Update: Disruptive Games recently announced on Twitter that Megalith will release on Steam for PC VR headsets next week on May 8th.
Original: After an initial open beta and then somewhat rocky launch on the PSVR platform, the VR MOBA and shooter hybrid Megalith is coming to PC VR via Steam.
After an open beta on PSVR later that year, the game launched exclusively for the same platform in early 2019. However, early players had some complaints about empty lobbies. This resulted in developers Disruptive Games launching a free trial that had the same features as the full game, but was restricted to only a few Titans, with the rest being locked behind the paywall of the full game. This was an attempt to get players into the game and try it out for free, while also potentially solving the empty lobby problem.
Now, a year and a bit later, Megalith is expanding onto Steam and PC VR headsets. The Steam version is ‘coming soon’ with no set release, but the Steam listing is already up. Currently, the page only lists HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows MR headsets as supported, with no mention of Valve Index support for now.
There’s no details on whether the PC VR version will follow the PSVR free trial model or whether it will simply be a full paid experience only. Likewise, there’s no word on potential crossplay with PSVR, which would definitely help with lobbies and maintaining a healthy player base.
Will you be checking out Megalith now that it’s on PC VR? Let us know in the comments.
Editor’s Note: This article originally published on March 5th, but has been updated with new information regarding the game’s upcoming release date.
In a 2019 Year in Review post, Valve detailed an overview of SteamVR improvements in the last year and announced that the team is working on SteamVR 2.0, with an eye on a release during this year.
In the ‘Looking Ahead to 2020’ section of the post, Valve wrote, “The team is hard at work on SteamVR 2.0, which will feature a number of customer experience improvements.” No further details were given on the what specific improvements the update might include, however, we reached out to Valve for comment and will update the post if we receive a response.
Valve also stated that they’re looking to expand the Steam PC Cafe Program, which supports VR arcades and launched in beta in 2019. The team is working on expanding the platform to also support schools and libraries.
With regards to SteamVR improvements in 2019, Valve highlighted the launch of their own headset, the Valve Index, while also noting that SteamVR supported almost two-dozen different headsets in 2019. SteamVR received over 100 beta updates last year, which Valve noted was mostly “a year of stability fixes” for the platform.
It’s going to be a big year for Valve’s VR efforts — not only do we now have confirmation that the team working on SteamVR 2.0, but the even bigger release is Valve’s flagship VR game, Half-Life: Alyx. Valve noted in their post that the team is “pushing towards a March 2020 release,” after the game’s reveal in November last year.
There’s also a bunch of SteamVR and Valve Index games scheduled for release this year that we’re looking forward to playing, which you can read about here.
Valve’s monthly Steam Survey has long offered useful insight into the share of VR headsets in use on Steam. But the figures provided are relative to the non-static Steam population, which obfuscates the actual adoption trend of VR headsets on the platform. To demystify the data, Road to VR has developed a proprietary model which derives actual headset counts by correcting for Steam’s changing population. The latest data shows that monthly-connected VR headsets on Steam have reached a record high of 1.3 million in December.
Introduction
Each month Valve collects info from Steam users to determine some baseline statistics about what kind of hardware and software is used by the platform’s population, and to see how things are changing over time; that includes which VR headsets are connected to users’ computers. Participation in the survey is optional, and headsets aren’t counted if they aren’t powered on and recognized by Steam at the moment that the data is collected.
Data is captured over the course of the month, which tells us how many headsets were connected to users’ PCs over that time period; we call the resulting figure ‘monthly-connected headsets’ for clarity.
While Valve’s data has been a useful way see which headsets are most popular on Steam, the trend of monthly-connected headsets has always been obfuscated because the data points are exclusively given as percentages relative to Steam’s population—which itself is an unstated and constantly fluctuating figure.
To demystify the data, Road to VR has created a model based on the historical data, along with official data points directly from Valve and Steam, which corrects for Steam’s changing population to estimate the actual count—not the percent—of users on Steam with connected VR headsets.
