There’s no shortage of strategy style games for HTC Vive, the trick is to find the ones that not only provide a polished experience but also some originality. The latest to arrive for HTC’s head-mounted display (HMD) is Siegecraft Commander from indie team Blowfish Studios, which manages more of the latter than it does with the former.
Siegecraft Commander is essentially a real-time tower defense title that gives you an entire map to take over and control. Rather than going down the standard tower defense route of set positions for defences while attackers follow a set path, Blowfish Studios has mixed up the mechanic by allowing you to place towers pretty much anywhere, there’s just one small cravat, they’re all interconnected.
Matches start from a main castle (Keep), from here you launch the necessary buildings you want to expand with, but in doing so whichever building is used to launch the next an interconnecting wall appears. The premise sounds simple enough, but if you’re not careful and don’t properly plan ahead this can lead to all sorts of issues. Outposts are your main expansion building, from here Garrisons then Barracks can be built, or an Armory then defences such as mortars. But these can’t just be placed randomly. While buildings can be fired to cover different distances from any angle off the base structure, their interconnecting walls cannot overlap, so you may find certain environment bottle necks difficult to navigate if you’ve been haphazardly building.
Another critical factor in all of this interconnectivity is that of losing or destroying buildings in the chain. Should you or your opponent manage to breach deep enough in either’s defences, destroying a crucial building – ideally an outpost – then every single building built from it comes crumbling down. If this happens later on during a match this can be devastating for the opposing player, easily turning the outcome of a game.
As with most tower defence videogames, Siegecraft Commander tends to err on the side of management more than direct action. Barracks automatically produce knights up to the allotted build count, with mortars and ballistas firing automatically, when not on cool down. But for those that like to get into the heart of the action they can still do so. Trebuchet’s, Pyres (fire magic) and Airships for example all have to be manually fired, leading to some heated engagements when teams are at loggerheads.
Controls for the HTC Vive are easy enough to pick up, with the left hand controller adjusting zoom, twisting the map and moving it any which way you please. But its not completely rosy Siegecraft Commander. While these controls work just fine when not in the middle of a chaotic battle, trying to move around the map can be cumbersome, there’s no flight or teleportation movement, you need to drag the map. Also – and this does depend on how you’ve expanded – you may find selecting the appropriate buildings somewhat problematic. If they’ve all been nicely spaced apart then its all good, but more often you’ll have built a chain, bits have been destroyed so other sections are adapted and rebuilt frantically, meaning that nicely laid out plans have been turned on their head and everything is bunched together. This can then make it somewhat frustrating trying to highlight what you need quickly.
On the flip side, when chains are destroyed and plans need to be adapted on the fly Siegecraft Commander becomes a highly engaging, taught, strategy videogame. It is rough on certain edges, and there are niggling issues, but for a title that’s looking to enter a genre so heavily established, Siegecraft Commander does just enough to make it a worthy consideration for purchase.
I was drawn to Wanderer: The Rebirth through its curious premise; a Monster Hunter or Dark Souls-esque third-person action game in which you take on a small handful of bosses using the Vive’s position-tracked wands. I had no idea if this was going to work, but it sounded unlike anything else in a time when VR is flooded with shooter clones and endless escape room games. I had to try it out.
Sadly, I wasn’t very surprised to find that Wanderer doesn’t work well at all.
It’s the brainchild of Chinese developer Wooway Games and should at the very least be praised for its strangeness. You fight bosses with a giant sword that isn’t tracked to your hands, but instead activated with the right trigger for standard attacks, while holding down the Vive’s grip buttons and moving the right wand in a certain direction to use special skills that need to cool down between uses. Moving is done with the left trackpad, dodging is done with the right trackpad. Your left controller takes the form of a crossbow that you can aim and shoot at enemies for a little extra firepower.
Remember all of that? Try doing that when you’re staring down a stone golem or trading blows with a chimera. Wanderer‘s control scheme is counter-intuitive to the point of making the game artificially difficult and incredibly tedious. Even on the easier difficulty enemies take chunks off of your health with one hit, meaning you need to be on your toes at all times and the Vive’s trackpads just aren’t designed to provide that kind of dexterity.
You also need to know when’s the perfect time to activate one of the long special move animations, during which you’re open to attacks. The gestures needed to perform these actions are unreliable, however, and combined with the stiff movement you can often end up facing the wrong way when you do activate them. If these had been simple button presses it would have been much more manageable.
My brain wrestled with the controls at every turn, and there frustratingly doesn’t seen to be a way to play the game with a standard gamepad controller, despite those prompts appearing in screenshots and trailers. I could be wrong, but trying to link up my controller to the game proved unsuccessful and it’s not listed on the Steam store page.
