Today sees the launch of Steam’s annual Game Festival where you can watch developer livestreams, chat with teams about their upcoming titles and, of course, play loads of free demos, over 500 in fact. And just like Steam’s summer 2020 edition of the event, there will be plenty of virtual reality (VR) videogames to sample.
Previously offering over 30 titles to try out, the 2021 edition doesn’t disappoint with 20+ VR videogames available. Some of these are entirely new which VRFocus hasn’t come across before whilst others like Monad Rock’s Blunt Force – which was first revealed four years ago – makes another return.
Those which have caught VRFocus’ eye include Battle Blocks, a competitive puzzle solver; asymmetric party title Operation Armstrong, and Desolatium, a Lovecraftian-style thriller.
As the majority of these are indie videogames the festival offers a great chance to see how small teams are leveraging VR in new and interesting ways.
The Steam Game Festival 2021 runs until Tuesday, 9th February at 10 am PST, so that should be enough time to play all those demos. For further updates on the latest PC VR releases, keep reading VRFocus.
In Blunt Force (developed by Monad Rock) you’ll play through two parallel storylines that primarily take place before and during World War II, before converging at the end. The storyline before the war sounds like it will be more of a detective mystery plot while the mid-WWII story is more of a traditional shooter with arcade and challenge modes. They’re both featuring the same character and happen nearly back-to-back.
Visually, it looks pretty good. The initial reveal a few years ago looked fantastic and it certainly appears sharper in the screenshots on the Steam page than it does in the actual headset. I played the demo on an Oculus Rift S and it looked fine, but certainly not as cutting edge as it seemed to be nearly four years ago.
The story is told in a really interesting way that involves jumping back and forth in time. For example, in the gameplay video above, you’ll see me at a pub pre-war in 1939 and then suddenly the memory fragments and puts me at the same location, in ruins, after the war starts. It’s a clever mechanic that conveys a good sense of how locations can trigger memories.
I didn’t dig through the options very much, I played with the default settings, which is just teleportation based. When you’re behind cover you can grab things like walls and tables to pull yourself up and down and to the side to go in and out of cover, or just physically move yourself.
Gameplay felt pretty clunky, but the studio has stated online this demo is outdated. It was very difficult to place the submachine gun on my back and have it stay there and my left hand had a lot of trouble getting recognized when I tried to grip the front of the gun. Shooting felt fine, although lacking in weight and impact a bit.
Voice acting is above average for indie VR games, but the animations and performances aren’t quite smooth enough to really fool you into getting engrossed in any sort of wartime drama. At its heart, Blunt Force is still just a relatively simplistic cover-based shooter with a narrative over the top and a bit of puzzle solving sprinkled throughout. Although — the developers actually making the effort to create something with a unique premise, actual voice acting, and a storyline rather than just a wave shooter or lifeless multiplayer game, is worth looking forward to.
Although it may have been several years since we heard much about Blunt Force, but that hasn’t quelled our excitement to see how the project turns out. We still ranked it on our list of top 7 VR games we’re still eagerly waiting for just a few months ago in late 2019.
Despite being the most popular video game setting in years’ past, WWII has fallen out of populartiy for game developers as of late. Other than Front Defense and Front Defense Heroes, there aren’t really many existing VR games that cover the conflict — unless you count Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond from Oculus and Respawn Entertainment. That’s still slated for this year as a Rift exclusive but it’s been complete and total silence from both companies ever since Oculus Connect last year.
Here is the 2018 teaser trailer:
Did you miss out on the UploadVR Showcase: Summer Edition? Check out every trailer, article, announcement, interview, and more from the UploadVR Showcase right here.
The Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition is now live from today until 10AM PT on June 22nd. In this digital event PC gamers from around the world can gather around their monitors to watch livestreams from developers of upcoming games, engage with creators directly in AMA sessions and message boards, and try out a laundry list of exciting demos for games before they release.
It’s like a digital E3 for the PC gaming crowd and VR has a presence this year with its own category. There are too many demos to list, even for VR, but a few of them really stand out.
Notably, we’ve got a fresh demo for Blunt Force, the WWII action epic we’ve been writing about ever since 2016; Naau: The Lost Eye, which we just featured in the UploadVR Showcase: Summer Edition earlier today; Rinlo, which looks like a gorgeous little adventure puzzle game; Ash of Legends, a single-player focused sci-fi VR shooter, Hospitality VR, a creepy and atmospheric horror game; and Hard Bullet, a cinematic slow-motion VR shooter full of action.
There are lots of other demos to check out as well in the Steam Game Festival. And if you’re interested in non-VR games then there are literally hundreds of other demos to peruse, such as the PC port for Quantic Dream’s PS3 classic, Heavy Rain, space station building sim Mars Horizon, atmospheric action-adventure game Raji: An Ancient Epic, and the newly released turn-based western strategy game, Desperados III.
Did you miss out on the UploadVR Showcase: Summer Edition? Check out every trailer, article, announcement, interview, and more from the UploadVR Showcase right here.
