting any of the world’s dozen-or-so bad guys an interesting and challenging affair. You can’t just tank through fights and button mash your way to success, because your beast form can only take so many hits before you’re turned back into a human; your human form, while agile, deals less damage to your foes—making the game’s combat system a real study in balance. You can change the game’s difficulty level at any time though, even in the middle of a fight, which increases bad guy skill and HP, and decreases the chances of getting a power up in one of the aforementioned vases that litter the game world.
My two favorite moves were throwing bad guys off high cliffs and throwing bad guys into piranha-infested streams (I really liked throwing guys)—two moves that are worth a relatively meager hazard bonus on your constantly building combo meter, but really effective at eliminating high numbers of baddies.
Puzzles are on the easy side, but hey, this is an adventure-brawler and not an adventure puzzler like Obduction.
Immersion
Like Insomniac’s Edge of Nowhere (2016), your third-person point of view makes you essentially a floating security camera that automatically switches positions as you control your character below. This sort of fixed-point teleportation isn’t really jarring because you can anticipate the camera switch pretty reliably, an event triggered by your character crossing a blue line in any given area of the map.
‘spirit sense’ activated, heading for a new area
So what does VR add to a decidedly traditional game like Feral Rites? A few things actually, the most important being the grandiosity of seeing it all in virtual reality.
The game’s Aztec-inspired scenery is vast and megalithic, something only a VR headset can correctly translate to the viewer. If you can resist using the ‘spirit sense’ ability and really take your time, you’ll be able to appreciate some of the most well-made environments currently available to VR headsets. Perched over a seemingly infinite drop, you can really get the sense of vertigo, even if you’re an invisible set of eyeballs in the sky.
To help you appreciate and take in the scenery, the developers added a unique rune-searching system so that every once in a while you can stop in your tracks and search for a rune symbol hidden somewhere in the scenery. When you find it, you’re given a little reward of coins for your effort, and you also get a chance to better scope out your surroundings.
Your shaman guide, Bokor
One of my least favorite things about Feral Ritesis that the storyline relies heavily on narrator-driven cut scenes; that and the helpful, if not incessant, image of your mysterious shaman buddy Bokor constantly appearing out of nowhere to tell you what to do. These are both (un)necessary evils to push the narrative forward, but dammit if it just doesn’t feel so gamey when you play it in a VR headset. Maybe it’s trying to hearken back to an earlier age, but the storyline was just too simplistic and just too obvious for me to really be engaged. Then again, it may be that I’ve grown out of these sorts of games, but I desperately want a game that feels more clever than me. I had to slog through it to get to combat, which proved to be much more engaging.
Something that often takes a backseat to the story is the soundtrack, an intensely cool mix of chill hiphop vibes when exploring (something like Samurai Champloo), and a much more arcade-like drum and bass track when in fights.
Comfort
Third-person games with a fixed POV like Feral Rites are always supremely comfortable simply because they don’t have any stomach-churning artificial locomotion to contend with.
It’s no surprise Oculus is pushing games like this on their platform, which up until Oculus Touch launches later this year, makes playing a game in a Rift necessarily a seated experience. That said, using the gamepad and sitting down is a familiar way to game, and scenery is usually splayed out in a comfortable, forward-facing way so you don’t have to swivel too much.
I can’t always play VR games for long, but this time I had a full day to beat it from beginning to end. Topping out at 10 hours for me personally,I can attest that Feral Rites is just as comfortable as you would expect it to be.
Conclusion
Feral Rites proves to be a fairly fun, well-balanced brawler that offers around 10 hours of gameplay if you follow the story alone. Collectibles are everywhere, giving you extra incentive to explore the entire island, which is a massive and beautiful place worth more than a cursory glance. The storyline is predictable and dialogue feels wooden however, and relies heavily on cut scenes and helpful narrators to push things forward, making it much less interesting than we would have hoped.
Scores
Gameplay: 6
Immersion: 8
Comfort: 9
Overall: 6.5
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.
No longer can you buy a bunch of cheap keys for a game and influence the review system heavily, nor can developers give out free keys in the hopes of positive reviews. If you didn't buy the game through Steam, your review won't count as much.
Insomniac Games currently stand as one of the most prolific high profile development studios in virtual reality (VR), with Feral Rites joining Edge of Nowhere as the second Oculus Rift exclusive title from the studio and a third, The Unspoken, on the way. While the latter title is something which could arguably only be achieved in VR, both Edge of Nowhere and Feral Rites are more traditional videogame genres adapted to the new medium.
Edge of Nowhere was a surprising realisation of adventure gameplay in VR. Slower paced than the recent Tomb Raider reboots or the Uncharted franchise yet bringing a whole new level of immersion to the genre, Edge of Nowhere proved that VR can add a great deal to videogame formulae that we’re already well versed in. Feral Rites is aiming to do the same for the scrolling beat-‘em-up genre, taking a single player through a 3D adventure that eschews the trends of modern takes on the genre such as Devil May Cry or God of War and sticks to the basics. This is ‘90s videogaming in modern technology: an experience that you probably haven’t been crying out for, but are likely to enjoy regardless.
Much like the pioneering Streets of Rage and Final Fight series, the combat in Feral Rites begins simply enough: light and heavy attacks, trading speed for damage with a risk/reward system of potentially leaving you open to counters. String combos together for increased damage while dodging and jumping to gain the advantage. So far, so familiar. But the videogame has been given the name ‘Feral Rites’ for a reason. It’s the transformation element that plays into the combat system to grant it a unique selling point (USP), as well as some light puzzling.
Throughout the campaign players will be given the ability to transform into several beasts, from a brutish bipedal tiger to a slightly less intimidating monkey, each with their own unique combat set and special abilities. The real skill comes when the player learns how to transform mid-combo, significantly increasing the experience gained and the chances of an instant kill.
Sadly, that experience is a massive bone of contention. The player can upgrade their character as they progress through the videogame, but it’s so structured its essential binary. There’s little difference here than simply unlocking new abilities along with the transformations and player choice is limited. Playing through the entire campaign twice will yield very similar results.
This too goes for the exploration aspect of Feral Rites. There are frequently multiple paths to choose from but ultimately it’s a pointless exercise. Sure there’s the occasional hidden collectable to find, but unless you’re an absolute completionist there’s little reason to go back and venture through previously unexplored territory as all paths eventually lead to the same destination.
The visual quality of Feral Rites is perhaps its most pleasing aspect. The chunky, colourful characters look great and the backdrops are very highly detailed. The VR aspect of Feral Rites performs best when the action is at its most fierce – panning and zooming the camera for blood-pumping action – but essentially, given that the player is following a near-linear path, the headlook functionality is largely overlooked.
Feral Rites strikes a similar chord to Edge of Nowhere in that it tries to bring something new to the genre without redefining it. Sadly, it simply doesn’t go far enough to breathe life into its chosen genre. It’s a videogame that – much like scrolling beat-‘em-ups from the early part of the century – is stagnating in a formula that is in desperate need of rejuvenation, suggesting that perhaps Insomniac Games may have been better to follow the lessons taught in Devil May Cry and God of War after all.