A third-person camera has been used to help player comfort, so it’s ironic that Wanderer is one of the more nauseating games I’ve played on the Vive. The game breaks several of the golden rules of VR on the camera front: as you run, your view seems to bob up and down, and when you’re scrapping up close the camera will twist against your will to get a view of the boss. I don’t often feel ill in VR games but even after a minute or two of stepping into the arena with one of the game’s bosses I began to sweat.
It’s an immense shame, as you can tell that there’s the foundation for a decent game here, it’s just been tarnished by the insistence of supporting VR. Bosses are well designed and offer up fun takes on mythological creatures, and you can see the consideration that’s gone into your attack timing to make combat more strategic. Sure, VR support helps The Wanderer get noticed in the ever-growing Steam marketplace, but when it’s at the expense of quality that’s no excuse.
Structurally the game is somewhat off, too, as you have to clear the bosses on easy mode (which is no simple feat) before tackling the same task on medium and hard difficulties. Something tells me that, unless there’s some heavy patching to be done, few people will actually be making it through to these later modes.
Final Score:4/10 – Forgettable
Wanderer: The Rebirth is a decent hack n’ slash fighter that’s been ruined by poorly-implemented VR support. At first glance I had hoped that Wooway Games may have managed to touch on something special for those that are after a mechanically-driven and tightly designed VR game, but it quickly becomes clear that they won’t find it here. The Vive wand controls are a mess and camera implementation suggests the developers don’t have a grasp on the essentials of VR.
You can download and play Wanderer: The Rebirth on Steam with official Vive and motion controller support for $6.99, with a 10% launch discount. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Developer E McNeill is synonymous with making virtual reality (VR) strategy titles for the Samsung Gear VR, with past projects including Darknet and Tactera. If you’ve played either of these you’ll have noticed a stripped back design theme featuring blue and yellow neon colours. None of this has changed for the indie developers latest experience Skylight, which expands the ideas from these earlier projects into another must see title.
Unlike its forebears Skylight is a turn-based strategy experience that cuts back lots of fluff usually found in this type of genre and tasks you with one solid objective, choose your team and destroy your opponents. There’s no secondary objectives or extras to be found to gain more points, annihilation of the enemy is what it’s all about.
Matches are one-on-one space battles, where you select from a choice of capital ships, frigates and smaller fighters. Depending on the gameplay mode you select you’ll be able to choose a certain portion of each class, each equipped with its own advantages and disadvantages. This is where you must implement the first part of any strategy, are you going for pure defence with lots of armour, massive firepower but lower health, or mixing up your ships for a bit of everything.
Skylight has three gameplay modes available, Campaign, Skirmish and Multiplayer. The former is the best place to start as you’ll quickly learn what ship does what, across three difficulty levels. The easiest campaign will generally have you fighting with a larger armada of ships than the AI opponent, so you shouldn’t have too much difficulty. The mid level campaign will be evenly matched in terms of numbers, while the hardest campaign will always find you at a numbers disadvantage. The AI doesn’t seem to get that much harder in general, but wars of attrition are definitely unwise in the latter levels. Skirmish on the other hand lets you set up battles however you wish. Up to a set quota (3 capital, 12 standard) of ships, you can select your own and your opponents, again another good way to learn the finer points of gameplay. This all essentially leads up to Multiplayer, which is the purest test of your skills and know how. You pick your team without being able to see your opponents and hope you’ve chosen wisely. All three modes maybe standard videogame fare, but for an essentially free VR videogame add up to plenty of gameplay hours.
The entire videogame is set on the deck of a spaceship, playing out as if you’re a commander controlling troops on a giant holographic display. Being a Gear VR title you can’t get ‘into’ the battles, you’re always on the sideline, but McNeill has thought of this. While everything does take place in front of you, swiping up/down/left or right on the touch pad will maneouvre the entire battle field in said direction to allow for a better view point. It’s a great little addition that just aids the whole experience.
Just going back to Skylight being free. You can download it and start playing without paying a penny, which is great, then a payment is required to unlock all of the experience. This idea of mixing up the mobile free-to-play idea with VR means that you can appreciate the effort that the indie developer put into Skylight, then delve deeper if you wish to. The small fee unlocks four more ships for 12 in total, as well as 20 missions – only 10 are freely available.
If you own a Gear VR, enjoy strategy titles and want something that’s methodical and challenging then Skylight is definitely worth a look. E McNeill has shown once again that he knows what he’s doing when making a mobile VR videogame. It may not feature in your face action, but it doesn’t need to, as Skylight has been perfectly formulated with engaging gameplay, quirky visuals and hours of entertainment.
When presented with the potential of VR as a new medium for video games, first-person shooters may immediately come to mind. But the prospect of being able to stand atop a battlefield, looking down at units, and commanding forces as an all-seeing god-like being is just as exciting. We’ve seen a few interpretations of the idea, such as AirMech Command, which mostly stay true to the genre’s roots, few games have stepped outside the genre boundaries.
