Triangle Factory, the studio behind Hyper Dash (2021), announced its squad-based shooter Breachers is set to launch next month on Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets.
The Rainbow Six Siege-inspired shooter has seen over 60,000 players play since the studio launched the open alpha late last year. Now the studio says Breachers will officially launch on April 13th.
Like Rainbow Six Siege, one team (Enforcers) is tasked with wiping out the enemy squad and disarm their bombs with an EMP. You’ll be able to rappel and breach through walls, swing through windows and catch your opponents by surprise with gadgetry like drones, cloaking devices, flashbangs and breaching foam.
1 of 3
Image courtesy Triangle Factory
Image courtesy Triangle Factory
Image courtesy Triangle Factory
As the opposing team (Revolter), your squad has to protect your bombs with force and gadgets such as door-blockers, trip mines, static field emitters and proximity sensors.
If you’re curious to try your hand at the Breachers, the studio is actually still running the open alpha until March 24th. You can join the open alpha over at SideQuest for Quest 2 and Quest Pro, and over at Github for PC VR headsets. If you need any help through the install process, make sure to jump over to the game’s Discord (invite link).
While a VR-only game, Triangle Factory is also packaging in a spectator mode that can be viewed without VR hardware, promising some ready access for streamers looking to commentate on the game’s 5v5 competitive matches.
Priced at $30, players who pre-order on Quest can also get an Elite gun skin for ‘The Jesper’, the standard sidearm players spawn with at the start of each round. You can also wishlist on Steam. The studio hasn’t mentioned PSVR 2 support yet.
Hyper Dash is out now on Quest and PC VR with full cross-play and after spending a couple of weeks with the full release version on Quest 2, we’re excited to report it’s a great competitive VR shooter. Read on for our full Hyper Dash review!
At its core, Hyper Dash is a game about speed. Solaris does a good job of tapping into that straight-forward arena shooter feel, Onward feels like a great compromise towards a realistic military shooter, and Contractors really does play like Call of Duty in VR—but Hyper Dash is wholly unique. It’s a game about blistering fast movement and pure chaos that feels at once both overwhelming and supremely satisfying. Not to mention it’s extremely difficult with a skill curve that feels completely new, even if you’ve got extensive VR shooter experience.
You don’t want to miss this one.
Hyper Dash Review – The Facts
What is it?: 5v5 team-based competitive VR shooter with PC VR and Quest cross-play Platforms: Quest, Steam, andViveport Release Date: February 25th, 2021 Price: $19.99
Usually in a VR game you’ll have to choose between different types of movement. The most popular two forms of movement, or locomotion, right now across the industry is “smooth” movement, in which you direct your body through the game world using the analog sticks like in a traditional video game, and teleportation movement.
This was most prominently popularized originally by Cloudhead in the first Episode of The Gallery and dubbed “blink” movement because you would point to a spot and then the screen quickly fades out and back in with you in the new location. It was a great and effective method to prevent motion sickness that developers still deploy to this day.
Hyper Dash however builds its foundation on a hybrid system at the very core of its identity that has you mix and match both smooth movement and a hybrid movement called dashing. If you played Raw Data from Survios, you might remember a “dash” mechanic there as well in which you will zoom forward with blurred vision to a new location, or in other words, dash.
So in Hyper Dash, as you can assume by the name, you’ll be expected to do a lot of dashing. All the time. It not only makes traversing the maps quickly a ton of fun, but it’s a tactical maneuver that makes you really hard to hit. Quick dashes were popular in the old Quake and Unreal games as well during PvP matches and this definitely channels a lot of that old-school arena shooter charm.
In terms of content, Hyper Dash has plenty to offer as long as you’re in it for the online multiplayer. You can technically play offline against bots, but the AI isn’t really capable enough to make it anywhere near as fun as playing against other humans. Thankfully, servers seem pretty populated here thanks to the cross-platform multiplayer and I never had trouble finding a match.
After over a year of alpha and beta testing, Hyper Dash seems to have a dedicated fanbase. Although, it’s worth noting, that at least in my experience both during daytime hours and late at night that the audience seems to skew on the younger end of the spectrum. Judging from the voices I’ve heard in voice chat (which can be turned off completely, switched to push to talk, or always on) most people sound like young teenagers in most cases.
If you do have trouble finding players though it auto-fills with bots so you never have to sit there at a ‘Searching for Match’ screen. There’s also an active competitive scene known as ‘Dash League’ that broadcasts games and features tournament play already. It’s currently in Season 2, carrying forward from the alpha. If you play on PC, you can spectate matches with drones to get unique camera angles like in Onward.
Overall players seem very friendly, active, and eager to play with dozens of lobbies up at any given time. Just be prepared for lots of internet slang, meme references, and some lighthearted trash talk.
There’s good weapon variety here with your basic pistols, red-dot long range pistols, SMGs, shotguns, and so on. Nothing too exotic or surprising here. Truthfully, the majority of people seem perfectly happy just dual-wielding the starter pistols most of the time; it’s totally valid since they’re actually quite good.
Hyper Dash Review – Comfort Settings
This is one of the more intense VR shooters on the market from a comfort perspective and that’s by design. There is no option for teleportation-only movement since that would fundamentally ruin the entire premise of the game’s movement systems. You can move with the joystick, sprint, grind, and dash. The only real comfort settings are smooth vs snap turning. If you’re playing on Quest though or have a wireless PC VR headset, I just recommend physically turning your body though.
