Lately it feels like there’s been a new trailer from Insomniac’s Stormland every other week.
Not that we’re complaining, of course. The Oculus Rift exclusive is one of our most anticipated titles on the horizon right now. And there is something genuinely new to talk about in the latest footage; specifically the co-op support.
Specifically, the footage covers the different gameplay options players can utilize. Stormland is essentially a first-person shooter (FPS), but you can use stealth or long-range weapons to avoid heavy confrontations. Or you can armor up and go in guns-blazing. But Stormland also supports two-player co-op, so you could mix and match these styles should you so choose.
Over on the Oculus Blog, Insomniac explained that co-op players will face more enemies to increase the challenge.
“Although players will need to share weapons and ammo, all other resources are automatically shared when playing co-op, so there’s no squabbling about who gets the stuff that contributes to progression,” Lead Designer Mike Daly said. “Everything else about the game is consistent between single-player and co-op. You get to keep your resource and story progress while playing co-op.”
The game continues to look incredibly polished. We’re just excited to stop talking about it and start playing it, though we still don’t know when we’ll be able to do that.
For now, we know the game is coming this holiday season. It’s looking very likely that this will be Insomniac’s last Oculus-exclusive. Last week we reported that Sony had purchased the developer. Outside of VR, Insomniac made Marvel’s Spider-Man and Ratchet and Clank for PS4, so it makes sense. Hopefully we’ll still see the team working on PSVR games, then.
For now, Stormland will be on display at PAX West this weekend. If you get a chance to play it, let us know what you think!
We’ve all thought it; VR must be great for horror games, right?
And it’s true; Resident Evil 7 and The Exorcist VR are some of the most compelling, immersive experiences you can have in a headset. But I’d argue that, recently, another genre has sneaked out of the shadows to threaten the VR gaming crown. Stealth could soon be the new king of immersive play.
Two Gamescom demos really hammered home that point. The first was, of course, Espire 1: VR Operative, Digital Lode’s hugely promising ode to Metal Gear Solid. The other is Phantom: Covert Ops, nDreams’ lovably ridiculous mix of sneaking and water sports.
Espire is a giddy experience and deeply nostalgic for any fans of Metal Gear Solid 2. In fact, everything from reloading your non-lethal sidearm to shouting ‘Freeze’ when holding up unsuspecting enemies is directly lifted out of Hideo Kojima’s stealth sandbox. If it were any less of a game you might consider that a slight, but rediscovering these ideas in VR is something of a revelation.
Digital Lode’s ambitious foundation is that, if a player can think it, they should be able to do it too. Knocking a guard’s head with the butt of a pistol sends them straight to sleep, walls can be scaled and any dropped weapon can be picked up and fired. It’s the closest I’ve seen a VR stealth game get to the idea of dropping the player’s physical body in the world and having it drive every element of the game’s mechanics.
Phantom is essentially the same game just…on water. Sneaking into enemy bases and sabotaging machinery all from the comfort of a kayak requires a bit of suspension of disbelief. That’s ironic given the consideration put into making the game’s movement as believable as possible. Paddling through streams feels entirely natural, from alternating strokes to pushing yourself away from walls with one end of an oar. It’s perhaps more streamlined than Espire, with stripped back options and encounters, but what it loses in player freedom, it more than makes up for in immersion.
There’s two sides to the coin, though. When you’re in control, VR stealth makes you feel like a kid sneaking into a backyard to steal your ball back. It’s alive and electric in a way most other games can only hope to capture. But when you’re caught, things can crumble away a bit.
I noticed the AI in both of my demos felt a little rusty. In Espire, when a guard caught me peaking out from behind a corner, a crew of goons sprinted to the same spot only to stand around aimlessly before running off with little coordination. For a game that otherwise emulates Metal Gear with uncanny precision, it was disappointing to see the veil lift in that moment. Phantom’s baddies, meanwhile, acted like headless chickens once I hid under a walkway.