Which brings us to Skylight. This latest release checks many of the boxes we’ve come to expect from strategy games over the years, but it’s ultimately a difficult game to describe mechanically as it melds elements from real-time strategy and turn-based tactics experiences together into something fresh and unique.
At first glance, Skylight looks just about like anything else E McNeill has done in his stint with independent VR game development. The neon-infused lines and colors are reminiscent of both of his past works (Darknet and Tactera), lending an identifiable style that feels both familiar and fresh at the same time. While Darknet was very clearly a unique VR-powered puzzle game and Tactera was an inventive adaptation of real-time strategy mechanics played on a virtual tabletop, Skylight is something a bit different altogether.
From the start of the game, the cohesive thematic sense of immersion is extremely well-done. Your character is standing aboard a starship in outer space as the soft, kind voice of a female A.I. speaks to you, addressing you as the commander. The premise is that you’re presented with a large 3D visualization of a battlefield as it’s happening millions of miles away in another region of space.
During missions your fleet, the blue ships, begin on the left side, while your enemy’s fleet, the yellow ships, begin on the right side. You look at each of your ships, tap the touchpad, then pick a node on the battlefield for them to approach or an enemy to attack. After you’ve issued all of the commands to your fleet, you confirm, and then everything starts to move at once. Your ships, your enemy’s ships — the action takes place simultaneously in real-time for both sides. It’s like a neon-space opera ripped out of Ender’s Game.
As the ships move around the environment, a timer is ticking down. Once it’s done the action pauses again for each side to issue new orders and the cycle repeats itself until one side loses all of their large capital ships. Things start out easy in the campaign with you outnumbering your enemy but quickly get more difficult as the missions carry on. There are three core campaigns split between Easy, Normal, and Hard difficulty levels. In my experience, the Hard campaign is in fact extremely difficult.
In addition to capital ships there are defensive ships and attack-type ships as well. Even though the combat system sounds relatively simplistic, the visual detail and animations put it over the top in terms of quality. Small fighter ships zip around larger ships during combat and the sound of rail guns firing really sells your eardrums on the power. Before long, you’ll really start to feel like the commander of a futuristic star fleet.
Skylight is launching with a free-to-play demo version and the option to unlock the full game for $4.99. In the free version, you get access to 8 of the 12 total ships and 10 of the 30 campaign missions, along with some multiplayer matchmaking limitations. If you enjoy the first few missions you play in the Easy campaign, I’d highly recommend purchasing the full game early instead of waiting because the extra ships really open up a lot of new strategic opportunities. Triple the number of missions and more multiplayer don’t hurt either.
Even though there is a good amount of content, I came away wishing for some type of structured campaign mode with a more refined story. The lore of the different planets and factions is there in descriptive text, but it’s not enticing enough to keep reading. More varied objectives, maps, and even just extra environments could have helped extend Skylight’s appeal. There is a Skirmish mode for quick battles you set up on your own, as well as Multiplayer matchmaking, which does add up to a relatively robust package.
Final Score: 7.5/10 – Very Good
Skylight may very well be E McNeill’s best game to-date. The stylistic neon visuals shine through with more detail than ever before and the intricate mixture of turn-based tactics and real-time strategy add up to an engaging and unique experience for Gear VR. A more robust campaign mode and a bit more gameplay variety could have turned Skylight into an even better tactical affair, but as it stands, it’s one of the best VR games for strategy fans so far.
Skylight will be available as a free demo version on Gear VR starting today (1/12/17), with an upgrade to the full game costing $4.99. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Unearthed Inc: The Lost Temple is a puzzle adventure game that puts you in the shoes of a fresh recruit to a treasure hunting company. With telekinetic powers and an obligatory wise-cracking robot sidekick named Droid, you venture deep into the Amazonian jungle in search of the fabled Dragoon Egg. What follows is a magical adventure that at times can be positively breathtaking, and at other times hopelessly exasperating.
Unearthed Inc Details:
Official Site
Developer:Glo Inc Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift), Oculus Home (Rift) Coming Soon: PlayStation VR, Google Day Dream Reviewed On: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift Release Date: December 16th, 2016
Gameplay
All too often in adventure games you’re find yourself led by the hand by a sarcastic robot who tells you where you need to go and what you have to do when you get there. While the trope itself is pretty useful for padding out a game’s narrative at the same time giving you direction, it tends to leave a pretty sour taste in my mouth after a while. I like exploring and figuring things out on my own, and after playing countless games with floating robot buddies tagging along, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather be frustrated with a game than swept through it by an overzealous robo-nanny.
That’s Droid! He’ll be here all week, folks.
In Unearthed Inc your side-kick Droid is helpful, robotic and sarcastic, yes, but he also thankfully stays out of your business if you want him to. Glancing at him quickly will signal you want a tip from him, which he’s all too glad to provide at no penalty, but you can otherwise let him jabber to himself as you try to figure out where to get the next piece of the puzzle.