Monthly-connected VR Headsets on Steam
Data gap from seven months of data misreported by Valve
After correcting for Steam’s changing population, we find that December 2019 reached a new record high with an estimated 1,342,000 monthly-connected VR headsets on Steam, beating the previous record set in September 2019 of 1,218,000 headsets. Year over year, monthly-connected headsets are up 75%.
Worth noting about the results: we’re talking about monthly-connected headsets here, as the underlying Steam Survey data is a snapshot of activity for each month. In the case of VR headsets, that means that the figure we’re estimating is how many unique headsets are connected to Steam users’ PCs over the course of a given month; it’s the closest official data point we have to active headsets, but doesn’t tell us the extent to which those headsets are actually being used, nor does it tell us much about gross VR headset sales figures.
Furthermore, the Steam Survey comes from a sample of the user population, not a comprehensive census—though Valve maintains the data offers an accurate snapshot. And of course, these figures are only inclusive of Steam, and don’t offer a complete picture of activity on the Oculus PC platform (or any insight at all on Oculus Quest and Sony’s PlayStation VR).
Trend Line
As with our previous analyses, the growth of monthly-connect headsets on Steam continues to closely fit an exponential curve with an R² value of 0.986, starting from the month that the first consumer headsets hit the market back in 2016.
It’s not clear how long this trend will continue, but we can make a (naive) projection based on what we’re seeing today by drawing out the line. Doing so suggests some 2.75 million monthly-connected headsets by the end of 2020.
Data gap from seven months of data misreported by Valve
Of course this projection is purely drawing out the exponential line, and doesn’t attempt to account for an array of other factors: crucially, in a young market like VR, things like cost, new features, and innovative content (or lack thereof) stand to influence the trend in significant ways. We certainly expect that the release of Half-Life: Alyx in March will have an immediate and lingering impact on the trend.
Looking at the latest Steam Survey data in detail for December 2019, we can see that the percent of the Steam population with connected headsets rose to 1.09% from the month prior (+0.07%). That figure continues to grow, having surpassed Steam’s Linux population for the first time back in January 2019; it would seem that the next big milestone for VR on Steam will be to surpass the OSX Steam population, which is still pretty far away at 3.06% of Steam users.
Breaking down the marketshare of headsets on Steam in December 2019: the Oculus Rift S saw a huge leap over the prior month to 18.46% (+3.63%), and Index saw a strong gain as well, now holding 6.67% (+1.74%) of the share of headsets on Steam.
Most of those gains came from losses in the original HTC Vive which is down to 29.75% (-2.89%), the original Oculus Rift at 33% (-2.55%), and Windows Mixed Reality headsets at 8.78% (-0.27%).
HTC’s latest headset, Vive Cosmos, has only gained a paltry 0.41% of the share of headsets on Steam. The figure is so low compared to contemporary headsets that if it isn’t an outright error, sales of the headset must be vanishingly few. All HTC headsets on Steam still account for 32.58% of the share, but this has been on a steady decline, losing 11.06% since the same time last year.
Oculus has soaked up much of those loses, with the Rift and Rift S collectively holding 51.46% of the share of headsets on Steam, a gain of 5.01% since the same time last year. And though is hasn’t grown as fast as the cheaper Rift S, Valve’s high-end Index headset has seen surprising traction, quickly surpassing HTC’s Vive Pro just two months after its launch, now holding 6.67% of the share compared to Vive Pro’s 2.42%.
Valve revealed Steam’s Best of 2019 lists today, including the top selling VR games of the year. The section is split into platinum, gold, silver and bronze subdivisions, along with a section purely for the best VR releases from this year only.
The platinum category, featuring the absolute top VR sellers of the year “as measured by gross revenue this year”, consists of Blade & Sorcery, Skryim VR, Arizona Sunshine, Gorn, VR Kanojo, Boneworks, Fallout 4 VR, Pavlov, Superhot VR, Beat Saber, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades (H3VR) and Zero Caliber.