This is a complex problem, one that both nDreams and Digital Lode told me they were working on. Realistically, I’m not expecting huge improvements between now and launch; there’s only so much you can ask of modestly-sized teams like these, especially Digital Lode (which, in many respects, they’re exceeding those expectations). The truth of it might be that we don’t see that final puzzle piece fall into place until Ubisoft lends its slick production skills to the rumored Splinter Cell VR. But, again, these are games that are about not being seen and, when all that’s expected of an enemy is to stick to their patrol routes, everything runs like clockwork.
And for now, clockwork will do just fine. Espire 1 and Phantom are both coming later this year and I can’t wait to properly sink my teeth into them.
Upon first glance, it’s tough to tell Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency — just revealed at our E3 VR Showcase — apart from its predecessor. In its pre-alpha state, it looks visually identical to the original, save for a few small tweaks. Its idle-brained robotic workers still spout adorably innocent lines and imposing enemy guards continue to flail their arms in desperation when you toss a knife into their back. A few minutes into my demo I’m starting to wonder what’s actually new here. Then it hits me; it’s what I’m not seeing that’s most important.
Namely, I don’t see a bunch of robots awkwardly colliding with each other, or tripping up on objects and accidentally killing themselves. I don’t notice objects accidentally flying out of my hands when I teleport, or collision issues that exile important items to unreachable realms. Anyone that played Neat Corporation’s original VR hit around release would have likely encountered these often game-breaking issues numerous times. By taking those learnings, the updates it made to the original and strengthening the team via a partnership with Fast Travel Games, though, Budget Cuts 2 could well make good on the promise first teased in that 2016 demo.
So what am I playing? Put simply, the game I felt like I should have been enjoying a year ago. In the hour I’ve played, I’ve found a game free of the frustrations of the first, one that finally let me embrace the joys of the mechanics Neat has been working on for so very long. I sheepishly hopped along an urban skyline, methodically picking teleport spots and combusting in frantic panic at the slightest threat of being discovered. At one point I traded projectiles with one enemy guard as I squirmed around on my knees behind a ventilation shaft for cover. In another I cruelly dangled a knife above one robot’s patrol route, letting it slip through my fingers as they passed underneath.
Budget Cuts 2 promises freedom with none of the fuss. Cautious players will be able to sneak their way up to vantage points where they can pick off targets with well-placed attacks. But, crucially, you pay for your mistakes; misplaced shots might alert guards to your location, and one wrong teleport can take you out of the frying pan and straight into the fire. These are the strategies and stumbles that held so much promise in the first game, brought crumbling down when you could simply trick guards into falling onto a lone pair of scissors.
With those hurdles out of the way, Budget Cuts 2 feels more like the self-reliant stealth game I’d been hoping for. It’s a game where skill and failure are part of the package. There’s no cheap path to victory; if you find yourself in a tight spot you can’t just shoot your way out of it. You’ll need quick reactions and sturdy aim to survive, but there’s such hilarious panic to the bullet-ridden tango of combat you can’t help but scream and laugh in tandem.
That’s not to say this surprise sequel is without its new tricks, though. The original Budget Cut’s abrupt ending hinted at a sequel that might be more aggressive and this seems to follow through on that theme. Perhaps unsurprisingly given Fast Travel’s inclusion, you can now swap risky knife throwing for much more dependable archery combat. It’s a sensible inclusion given just how erratic throwing could work in the first game, but it’s not a bail-out, either. You try knocking an arrow (or any other item, for them matter) whilst also dodging a swarm of bullets. Let me know how it goes.
Environmental variety is another big focus this time around. Though my demo does have its fair share of office cubicles, the rooftop sneaking also gives everything a touch of vertically and greater player freedom. How you get from A to B if often up to you; after dying in one section I got back to where I fell using an entirely different path. It can be dizzying and intimidating, though, and it could use a few directional pointers from time-to-time. You’ve probably also seen the train-set level featured in our E3 VR Showcase, which promises to introduce bring some new dynamics to the game.