Thanks to your new found telekinetic powers, you can effectively tractor-beam objects straight to your open hand and then ‘force push’ them at enemies and specific puzzles. It’s kind of childhood fantasy come to life, and getting the hang of magnetically tractoring a weapon or object to my hand quickly became second nature, and mostly works as it should. More on that later.
Puzzles – if you’re not into fetch quests, then you may feel a little resentful at all the mechanical gears, keys, and other wiggly-bits you have to collect and bung into place, which at times are stored in less than likely places. Oftentimes I would resort to spamming Droid to get a clue where the next piece was simply because of how obscure the answer would invariably turn out to be. Who knew the only thing to knock down a mushroom was a bottle of poison? I sure as hell didn’t.
matching puzzle to open a door
To break up the more or less 2 hour puzzle adventure, there are actually some not-so-easy boss battles that really bring your physicality into play, something that was delightfully unexpected and a nice change from the regular humdrum of puzzles and cut scenes. Dodging fireballs, dynamite, and energy orbs from a number of baddies—all headed straight for your face, mind you— while you have to shoot back with whatever’s on hand really gets the blood pumping. It also lets you release some of that frustration you may have built up knocking through puzzles—puzzles that at times felt too obscure and disconnected from my apparent goal that when finally get to a boss battle, you’re ready to blast pretty much anything with a rock to the face.
The story itself is a little weak and tends to be a straightforward ‘find the thing because… you just gotta’ quest, some of which can be forgiven due to what I felt was a smorgasbord approach to entertainment: Offer a little bit of everything and hope something sticks. And to their credit, a lot of it did.
Immersion
If you play according to the game’s unwritten rules, i.e. don’t clip through walls, don’t place items in the wrong spots, don’t try to use the wrong item for the wrong purpose—you may feel as much presence in Unearthed as any other standing room-scale game. While both well rendered and well voice acted, the uncomfortable truth is that the game’s object interaction is just too rough and inconsistent to be truly immersive.
Throwing items in VR isn’t easy, simply because you don’t have the same physical feedback cues like weight and size that help you learn when you should release an object to hit a target accurately. While you can telekinetically ‘shoot’ any item in your hand, you can’t exactly put an arc on it like you would, say if you needed to get an orb into a cup or a log into a fire pit. At times I would be absolutely baffled why the I was being forced to play a second rate carnival game to move forward in the narrative.
Unearthed Inc also suffers from a mismanagement of expectations. When it comes to seemingly simple tasks like opening containers, I still don’t fully grasp why I’d have to use a pickaxe to open a small wooden box or breaking into a nearly broken fissure in the wall (both containing a quest items inside), not when I could logically use my fists, a metal saw, a rock, a knife, a log, or any other number of sufficiently sharp or blunt items in my inventory. The game just doesn’t want you to do it.
The same goes for inventory. Why can’t I put a map in my inventory that is no bigger than any other item that’s already in there? Again, the game wants you to realize that the map is unimportant to further progress. But that should be something I decide, not the game.
Comfort
Unearthed Inc relies on a sort of point-and-click teleport system that only gives you very specific nodes, something similar to Cyan’s VR-capable puzzler Obduction (2016). This is true about 99 percent of the time, making it an ultimately comfortable experience—all except a fast-paced mine cart ride half way through that’s pretty nausea-inducing.
At moments your actual POV is lurchingly shifted around you so you can see an Indian Jones-esque boulder come tumbling down after, a locomotion no-no that Oculus suggests against in their Best Practices Guide. That said, the entire scene felt disorienting and a little too ‘bottom of the VR barrel’ for my tastes, a pity considering how competent the rest of game presents itself.
If you’re anything like me, you’re a little sick of waiting on Valve to actually make a big game for VR. The Lab is a great showcase for the Vive, but it’s just a mini-game collection. I want something I can actually sink my teeth into and lose hours in, recapturing the many late nights we’ve all spent playing Half-Life and Portal. I might well get my wish next year, but indie developer Zulubo Productions has something that might tide us over in the meantime.
Vertigo feels like a VR tribute to Valve. It’s like a mix of the developer’s two celebrated series molded and beaten into shape to fit VR. All it needs is a sprinkling of Left4Dead and I’d be calling some lawyers.
That’s not to say Vertigo doesn’t have a lot of originality to it. The game starts as you head to Washington to investigate a series of strange lights, and you suddenly find yourself warped to a labyrinthine underground facility that houses a Quantum Reactor. You set about finding a means of escape, clearing different floors by solving environmental puzzles and defeating enemies using a stun baton in one hand and a laser pistol in the other.
You’ll also get a teleportation device that opens up portals you pull yourself through (one of the cooler locomotion techniques I’ve seen) and it also slows down time, which is handy for a number of puzzles.