The next tier, gold, features Virtual Desktop, Moss, Creed: Rise to Glory, Budget Cuts, Pistol Whip, Sairento VR, Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Onward, Half-Life: Alyx, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality and Contractors.
The silver and bronze tiers feature more titles than platinum and silver, including prominent titles such as Space Pirate Trainer, Tilt Brush, Espire 1 and many more. You can view the full VR top sellers list here, where you’ll also find many of the listed games on sale at the time of this writing.
It is interesting to see a title like Boneworks, which only released a few weeks ago, in the platinum category. Likewise, it is notable that pre-orders for Valve’s flagship VR title Half-Life: Alyx — which is slated for release in March 2020 –pushed it into the gold category.
VR headsets were very popular during the holiday season with both Oculus Quest and Valve Index backordered as far as February 2020 from the Oculus website and Steam, respectively. Facebook recently added the Oculus Link connection for Oculus Quest which allows for a wired connection to Steam.
Which of the top selling VR games on this list did you purchase this year, and which were your favorites? Let us know in the comments below.
An update to SteamVR has brought a slew of interface changes which aim to improve ease-of-use and address the software’s dense array of settings.
Update (December 17th, 2019): Valve today pushed the SteamVR 1.9.13 update out of beta and into the main branch, making it the public version of the software which will be downloaded by all users. We’ve updated the article below to reflect the move from beta to public release, and included the full changelog for reference.
Original Article (December 12th, 2019), Updated: As Valve prepares for the debut of Half-Life: Alyx and an influx of new VR users alongside it, the company is also evolving SteamVR to be more user friendly.
An update to SteamVR (1.9.13) has overhauled the Settings menu, moving it away from a developer-centric power-tool toward something more approachable to end-users.
Captured by Road to VR
In addition to modernizing the look and feel of the Settings menu, some settings are now hidden by default and can only be seen when toggling on the ‘Advanced Settings’ option, which also reveals a sub-menu of developer-specific options.
Of equal importance, Valve says that “most” settings can now be accessed both inside and outside of the headset. This will hopefully reduce instances where players need to remove the headset to make small tweaks like adjusting Motion Smoothing, Render Resolution, or Audio Mirroring.
Captured by Road to VR
The update has also brought minor tweaks to the SteamVR Dashboard (the in-VR menu), including improvements for Desktop View with multiple monitors.
Additionally, the update allows users to further increase the brightness of Index, as well as change the headset’s refresh rate without restarting SteamVR (so long as the headset has been updated to the latest firmware and users are using NVIDIA GPU drivers of version 441 or higher).
Valve notes that “the new SteamVR settings are still a work in progress,” so we can expect to see more changes before the beta gets pushed out to the public branch of SteamVR. If you want to try it out ahead of time, you can install the SteamVR beta branch by right-clicking on SteamVR in Steam and going to the ‘Betas’ tap and selecting the beta branch from the dropdown menu.
Most settings now available on both the desktop and in-headset.
Valve Index HMD refresh rate can be changed mid-game, without restarting. (Requires NVIDIA driver version 441, or higher)
SteamVR Desktop View
Improved multi-monitor desktop support (Windows 10 only).
Improved cursor rendering (Windows 10 only).
Added experimental user setting to control Desktop scale.
Fixed double characters appearing in the desktop view and Steam chat.
Fixed backspace not working in the desktop view (Windows 10 only)
SteamVR
Numerous crash fixes and stability improvements.
Improved audio mirroring latency and fixed some cases where the mirror could accumulate a large delay.
Moved Performance Graph to main SteamVR status window (right-click)
Skip “Advanced Supersampling Filtering” for systems which use their own compositor (e.g. Windows Mixed Reality, Oculus). This fixes some causes of blurriness reported by WMR users.
All windows now group together under one icon in the Windows taskbar.
Fixed rendering of grid lines in the construct.
Fixed loading animation on transition overlay being at the wrong height.
Added better error diagnostics when failing to find proper display adapter for new UI.
Added block compression to render model textures over 2048×2048.
Minor optimization for motion smoothing.