A lot to look forward to, then. With the foundation laid, I can’t wait to see what sticky situations Budget Cuts 2 puts me in. Most of all, though, I feel relieved. There was a great game buried under the original Budget Cuts’ wealth of technical issues, good enough that it still found an audience. In Budget Cuts 2, though, Neat has a shot at redemption. With Fast Travel’s bow in-hand, I’m confident it won’t miss this time.
Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency is due for release later this year.
There were plenty of chances for Intruders to mess up. It could have been in the heavy focus on stealth, a genre that’s difficult to balance especially in VR. It could have succumbed to the repetition of retracing your steps over one tiny environment across a whole game. But indie team Tessera Studios handles these elements with measured caution. Intruders is a game that knows its boundaries and, whilst far from groundbreaking, it’s all the better for it.
This is a surprisingly effective little home invasion game. Three brutish baddies storm the halls of your house in search of you as you try to rescue your captive parents and hidden sister. It’s a more morbid take on Home Alone; Joe Pesci is swapped out for a lanky leader that adorns a deer skull and he’s backed up by a hulking mass of muscles and a thugish hacker. The darkened corridors and continuous clash of lightning establish a palpable creepiness if never venturing too far into true terror. It’s a game of cat and mouse with all the heart skips and near misses that come with it.
Intruders thrives on its simplicity and manageability. Sneaking sticks to the basics; take cover behind furniture, crouch to reduce noise and hide in cupboards when things get tight. The trio of enemies patrol the house on interchanging routes that are pretty simple to learn and avoid.
While never especially challenging, stealth does have some nice touches. Intruders is a game about playing on your home turf; it expects you to learn the lay of the land and put it to your advantage. The house is small enough to memorize quickly and get around efficiently. If you get spotted, enemies will give chase. Dread starts to flood your brain as you desperately scramble to get away (an often futile effort). It’s deliciously hopeless.
Most notably, though, it’s refreshing not to be bogged down by a set of unknown parameters and technicalities that can make the stealth genre so frustrating. Intruders is a clean-cut affair that will rarely leave you feeling poorly treated. Its two-hour run time makes it a perfectly innocent bit of snackable sneaking that avoids potential pitfalls.
Well, for the most part at least. Crouch-walking is an unwieldy process, sometimes attracting attention from the other side of the room but later letting you crawl past an enemy’s legs undetected. Intruders’ yard posts for success seem to shift by the scene, which can make it an inconsistent experience. In one objective in which I had to follow one specific kidnapper, the other two seemed to completely disappear from the house. It was a good time to go and snag the game’s scattered collectibles, at least.
It mainly stumbles where its ambitions grow beyond its capabilities. Tessera takes a decent stab at telling a good story. There are twists and turns but it’s all betrayed by woefully stilted dialogue. The pacey plot beats move everything along with welcome urgency, but it’s a little tough to take any of it seriously.
Final Score: 6.5/10 – Decent
Intruders is a welcome case of less is more. It’s an engaging little short that largely keeps its ambitions in check with enjoyable if unremarkable sneaking. You likely won’t remember much about Intruders a week or two past playing it, but it keeps you hooked while it lasts. For a home invasion game, it’s perhaps just a little too safe.
Intruders: Hide And Seek is available now on PSVR.Check out these official review guidelines to find out more about our process.
We’ve already written about one promising new PSVR game coming from PlayStation Talents today. Now it’s time for another, and Intruders: Hide and Seek looks like a treat.
In this first-person stealth game you play as a young boy. One night three people break into your house and take your parents captive. You need to survive the night by sneaking around the house and avoiding detection. A cinematic trailer for the game debuted today but there’s also an older gameplay trailer we’ve found below.
There’s no combat, meaning you’ll have to rely entirely on stealth. You’ll weave between the rooms of the house, checking for lumbering kidnappers. At one point in the gameplay you even find your family bruised, beaten and gagged in one room. Cheery!
It looks like a gritty take on Home Alone, which isn’t something we knew we wanted for VR. We’re also reminded of Krillbite’s Among the Sleep, a horror game that casts you as an infant.