Walking through the facility feels almost exactly like exploring Black Mesa in the original Half-Life. It’s a massive site with weaving corridors connecting enormous rooms littered with scientific equipment. You can even draw comparisons between the stun baton and Gordon Freeman’s iconic crowbar. All there’s there to differentiate it, ironically, is occasional and humorous intercom messages that invoke GLaDOS from Portal.
Vertigo wears its inspirations on its sleeves and that’s not a problem. Just attempting a Half-Life-like adventure makes it one of VR’s more ambitious indie games. The bigger environments are designed just as they would be in a 2D game, without the considerations of sluggish VR locomotion. Its’ refreshing to see that sort of scale in a first-person VR game, even if it is painfully slow to navigate, either through teleportation or using the grip buttons to walk forward.
It’s got the kind of variety in gameplay that you’d seek in one of those titles, too. In one room you’ll be fighting off swarms of robotic baddies with your back against the wall, while in the next you’ll have to navigate a flooded section to get to the other side.
Ultimately, though, the game’s just a little too rough around the edges to make it an absolute must play. Checkpoints, for example, are few and far between, and you’ll have to repeat a lot of gameplay to get back to where you died. That’s especially frustrating when death can come from simply being pushed off of the side of a ledge by accident, or being overwhelmed by the enemy with nowhere to hide and recover. An early boss fight is particularly annoying, making you swipe at incoming tentacles with demanding efficiency despite being given seconds to react.
There are also some confusing sections, like just before this boss. I survived a huge fall down a sheer drop and spent 10 minutes venturing down a cave, only to find it blocked. I must have spent a few hours exploring for the correct path before I finally realized I should have backtracked before the fall to trigger the next sequence. You get the sense the game needs a bit of a tidy up, one more look through to see what platforms and bad guys could be pulled from existence to ensure a smoother experience.
Final Score: 7/10 – Good
I’d be tempted to give Vertigo a higher score if the design was a bit tighter and I wasn’t sure that it will look a little dated very quickly. That’s not to say Zulubo Productions shouldn’t be very proud at what they’ve achieved here: a very decent stab at bringing a Half-Life-style adventure to VR. There aren’t many studios that can say they’re attempting that right now. For that reason alone, this is a game that deserves your support, but be prepared to put up with some rough spots.
You can purchase Vertigo from Steam at a price of $14.99 with official support for the HTC Vive with tracked motion controllers in either standing or room-scale configuration. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
VR has an obvious opportunity to pull users into virtual spaces modeled after fantasy or reality but there are some experiences that may not have immediately come to mind for the medium. Many of us have watched game shows from an early age and possibly even fantasized about being on one of the many shows. Remember the youth-friendly experiences like Legends of the Hidden Temple and GUTS? What about Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune as you got a bit older?
Then you’re in luck!While CoLab from Pixel Federation doesn’t quite mirror those experiences exactly, it does drop you into a game show of its own design with quite a bit of fun in store.
As a contestant on CoLab, the game show involves over 100 puzzles that center around a few mechanics you’re introduced to during “tryouts”. On the Samsung Gear VR the whole game functions without a gamepad if desired, as any puzzles can be solved with a mixture of your gaze and the side touch pad. On Rift and Vive, you’ll use your gaze and a button on your controller of choice.
With the style of puzzles presented in smaller rooms, you half expect not to have to change your perspective in the virtual space very much outside of turning in 360-degrees. Before tryouts end though, you’ll be moving around via teleportation and even using static portals (a Portal joke is made, of course) as the designers better utilize the 3D space from top to bottom.
In said space, you’ll be connecting blocks to others in order to create a flowing current, maneuvering plates in sliding puzzles so that you can direct lasers to their target, moving your head as you guide a dot through a maze on a floating sphere, and a few others. Combinations of the mechanics of these puzzles and some new ones start to pop up as you get further into the game and the final boss, without spoiling things for you, adds a layer of excitement that’s not in any other part of the game.
The game show of CoLab eschews a virtual audience, instead inspiring you to progress by way of the promise of “premium access” in the grand finale. The episodes are of a decent length, with the experience rounding out at around 4-5 hours if you don’t have any significant trouble with some of the puzzles. Once you reach the end of the episodes that are presented to you, there are a few secret levels to work through before the final chapter. Even after that, there’s a puzzle segment to conclude the story that involves a very annoying task that ends on a very hit or miss joke.
In game shows the contestants switch with every episode and very rarely leave an impression, so the show’s host has to be a charismatic character that carries the event. Initially, the CoLab host’s enthusiasm is off putting. The floating robot gives off an air of disinterest while maintaining an energetic speech pattern, which I initially felt would limit the immersive trip into this virtual experience. Soon, though, it’s understood that the robot’s manner is purposeful as it ushers you through the experiences with a mixture of clever and not so clever quips much like Portal’s GLaDOS and that’s not a bad character to aspire to emulate. It even clicks into place in a more firm way in the closing moments.