Fixed some memory leaks when VR_Init is called repeatedly in long-running applications.
Fixed regression in ComputeOverlayIntersection for Dashboard overlays.
Moved dashboard power menu from a tab to a popover.
Added haptic bumps with moving on or off of buttons on the dashboard controls.
Added experimental user setting to control Dashboard placement and scale.
SteamVR Input
For games using legacy input: When fetching default bindings, prefer partner site explicit defaults instead of generic legacy defaults
When switching bindings, SteamVR now records the previously selected binding in a setting.
Action Sets with a higher priority will now correctly override sets with a lower priority.
Recent games list in top level controller configuration menu now shows most recent game instead of starting with second most recent game.
Linux:
Rate-limit attempting to open the tracing filesystem to once every 5 seconds.
SteamVR will now attempt to set thread priorities through rtkit (when available).
Fixed a vrwebhelper crash that could make the dashboard disappear.
Fixed the pairing UI window content not showing up the first time it was opened.
Fixed a few behavior quirks in vrwebhelper’s desktop windows.
Added diagnostics for tracking down rare stuck haptics bug on Linux.
There is a known crash on Linux which is currently being investigated. In the meantime, Linux users may opt into the ‘linux_temp’ branch. (Right-click SteamVR -> Properties -> Betas, to enable).
Oculus:
Fixed an issue where controllers may stop tracking too quickly when hidden from view.
Fixed IPD value not being correct until changed by the user.
Index HMD
Max brightness extended to 140.
Framerate can be changed without restarting (requires NVIDIA driver version 441, or higher). Requires firmware update.
SteamVR Tracking 2.0 Basestations
Improved reliability of firmware updates, in situations with weak signals or interference.
Note: Vive Pro users experiencing issues with basestation communications may want to reposition their link box.
Thanks to Steam’s hardware agnostic approach, it’s become the defacto repository of all things PC VR (excluding Oculus exclusives, of course). Every major PC VR headset is supported through the SteamVR platform, including Oculus Rift S, HTC Vive, Valve Index, Pimax, and Windows VR headsets; not to mention Oculus Quest, which thanks to Oculus Link lets you play PC VR games from the Oculus Store, Steam, and Viveport.
So you may be wondering, what are the best VR games for SteamVR headsets recently? You may find a couple repeats from our 10 Best Recent Rift Games, but there’s still plenty of top-scoring games to dig into here. Now, in no particular order, our top 10 best games for SteamVR headsets.
Note: Below you’ll find links pointing to Steam and Viveport, as the latter also offers support for many of the major VR headsets.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
Ganking zombies takes practice, and you’ll get all of that and more as you grab walkers by the head, jab screwdrivers into their eyes, sneak around the shambolic horde, and think about how much your life has changed since you got a VR headset. It’s not an open world adventure, but it does its best to give you plenty of places to visit and even a few choices to make that definitely flexes its mostly-linear narrative.
Cool weapon mods, refined physics-based zombie killing, and a high level of polish put this one head and shoulders (ok, maybe not ‘head’) above many other similar games in the genre. Check out why we gave The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners a super solid [9/10] in our review.
Half-Life: Alyx
It’s a weird time to be alive. After over a decade of waiting, Valve has finally revived the Half-Life franchise, and it did it to spectacular effect in VR with Half-Life: Alyx (2020). Delve back into the dystopian City 17, set between the first and second Half-Life games.
Seriously, the level of detail is amazing in Half-Life: Alyx, making the linear narrative feel lived-in and much larger than it really is. And that’s saying something, because this full-featured puzzle-shooter boasts 15 hours of gameplay that is totally justified playing it straight through. Stop and smell the daises though, because we gave it our top score of 10/10 for good reason.
Fujii
Funktronic Labs describes Fujii as “magical, musical hike through lush, chromatic VR wilderness,” and even though this little escape from the daily grind is more of a chill gardening sim than your standard game, it’s one of those games that will have you coming back, even if you’re not sure why.