PlayStation Talents is a Spanish initiative helping out young student developers. Intruders won Best Game for the Press Award, and the Best Game of the Year Award all the way back in 2016 and have continued development since. As we wrote earlier today, PlayStation Talents is also bringing Anyone’s Diary and Echoes VR to PSVR.
As for release, the game’s set to launch on February 13th. Developer Tessera Studios says it will have around four hours of gameplay on offer and it looks like PSVR support is optional. It’s being published by Daedelic Entertainment.
Console developers realised a long time ago the potential in making videogames based on ninjas. Whether the gameplay tended to be more action-based or veered towards stealth, they all had overlapping details which made them enjoyable, Katana’s, shurikens, superhuman-like agility and the fact that they looked badass in their black outfits. It’s a recipe that’s perfect for virtual reality (VR), but only a few developers have tried. The latest comes from Amber Eye Studio in the form of Shadow Uprising, a title that very much embraces stealth at all times.
Unlike a normal first-person shooter (FPS), a VR experience based around being a deadly martial artist who can flit about rooftops like a monkey needs to have movement down to a fine art. Simply having smooth locomotion to wander around levels and take down enemies isn’t enough. Thankfully, this is one of Shadow Uprising’s stronger elements, where you can start exploring levels for the best routes quite intuitively.
Both hands have grappling hooks, so no matter whether you’re left or right handed the system just works, with the added bonus that you can grab onto any vertical wall to climb up if needed – this also means you can scout areas from on high like Spider-Man which is cool. Slightly disappointing is the normal floor movement which is locked to either where you look or where the controllers are pointing. The former definitely felt the better of the two, but there were points when it seemed constrained, not quite as dextrose as it should be.
As mentioned this is definitely a stealth title through and through. Attacking enemies head-on is just foolish as they become harder to kill and dish out significant damage. You need to perfectly use Shadow Uprising’s assortment of armaments, finding a loadout that suits your gameplay style. The basic loadout is a couple of katana’s, a bow and shuriken. It’s only through searching out each level’s secrets that your weapon selection diversifies, which helps to extend a playthrough for completionists.
The Katana’s are great for killing enemies in one stealthy blow, while equipment such as the bow is better for distracting opponents. There may only be eight weapons but it’s enough to offer a decent variety of strategies when deciding whether to engage or sneak past.
When it comes to the level design, Amber Eye Studio has tried to offer a decent amount of variety over the nine stages. They tend to be fairly linear in their layout, with the occasional door and tunnel offering a slight detour around particular groups of enemies. The cel-shading style works well enough but if the team were going for dark and broody, they, in fact, ended up with bland and gloomy.
That same blandness can be found in the enemies. Yes, they are all robots – so it’s a bit unusual as to why they need to gather around a burning oil drum – but the variety in their actions is minimal, to say the least. Point A to B walking for the most part unless of course, they see you. If it’s just one then that’s not too much bother, if a group spots you hightailing it out of there is best, as death is quick and will return you back to the checkpoint.
As a stealth experience for VR Shadow Uprising is a welcome addition to the fold. It’s a title with some decent entertainment value and should have a good few hours of gameplay if you enjoy properly sneaking around. That being said, Shadow Uprising doesn’t feature any wow factor to make it a must-have experience, just middle of the road.
I’ve wanted a great stealth game in VR ever since consumer-grade headsets started hitting the market. When you’re wearing a headset you at first have a tendency to either sit or stand in one place without moving too much. But then you take a step, and you lean around, and you reach out with motion controllers. Then when a game asks you to crouch down or get on the ground the immersion is ramped up to whole new levels. That’s precisely where games like Espire 1: VR Operative seek to provide their thrills.
So far Espire 1 (by a team of devs that’s just referring to themselves as Espire right now as far as we can tell) is billing itself as “Metal Gear Solid meets Goldeneye 007 in an immersive VR world” and from what we’ve seen that seems about right. They’ve been doing a good job of releasing new dev diary updates and the latest entry (embedded below) is the first time we’ve really seen the locomotion system explained in detail.