Final Score:7/10 – Good
CoLab, as a package, is a lot of fun. Instead of innovating a great deal, it presents a well made package influenced by well known puzzlers, utilizes the 3D space well, and closes out in an interesting way. There’s not much replay value to be found, considering the structure of the game has you retreading the same mechanics multiple times, but it’s worth a purchase for fans of the genre.
Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score. You can purchase CoLab on the Oculus store for Gear VR at the price of $1.99 or on Steam for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive at the price of $4.99.
I have to admit when I saw Twilight Pioneers for the first time I was more than a little skeptical. A free, first-person action RPG that used Daydream’s laser point controller as a sword didn’t sound like it would be very successful. Normally, this might be the kind of game we skip over.
It was a pleasant surprise, then, to be proved wrong by this fun, if far from revolutionary, taster.
Twilight Pioneers, seemingly an extension of PC MORPG, Twilight Spirits, is developed by Hong Kong-based NetEase Games. It’s their first Daydream app, though they’ve got plenty of similar-looking games out on Android. It throws you into a grim world, overrun by the imaginatively-named Dark Lord, where you’ll team up with another warrior to fight monsters and overthrow your enemy. It’s not the most original plot, but we’re more interested in the mechanics than the story.
As with any Daydream app, the action hinges entirely on the Daydream remote, which has had trouble implementing with traditional genres in the past. Here, you press down on the track pad to walk, double tapping to execute a quick dash. There’s no way to turn other than doing so yourself, so make sure you’re either standing up or sitting on a swivel chair when playing.
In the opening few minutes you’ll gain access to four weapons, including a standard sword you can throw, a ‘Skyward Sword’ that fires daggers (no one tell Nintendo), a scythe-like weapon for quick slashing, and a dragon spirit you can guide around environments.
If you were to compare it to the two motion-controlled Zelda games — a staple series in the action RPG genre — Twilight Pioneers is fittingly more Twilight Princess than it is Skyward Sword, (seriously, don’t tell Nintendo). Your weapons initiate special attacks with quick flicks of the wrist, though slower swipes for standard attacks also work. There’s not much finesse to it; the few enemies I faced never blocked my random swings, but the controls were responsive and fun to use. The dragon attack in particular is a joy, ripping apart enemies as you tilt the remote to lead it around the room.
Most of the free content involves a boss fight with a giant elephant monster that hurls boulders at you while you switch between weapons, using different attacks to bring it down quickly. Navigating with the touchpad is bound to upset those without their VR legs, but I found darting about a large arena to dodge attacks and steadily chipping away at the creature’s health to be a simple but appreciated thrill. I could blast boulders out of mid-air with my Skyward Sword, and then steer my dragon into the belly of the beast to inflict a lot of damage.
If the game is to be anything more than an amusing distraction, then it will need to add some challenge to the mix. Each of the weapons have cool down timers for their special attacks, and this seems like it could be key to establishing a satisfactory flow of combat. As it is, I simply used each attack as they became available, but if later levels could implement enemies that only respond to a certain type of weapon, NetEase could have a combat system that nicely lays on the pressure for some memorable fighting.
What’s on offer here is just a small slice, and it doesn’t even begin to compare to similar experiences appearing on Rift and Vive, but it does suggest this genre could really work on Daydream. Twilight Pioneers is aiming to release another four episodes, each costing $0.99, with the following installment due next month. If it can add a little complexity to the solid systems its established in this promising start, then it could end up being one of Daydream’s better titles.
The demo for Twilight Pioneers is available now for free on Daydream.
The phoenix is a symbol we can all easily recognize. It signifies rising again and being born from the ashes of what came before. It’s about making something great from a fresh start. It’s fitting, then, that the first game from UK-based Penny Black Studios, formed by game industry veterans, be about riding on the back of one of these fabled creatures.
It also helps that How We Soar is a pretty wonderful experience.
In this PlayStation VR exclusive, released weeks back though seemingly flying under the radar for many, you follow the story of an author that’s suffering from an existential strand of writer’s block. He’s struggling to come to terms with what makes a good story, while also building his own narrative around him as he raises a family. You’ll see both sides to his life by gliding through beautiful paper craft levels that evolve as you collect orbs to open up portals to new areas.
Skimming the skies on the back of this bird is a joy, showcasing VR at it’s whimsical best. Your companion is a brilliant blend of orange and blue, and his fluffy feathers are just asking for you to lean in and pet him, something I caught myself thinking about doing several times. If you’ve played The Last Guardian and wanted to comfort Trico in VR in the past few weeks, How We Soar is as close as you’ll currently get.
Equal praise must go to the game’s levels, which you can paint by sweeping in close to the paper islands that depict both the worlds the author creates and his life outside of those books. As you gather orbs these sheets will bend and fold to make new scenes and objects that are often there to be marveled at. Flying through the belly of a paper dragon and bringing life to his scales, or squeezing inside of an asteroid orbiting a small planet are wonder-filled experiences. I often want VR to move past these early fantastical tones that focus on style over substance, but How We Soar’s presentation truly enraptured me and gave me memories.