Road to VR’s Ben Lang calls Fujii’s lack of instructions “a testament to the intuitive VR game design skills of developer Funktronic Labs,” noting that players learn to interact with the world almost exclusively by doing, exploring, and testing the limits of the world in way that makes it a truly unique and personal experience. Check out why we gave Fujii an [8/10] in our review.
Pistol Whip
It feels like Cloudhead Games took a slice of Beat Saber (2018), a little dusting of Smash Hit (2015), a few shards of SUPERHOT VR (2017) and mixed it all together to create Pistol Whip, a VR rhythm shooter that engages your body in a very unique and compelling way.
You’re constantly moving forward through a levels where enemies appear and shoot at you, and it’s your job to not only return fire, but dodge incoming bullets too. Flow state is the name of the game here (ok, it’s Pistol Whip, but you know what I mean), and although we are still technically waiting for more music to fill out its 10-song library, it’s a game you’ll be able to pick up easily but have a hard time mastering. Check out our preview to learn more about why we like it so much.
BONEWORKS
Boneworks (2019) from Stress Level Zero is not only an achievement in VR physics simulation, but it also basically brought to VR what Valve couldn’t. That was of course before Half-Life: Alyx was even public knowledge, but this part HL homage, part physics sandbox is still a super interesting game that takes a hardliner stance on how to best immerse the player.
We didn’t give it the best score in our review—a respectable [6/10], which on our linear grading scale puts it at “good”. Due to a minimal narrative, you have to create some of the fun for yourself, which might just be right up your alley.
Until You Fall (Early Access)
Until You Fall arrives to us from Schell Games, the studio behind the super successful VR puzzler I Expect You to Die (2017), making this hack-and-slash melee adventure a bit out of left field for the studio.
Nonetheless, it offers up what Road to VR’s Ben Lang calls “a surprisingly rich combat experience which successfully fuses meta-game elements in a way that no other VR title has yet managed.” It’s still in Early Access, so we haven’t given it a score in our EA review; if we had to, it would certainly be high up there.
Beat Saber
What’s a ‘best-of’ list without Beat Saber (2018), the game that has basically become synonymous with VR at this point. Granted, it’s available now on basically any VR headset worth owning, although its overall input simplicity makes it perfect for a multi-device platform like SteamVR.
Ok, we get it. It’s not super recent, but the content keeps flowing at a pace we simply haven’t seen in other VR titles. Now that Facebook has bought developing studio Beat Games, there’s been a strong influx of content from household names like Green Day, Panic at the Disco!, Timbaland, and more to keep you coming back for that sweet, sweet paid DLC.
No Man’s Sky (New VR Support)
With No Man’s Sky (2016), Hello Games has gone the full hero’s journey. With one of the biggest hype cycles for an indie studio to weather, the worst releases in video game history, and nary a sign of a light at the end of the tunnel, No Man’s Sky easily could have slunk away into the darkness, never to be heard from again. Instead, Hello Games persevered and ardently improved No Man’s Sky, eventually even adding VR support with its free ‘Beyond’ update.
Its VR support didn’t exactly wow us when it first released; Road to VR contributor Gabriel Moss called it “a wonderful, deeply flawed space odyssey,” giving it a still pretty respectable [7.5/10]. Quality of life updates have gone a long way of keeping us coming back for more since it first launched though—Bethesda could learn from.
Vacation Simulator
Job Simulator (2016) wasn’t an easy act to follow, considering it was likely people’s first VR experience when it arrived as a launch title on basically all VR headsets. No fear though, because the owls at Owlchemy Labs hashed out a slightly new direction with its more relaxed little bro, Vacation Simulator, which includes a story line, a more open environment and a ton of vacation-style activities to explore and play.
Some fans of the original may not exactly gel with the new direction Vacation Simulator takes, but we’re willing to bet many people will have a blast going through the gads of activities. Anyway, we did, which is why we gave it a resounding [8.8] in our review.
Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs
Angry Birds in VR? Pffft. That sounds lame! But no! It’s actually really fun, and not at all a diseased microtransaction-riddled mess like its mobile forbears have become. Here, Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs actually hits on some seriously fun gameplay by letting you not only knock down complex creations overrun by evil little piggies, but now you can even make your own block fortresses in creative mode.