In practice it works kind of like a combination of Eagle Flight and Onward. You move around by pressing on the Vive wand’s trackpad or the Oculus Touch control stick to guide your movement just like in any first-person shooter. However, as you accelerate your field of vision starts to narrow into a box to cut down on sickness. In the periphery you can still see through the design that appears to digitize your surroundings.
Gameplay otherwise works a lot like Onward with you handling weapons realistically, moving and ducking and hiding behind objects, and even using spy tools like cameras to peek around corners. We’re eagerly anticipating the chance to get our hands on the game and seeing how it plays. What do you think of what you’ve seen of Espire 1: VR Operative so far? Let us know down in the comments below!
I’ve always wanted to be a hacker. No, not a boring, real life hacker that has to spend hours writing competent code and squashing bugs. I want to be the kind of hacker that types fast and breaks the firewall all while wearing sunglasses and a black leather jacket. Fortunately for me, that’s the exact kind of hacker you get to play as in the newly revealed Gear VR stealth, action video game from Force Field Studios: Term1nal.
Force Field VR’s first foray into the VR scene, Landfall, has already been launched and received well by critics and fans alike. That game was a twin stick shooter that focused on strategic gunplay and quick reflexes. Term1nal for Gear VR, however, is more of a thinking man’s game.
In Term1nal, you play as Flynn Lightman, hacker extraordinaire. You are contracted by a mysterious woman to infiltrate the offices of STRIDE Industries — the world’s most successful (and well guarded) data security and robotics firm on the planet. Getting the information you need from STRIDE can only be done by taking over the controls of a temperamentally experimental new robot model. Operating her remotely, you’re able to use this robot to sneak past STRIDE security, hack terminals, unlock doors and maybe even unlock something even more important: the truth.
I had the chance to play Term1nal in its first ever public demo at GDC 2017. The games designer’s emphasized that the game was still quite early in development, but from what I saw its already shaping up to be one of the most polished and enjoyable campaigns available on a mobile VR platform.
You play Term1nal on the Gear VR using a bluetooth gamepad. Once you’ve assumed control of your new robot host, you play the game from a variety of changing perspectives. The in game reason for this is that the optics of your vessel are malfunctioning so instead you have to observe her through the office’s CCTV cameras. Walking from room to room triggers new camera angles but, for the most part they will all be from a birds eye view. Certain actions will also trigger a first person viewing mode as well.
Your main obstacles in Term1nal are STRIDE’s seemingly never ending army of robot patrols. There were at least four or five different types of guards that I saw in just my demo alone. Each of them has a limited view, represented by a red cone that you’ll need to avoid in order to make it to the next objective unscathed. Your robot doesn’t have any weapons, however, so you’ll need to use smart strategies and your enviornment to bypass the security.
Towards the end of the demo I also found the “key” I had been searching for. This key was actually an adorably eager robot dog that, once I introduced myself, became bonded to me and would follow my every command. I could use my new, synthetic K9 friend to distract guards, unlock previously inoperable doors and otherwise go wherever I ordered him to. He wasn’t given a name in the game but I like to call him Joe Jr. I love him.
There were also a variety of puzzle terminals that I needed to access and complete. Often times these logical brain-teasers had to be completed while keeping one eye on and avoiding the gaze of a lumbering robot guard. The few that I saw were creative and satisfyingly challenging and indicate that Term1nal should end up being an enjoyable game for the more intellectually minded VR gamer.
Term1nal is currently slated for a release sometime in Q2 of this year. No price has been set yet for the experience.
Just like Michael Wentworth-Bell, I’ve often wondered why we don’t see more VR stealth games. Poking your head around cover and quickly ducking and diving to keep out of sight seems ideally suited to headsets. The difference, however, is that Wentworth-Bell is actually doing something about that absence.
Namely, he’s creating his own stealth game, Espire 1, for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and you can see the first footage for the project below. At first glance this might look like any other shooter on its way to VR headsets, but Espire’s focus on keeping out of sight and avoiding confrontation makes it quite different from other games.