What it doesn’t have is the kind of mechanical complexity and gameplay loop that many will be looking for. This is a peaceful experience, and each of the 10 to 20-minute levels only ever ask you to fly through rings, gather a certain amount of orbs, and then chase and catch a paper bird that spawns when you pick up all of one type of collectible.
Controls are deliberately sluggish, which can be a source of frustration when you’re hunting levels for the last orb. You can boost by thrusting the DualShock 4 forward, but it’s only slight and you occasionally wish for a more dependable option. One nice touch is seeing the pad within the game world, also made out of paper and attached to the reigns of your companion. It almost made me wish for entirely tilt-based gamepad controls, though ancient experiments like PS3’s Lair are a good reminder of why sticks are more dependable. Since you’re riding the bird and not embodying it, tilting your head like in Eagle Flight wouldn’t have made very much sense.
The hook here is the atmosphere, not the gameplay, but I appreciate that not everyone will be looking for that type of experience. For me, though, it made How We Soar one of the more memorable games seen on PS VR to date. It’s design understands the current limitations of VR — especially PS VR — but proves that developers don’t need to make compromises to create fulfilling content.
Final Score: 8/10 – Great
How We Soar is one of PS VR’s most uplifting experiences, and won’t soon be forgotten by those that enjoy something more in line with the pace of a walking simulator, as opposed to the action-packed intensity of EVE: Valkyrie or Driveclub VR. It’s a breezy ride that will leave you missing the wind rushing through your hair. If it’s flown under your radar thus far, make sure to right that wrong soon.
Dating Lessons is an interactive dating course created by VR developers Cerevrum Inc. and self-styled seduction coach Manish “Magic” Leone. Supposedly tailored for heterosexual men with low self-esteem or shyness with the opposite sex, the dating course offers 11 lessons and 7 practical interactive sessions that promise to “give men tools to enhance their power of attraction and develop behavior patterns to handle stress and anxiety.”
‘Dating Lessons’ Details:
Official Site
Developer:Cerevrum Inc. Publisher: Cerevrum Inc Available On: Gear VR, Oculus Rift, Steam (Rift and Vive), Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, Gear VR Release Date: December 17th, 2016
Before diving into the review, I should first start off with an advisory message: I don’t need dating lessons because I’ve been in a stable relationship with my partner for the better part of a decade, so I’m simply not in a position to put seduction extraordinaire Magic Leone’s pick-up artist (PUA) theories and practices to the test. What I am able to do however is show you exactly what sort of content you can expect from Dating Lessons, which hopefully will help you determine if its right for you. As in all reviews, the thoughts that follow are my own.
Secondly, before the review begins, how do you introduce someone who calls themselves Magic? Straight out of the gate, Magic. Anyway, here’s what he has to say about himself on The Gotham Dating Club blog, one of the regular outlets for his articles such as ‘My Power Pose to Show Her You’re a Superior Man’ and ‘How To Project Dominant Body Language The “Right” Way’:
Manish “Magic” Leone
Magic Leone is an unusual dating coach. He came to the U.S. from India after his failed attempt at suicide when he discovered that his fiancé of 7 years was cheating on him.
Magic studied the deep emotional and physical needs that fuel women’s sexual desires while counseling them on sexual health. Working with women, Magic developed an understanding of how most women want to be seduced. This knowledge led him to sexual encounters with more than 400 women, and ultimately to marry the woman of his dreams.
Magic is known to be a tough coach who runs military-style workshops that force men to evolve overnight, but you may not know that he is actually a softy who craves chocolate 5 times a day. In fact there was a time Magic’s clients brought him chocolate to workshops as part of his compensation, and sometimes even as a form of bribe to make him go easy on them. Magic is also a movie buff. In his spare time (after he is done indulging in women), he secretly works on the screenplay that is his dream project.
According to Magic’s website, with his help you can become “The #1 Choice Of Every Woman. They’ll Choose You Over All Other Men Resulting In Ultimate Power To Have Sex With Any Woman You Choose!”
You can also take solace in the fact that with Magic’s guidance you’ll finally say goodbye to “Feeling Like A Desperate Loser Who Fears Rejection And Does Not Know What To Say To Women. Good Looking Women Will Chase You And Do All The Work – Even Your Female Friends Will Compete To Get In Bed with You!”
Furthermore, Magic promises that anyone can “Attain High Status Among Men And Every Man Would Want To Be Friends With You Hoping To Get A Little Piece of The Action By Getting In Your Good Books!”
That may be illustrative enough for you to understand what sort of person is behind Cerevrum’s Dating Lessons. Now for the proper review.