Angry Birds just works in VR thanks to an intuitive shooting mechanic and a good mix of difficulty levels, which were big factors in why we gave it a [8.5/10] in our review.l
Update (March 26th, 2020): Out with the old, in with the new. We’ve updated to include a few of VR’s most promising recent games that you should definitely consider now that you’ll never leave the house.
Oculus Rift headsets and the Valve Index have surrendered a tiny share of overall VR headset usage to HTC Vive in October’s Steam Hardware Survey.
September was another month of growth for both Rift and Index. But, while the newly-released Rift S continued to grow in October, the total percentage of Rift and Valve headsets used on Steam was down.
Steam Shrinkage
On the Rift front, the S went from 13.03% to 13.7%. It’s easily the slowest month of growth for the headset since the Steam Hardware Survey started following it. Combine that with 0.37% usage of DK2 and 33.07% usage of the standard Rift and total Oculus usage on Steam comes to, amazingly, 49.99%. Last month it was at 50.07%. Not a major reduction, then, but enough to put it back below the 50% mark.
We can’t help but wonder if the recent announcement of Oculus Link, which will allow Quest owners to plug their headsets into PCs to play Rift games, might have stalled Rift S’s growth. Link arrives this month and we’ll be interested to see how it changes up the PC VR landscape.
As for Index, Valve’s headset fell from 4.98% to 4.92%. Again, it’s a very, very small reduction, but it’s the first time Index has gone backwards instead of forwards since it joined the Steam Hardware Survey.
The biggest loser of the month, though, is Windows VR. Microsoft’s range of devices fell from 5.87% to 5.22%. Surely next month will see Index overtake that line of products?
So, what which headset(s) are gaining the ground Facebook and Valve have lost. The answer is the HTC Vive platform. Last month’s total Vive usage (combining Vive and Vive Pro) was 34.78%. This month it came to 35.18%.
October saw the launch of the Vive Cosmos, though the survey doesn’t list the device yet. Still, we do know Cosmos replaced the original Vive, so this bump may be attributed to a last-minute rush to buy up the last Vive units.
November is now upon us and that means one thing: Black Friday. We’ll be looking forward to seeing how this year’s deals shake up the results in early December.
A few games are listed under the “Horror VR” category on the sale, including:
Organ Quarter – $12.49 (50% off)
Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted – $20.99 (30% off)
Horror of the Deep – $3.59 (55% off)
SCP: Blackout – $15.99 (20% off)
Rise of Insanity – $4.89 (51% off)
Emily Wants To Play – $2.44 (51% off)
Narcosis – $7.49 (50% off)
Don’t Knock Twice – $6.79 (66% off)
Stifled – $15.99 (20% off)
Frosty Nights – 0.84 (80% off)
Of those, the most notable is definitely Five Nights At Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted. The game recently received some new Halloween DLC as well – Curse of the Dreadbear. However, that DLC isn’t free and is not included in the base game. It is not included in the Halloween sale and is available at the regular price of $9.99 on Steam.
There are also a few non-horror VR games included in the sale as well. Most notably, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is available at half price for just $7.49. Another great VR title, Red Matter, is available at 20% off for just $19.99, while Racket: Nx is also available at 50% off for $9.99.
These are the most prominent titles on sale, but still only just a slice of the VR discounts on offer. You can view the full list of VR games that are discounted in the Halloween sale here.
Besides VR titles, there are a lot of significant regular PC games on sale as well, which you can also check out over at Steam.
Will you be picking up anything in this year’s Steam Halloween sale? Let us know in the comments.
Every month we aim to round up each and every AR and/or VR game release for you in one single place — this is October 2019’s list. Check the bolded and underlined entries for ones we feel are particularly worth your time.
Curious about what’s coming this month to a VR headset near you? Then we’ve got you covered. And don’t forget to watch VRecap every Friday and The VR Download live every Thursday to stay on top of the top news stories, top new releases, and enter into our weekly VR game giveaways.