Wentworth-Bell wants to make this an immersive experience by gamifying the limitations of VR, in a sense. You play as the pilot of a drone operator, designed to take on military sneaking missions. While you’ll see through the eyes of a drone, your character is actually standing on a virtual holodeck, which mimics your tracking space in the real world. The idea behind this sort of VR within VR is to legitimize the compromises developers have to make right now; the field of view shrinks when you move with the trackpad/Touch sticks, but instead of darkness you’ll see the holodeck room around you.
The video shows several neat ideas for stealth games, many of which are logical evolutions of mechanics from other titles like Splinter Cell and, of course, Metal Gear Solid. You can use a camera to peak around doors, for example, but you’ll actually have the device in your hand to freely move it. There’s also a tranquilizer gun that has to be manually readied after every shot, which seems like a nod to a similar weapon that was introduced in Metal Gear Solid 2.
Wentworth-Bell explained to UploadVR that he’s still working on core systems like the game’s AI, but is aiming to produce something similar to current game mechanics. That means enemies might not immediately spot you if you poke out from behind cover at a distance, and physically crouching might reduce visibility.
You’ll even have to think about the speed of your psychical movement; collide with a wall too quickly and someone might hear. It’s bringing your body into VR in ways you might not previously have thought of.
“When first alerted (sight or sound), the AI will investigate the location,” the developer explained. “If a player stands 30 metres away from a guard, the guard will walk towards the player and if the player did not move out of sight, the guard will then begin combat, alerting nearby guards. Currently the guards will engage the player until they loose sight for 10 seconds straight. They will then search for the player before returning to their patrol.”
Currently, Wentworth-Bell is looking for funding and partnership to help develop the game, and he plans to release not only a version for Steam but an arcade experience that could be used for location-based VR.
One of our favorite Early Access SteamVR titles is getting a whole lot better today just in time for the holidays. The latest Zero Dark update for Island 359 [Early Access Review: 8/10] will add full trackpad locomotion, a new arcade mode, the legendary T-Rex dinosaur, a new progression system, and a massive all around overhaul.
Ever since Cloudgate Studio’s debut VR title released earlier this year, it’s started a trend of large, game-changing updates. Instead of just adding a weapon here and an enemy there, each update has fundamentally altered the way the game can be played. Most recently with the Second Blood update, they added the much-feared triceratops, a stealth-based hunting game mode, and the ability to use a powerful bow instead of just guns.
The Zero Dark update is adding even more to this dino-hunter’s paradise. The biggest addition is undoubtedly the inclusion of optional trackpad locomotion, meaning you no longer have to use the sprint-based teleportation feature for movement. After that, there’s also a new Arcade Mode which plays out like a relatively standard wave shooter, or horde mode style affair. There are three different general locations (Jungle, Beach, and Valley) with 5 different areas per location, adding up to a lot more content than just the single map and endless waves you might find in other wave shooters.
“As you progress through Arcade Mode, you’ll earn credits and level up to allowing you to spend your earned credits on player or weapon upgrades,” Cloudgate President and Co-Founder Steve Bowler explained in an email. “We will be making these carry over to Mercenary Modes in the near future, but we need to blow out the profile system a bit more before we can do that. The plan is that playing Arcade Mode will allow you to spend your XP on some actual inventory items as well that you can take with you to improve the Mercenary Mode missions, allowing you to achieve higher scores. You can level up your gun damage, reload speeds, bow distance, health (there’s even a small health regen), etc.”
You also probably noticed in the images here that they’ve added a T-Rex finally as well. Bowler explained that it’s still a work-in-progress (like everything in this game so far, it is in Early Access after all), but the beast is already included as a boss in the Valley map’s Arcade Mode currently. A Mercenary Mode mission featuring the T-Rex should be coming as soon, which “will be your premium Rex experience” according to Bowler. That’s expected early next year.
In addition to a handful of other updates and tweaks throughout, this is shaping up to be another major update for what’s already a beefy game. You can purchase Island 359on Steam for $19.99 with the current Steam Winter Sale bringing that down to $14.99.