Gameplay
Dating Lessons is an app that combines 360 video with interactive elements. Video quality is actually quite good. In fact, I wasn’t even aware that I didn’t have positional tracking for the first lesson or two because of how well interactive elements and 2D video was interlaced. Saint Petersburg-based VR studio Cerevrum has also produced a number of educational VR games including Speech Center VR, House of Meditation, and eponymous brain training game Cerevrum, all of which are available on Gear VR.
Lesson topics run the gamut from subjects such as What Triggers Attraction,Eye Contact, Energy, Self Deprecating Humor and also more sexually-charged themes like Body Language, and Touching. Despite this, everything is pretty much PG-13 in Dating Lessons.
In the first lesson What Triggers Attraction, Magic tells us he’s going to teach us the building blocks of getting the girl:
“How do you approach her? What are those kind of things you can say that makes her want to stop and continue the conversation with you? What is it you need to tell her during the interaction so she continues not only to enjoy your interaction, but also feels more and more interest for you, more and more desire for you? And then I’m going to teach you how to position yourself, how to walk up to her, the right tonality, the right body language, how to make eye contact, how to touch her. Basically, these building blocks will teach you every single thing you need to know that next time you see a woman you know exactly how to charm her, you know exactly how to get her so excited that she gets eager, she gets desperate to be with you.”
Then Magic has me set goals, telling me to choose an arbitrary max of 3. He reassures me that this is “even something I do with my very high-end customers when they come to my program.”
This is all well and good, but these goals that I’ve set have zero bearing on how the rest of the course goes, and offer no tailoring to my individual needs as a paying customer who just wants to simultaneously find out how to date multiple women, attract one special woman and get my ex girlfriend back. (I wonder why she left me in the first place?)
Going through all the lessons and interactive interludes takes about 2 hours. Most lessons start out with some common sense tactics that more or less culminate in a generally understood dating maxim: Thou shalt not be an unpleasant weirdo. That includes staring for too long, not smiling enough, talking too quietly, hitting on her while she’s clearly doing something else, initiating an uncomfortable, albeit entirely innocent touch; basically not having a clear grasp on basic social interaction cues.
But then each lesson takes a brief turn for the frighteningly manipulative, leaving me with some serious questions.
Why do I have to drop fake hints that I’m actually constantly talking to models, and “it’s refreshing to finally meet a girl that is so down to earth”? Why do all of my questions directed toward a woman necessarily have to be self-referential and long-winded? Why do I have to pretend I’m so much more important than I really am? I can’t help but think that these tactics aren’t really about breaking the ice, but actually reveal Magic’s true intent of teaching the user to build a quick report based on artifice and deception. He never tells you the advice “talk about your hobby and maybe you’ll find out she likes it too.” It’s always based on a meticulous extraction of data about her that you’re then supposed to leverage so you can build immediate trust.
Here’s a quick bit on how Magic uses self-deprecating humor to his ultimate advantage.
In the interlaced on-location shots, I found Magic at points somewhat unrehearsed, and even at times a bit incoherent, almost as if he was making up his points on the fly. Outdoor scenes sometimes suffer from bad audio due to the constant wind blowing into his lapel mic.
The virtual visual aides presented during the video were helpful in illustrating some of Magic’s more concise points however, and were well used throughout the entire 11 lesson course to good effect.
The 7 interactive modules were at times painfully ineffective, and left me questioning if there was any point at all to the exercise. In a few trials, you’re asked to talk to a prospective woman with the goal of introducing yourself, chatting her up, etc. The problem is the resultant grades given have no basis in reality. As far as I could tell, the only thing measured was the volume of my voice, which I verified by repeating the phrase “turd-flavored soup” in a constantly descending volume. Jessica, my new female prospect from California with a heavy Russian accent, was pleased to meet me even though I kept whispering “hamburger hamburger hamburger.” Who knows, maybe she just likes hamburgers.
Hamburger-fan Jessica
I wasn’t expecting to have a realistic conversation with an advanced AI, but I’m not sure how Dating Lessons wants me to practice having a conversation with a cardboard cut-out of a woman either.
Immersion & Comfort
There’s only a single environment in the app, a beach-side bungalow filled with projection screens that Magic pops in and out of for his on-location lessons. There’s not much of reason why this couldn’t be executed on traditional monitors, and I fail to see how virtual reality makes this content any more compelling.
Another annoying bit is the omnipresent gaze reticle. Despite the fact that you only need it for cursory selections and some minor button pushing, it quickly becomes a big distraction personally and I wish it would disappear so I could focus better on the content.
Since the Dating Lessons is entirely based on 360 videos and no positional tracking is afforded to the user regardless of you choice of headset, the same caveats apply as with all non-positionally tracked experiences, i.e. extended use can be mildly uncomfortable and make you feel removed from reality.
Pretty much how I felt through the entirety of Magic’s PUA dating course.