If you’re a VR game developer planning to release a game soon — let us know!You can get in touch with me directly by emailing david@uploadvr.com or hit all of the editorial team by emailing tips@uploadvr.com. Please contact us about your upcoming releases so that we can know what you’re working on and include you in release lists!
Unless otherwise stated, all PC VR releases are the Steam versions.
Rift, Vive, Index, and Windows VR Game Releases For October 2019
Vanishing Realms: The Sundered Rift is a full-length expansion to the original game that adds a meaty third chapter. Read our full review here to see what we thought!
Vanishing Realms is officially out of Early Access and with that update also comes the release of a big paid expansion that’s even larger than the original game in the form of The Sundered Rift. Indimo Labs has been hard at work on this new DLC and it shows.
In order to approach The Sundered Rift with the right frame of mind, I actually started the whole game from scratch. I dove in fresh from the very beginning and replayed the first two chapters of the original Vanishing Realms. I think that really improves the experience to play it straight through as one 6+ hour journey — the original is about 2-3 hours and The Sundered Rift can easily take upwards of 4 hours with its six different zones and multitude of new content.
To be clear though: this is not a sequel. Even though you have to pay for it separately you still need the base game to play it and it still functions off of the same core mechanics. Luckily, Vanishing Realms still feels innovative in a VR market overrun with non-VR game ports and half-baked experiences that often barely limp across the finish line of development. By comparison,. despite being over three-years old, Vanishing Realms is a competent, capable, and complete game.
Inventory management is a breeze with sockets at your waist that represent bags for things like consumable healing items, swords, bows, shields, and more. Switching things out is relegated to looking down and grabbing what you want rather than navigating a floating 2D menu. Combat is tiring and intense, especially once you’re deep into the game, requiring quick parries, adept blocking, and quickly swapping to the right tool for the job. Any melee combat you’ve seen in VR owes Vanishing Realms for laying the foundation and it still feels good even now.
The original Vanishing Realms is a bit more restricted in its scope. Many of the areas are indoors and it generally lacks a lot of breadth as you progress. The Sundered Rift on the other hand, as you can tell even just from the screenshots on the Steam page, has a lot of variety with several “open world-esque” levels that really evoke a sense of existing in a larger, more robust world.
Comfort
Vanishing Realms was originally designed exclusively for the HTC Vive when it was the only headset on the market that had tracked motion controllers and allowed for full roomscale movement. As a result, it leans heavily on teleportation movement although you can enable smooth movement but you’ll probably still need to teleport sometimes. You can also use snap or smooth turning.
Another thing about Vanishing Realms that is retained here are the various clever puzzles, traps, and riddles sprinkled throughout. The developers at Indimo Labs write some great rhymes that would make any Dungeons & Dragons DM smile with pride. In fact, I would love to see the teams from Indimo Labs and the folks at inXile that worked on The Mage’s Tale team up in some way. By and large they’re very similar games.
Vanishing Realms: The Sundered Rift Review: Final Verdict
Fans of VR RPGs need not look further: Vanishing Realms and its new accompanying expansion are fantastic. The Sundered Rift content is a pleasant surprise as not only does it continue on from the base game’s first two chapters, but it delivers an experience that’s longer, larger, and more ambitious. Zones feel more open and varied, there are close to a dozen new enemies, and tons of new weapons and challenges. Even though it does little to actually innovate by way of still using the exact same underlying mechanics and bone structure of the more than three-year old core RPG that came before it, it’s an epic conclusion for Indimo Labs that successfully manages to expand on what made the original so great.
Vanishing Realms: The Sundered Rift is now available on Steam with support for Rift, Vive, and Index at the price of $14.99. To play Sundered Rift you must first own and complete the first two chapters from the base game, Vanishing Realms, which is $19.99 on Steam and last about 2-3 hours.
This review was conducted using an Oculus Rift S with the Steam version of the game. For more on how we arrived at this score, read our review guidelines.