Don’t be surprised if you get blasted off a rail mid-grind from someone a football field away using dual pistols. Hyper Dash players are really good. It could benefit from smarter skill-based matchmaking since it’s not the easiest game to get the hang of, but playing against ‘Hard’ bot lobbies is a good starting point. It’s also sorely missing any kind of progression system beyond unlocking a couple of helmet cosmetics as you level up, but there’s nothing else in terms of loadouts, gun options, gear, more detailed avatar customization, or anything like that at all. It’s a big missed opportunity—something that only Population: One has really nailed out of the gate in VR.
You’ve got your basic deathmatch mode and point-capture based mode in domination, but the real standouts for me were control point, which is basically king of the hill, and payload, which works just like you’d expect if you’ve ever played Overwatch or Echo Combat. Modes that require more coordination and planning than just zipping around at breakneck speed are what I gravitated towards the most.
Triangle Factory crafted some stellar maps as well. There are only six of them, but they’re dripping with personality and feature lots of verticality. The one with the grind rails twisting across a giant water quarry seems to be extremely popular. It reminds me a bit of Lockout from Halo 2 with its large open gap in the middle. Since you can grind on rails in Hyper Dash or dash upwards or downwards, there are always a wide array of directions you can go at any given moment. It’s liberating to not feel like your feet are glued to the ground as they are in most VR shooters.
Hyper Dash Review – Final Verdict
If you’re tired of the military settings of most VR shooters (Onward, Contractors, Pavlov, Zero Caliber, Medal of Honor, and so on) and don’t care about battle royale like Population: One, then Hyper Dash is the antidote. It’s much faster and more intense than Solaris and really channels the speed and intensity you might recall from popular PC arena shooters like Quake. The learning curve is steep, but it’s got an active playerbase, full PC VR to Quest crossplay, and a good selection of maps and game modes to keep you busy.
For more on how we arrived at this score, read our review guidelines. This review was conducted using a digital release version of the game on a Quest 2 headset.
Every weekend VRFocus gathers together vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) industry, in locations around the globe to help make finding that ideal job easier. Below is a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on immersive entertainment.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Oculus Quest already has some great multiplayer shooters which are native to the headset like Population: One, Contractors, Onward and Solaris Offworld Combat. Next month that competition will increase with the arrival of team-based 5vs5 FPS Hyper Dash to the Oculus Store.
Developed by Triangle Factory, Hyper Dash has been available through Sidequest since April 2020, receiving plenty of positive feedback from the community. Now the title has appeared on the Coming Soon section of the Oculus Store with a release window indicating next month.
This is a pure arena shooter where teams compete across a range of gameplay modes including Payload, Domination, Control Point and Deathmatch. They can further alter the parameters of each match with Mutators to mix things up.
There are an array of options to ensure all players are catered for, from left-hand support and rebind-able controls to voice chat so teams can communicate and an offline bot-mode if other players aren’t available or you just want to practice.
The Oculus Store launch will support cross-buy between Oculus Quest and Rift, although the Oculus Rift listing isn’t dated so may arrive at a later point. Hyper Dash is also scheduled for a Steam launch in Q1 2021 supporting Rift, Valve Index, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality. It could well be the case that a multiplatform lunch will take place to ensure adequate player numbers.
Hyper Dash is a new fast-paced multiplayer shooter available on SideQuest featuring cross-play with PC VR.
You can try the alpha testing release right now and Hyper Dash is free while still in development.
The game supports up to 5 versus 5 player matches in VR with spectators who can log in without a headset. The non-VR participants control a drone that can be seen in game. There are eight weapons currently in the game that are all one handed so you can dual wield. It features three modes:
Payload is like Overwatch and Team Fortress 2
Domination challenges teams to capture three points and hold them for five seconds to score and the first team to three points wins
Capture Point is a mode where you try to hold a point in the middle of the map for 300 seconds
The game combines multiple movement systems including smooth locomotion and rail grinding that gets you around a map quickly after a respawn. There’s also a dash/teleport mechanic described as the main way of moving around in the game but it is limited to three dashes at a time. The dashes recharge and you can boost the dashes to five with a pickup located around the map.
“You can point your dash preview arc to where you want to dash. If you let go of the button you dash to the highlighted location in a fraction of a second,” Triangle Factory developer Jeroen Dessaux explained in a direct message. “The dash leaves a visible trail so players see where you went and it’s not too disorienting.”
The alpha release available now publicly also includes new sprinting features the developers are testing where “if you click the joystick button you will use 1 dash bar, but start sprinting for a few seconds,” Dessaux explained. “This is useful in a few situations. Some players wanted this and using the dash bar to restrict it seems like a good tradeoff. It also leaves a dash trail to make you more visible.” You can also sprint on the rails as well.
No price has been decided for the final game yet but it will be a paid title when it is finished and the developers say Facebook gave them the go ahead for eventual release on the Quest Oculus Store.
“We’ll keep working on the game and take in community feedback, and release new builds at the end of each month until we release,” Dessaux explained in an email.
Check out the latest trailer here:
You can find the PC version of the game — which should work with both Oculus Rift and SteamVR headsets — in the game’s Discord server. You can also find the development version of Hyper Dash on SideQuest here.
