Category: Turtle Rock Studios

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Journey of the Gods Review: A Legendary Quest

Journey of the Gods Review: A Legendary Quest

Journey of the Gods is a delightful game. Taking heavy inspiration from The Legend of Zelda franchise, Turtle Rock Studios has crafted a polished and well-rounded action adventure that takes you across a variety of biomes wielding a sword, shield, and cross-buy as you battle back dozens of dangerous beasts. While technically playable seated or standing stationary, moving around in full roomscale is when the game really comes alive.

After the first hour or so, once you’re used to the rhythm of switching between your crossbow and sword/shield setup, is when Journey of the Gods starts to click. There are lots of puzzle elements here, but not in the traditional Zelda-sense of moving blocks and hitting switches that often. Instead, problems are more environmental.

The core differentiating gameplay gimmick in Journey of the Gods is that you can grow to become a towering God that looks down at the world and influences things around you. That means growing and shrinking trees to open up or close passages, throwing down lightning bolts, and more. This functionality is used in combat, to a degree, but is mostly about puzzle solving. Energy is dispersed around levels to collect and power up your God-power gauge.

In this way it’s a bit like two games mashed together — a lite God-mode puzzle game and a more involved first-person action game. The first-person bits reminded me a lot of the early days of VR like Vanishing Realms, but instead of being over in an hour you can stretch this one out to six or more depending on how much of a completionist you are.

Scattered around each level you’ll find upgrade tokens for your sword, shield, and crossbow that can be exchanged back at the hub world to increase each item’s power. I’d have liked for a more diverse progression system of some kind other than just new God powers, such as new weapons, or items, but that’s mostly just the Zelda fan in me. The developers did a good job of injecting some unique flair here.

Visually Journey of the Gods isn’t going to turn a lot of heads. It’s got a very flat, stylized design that, while consistent and well-done, will likely be off-putting to some. It lacks the pop and personality of something like Wind Waker, but still evokes a similar sense of charming style. More than anything I found myself a little underwhelmed by creature designs and the lack of faces on characters. Windlands 2 has a nice, similarly stylized visual design but it came across as much more lively despite there actually being fewer NPCs to interact with in that one.

Journey of the Gods also has a minor space issue. A lot of the open space in levels feels under-utilized, almost as if levels are large for the sake of it rather than out of necessity. However, the few times I played the game on Quest outside on my backyard patio or in my garage where I really had room to move, the larger levels were certainly nice to run around in.

The sword and shield combo felt really great and it makes me hope to see more games with this gameplay setup on Quest soon. Alongside Apex Construct, it’s one of the few games on Quest that offers a solid front-to-back single-player campaign full of combat. I’ve played plenty of sword fighting games on wired PC headsets, but being able to spin and slash without worrying about yanking the cord out of your PC is really great.

Final Score: 8/10 – Good

Journey of the Gods is a simple, yet charming game. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel in terms of action adventure games in VR go and it certainly won’t blow your mind with its visuals, but what we’ve got here is a well-made and tightly designed adventure with hours of content to explore. I’d love to see this turned into a franchise so we could experience a bigger, better, and bolder sequel. As it stands, Journey of the Gods is a delightful and fun game worth adventuring with.

Journey of the Gods is now available on Oculus Quest and is expected to be released on Oculus Rift as today. The game costs $29.99 and does support cross-buy across Quest and Rift. Check out these official review guidelines to find out more about our process. 

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Turtle Rock’s Journey of The Gods Journeys To Rift This Week

Turtle Rock’s Journey of The Gods Journeys To Rift This Week

Vader Immortal isn’t the only Oculus Quest game making the jump to Rift this week. Turtle Rock Studios’ Journey of the Gods is also due on the PC VR platform.

The developer recently confirmed that its Quest launch title will arrive on Rift on June 18th. That’s tomorrow! Journey of the Gods is an Oculus Studios title, meaning Oculus funded and published the project. As such, you can expect full cross-buy support with Oculus Quest. That means if you’ve already bought the game on Quest, you’ll be able to download it for free on Rift and vice versa.

Journey of the Gods is a Zelda-like VR adventure game. You travel across a fantastical landscape, doing battle with evil monsters using a sword and shield. Beating bosses bestows you new god-like powers that turn levels into diorama-sized sets, allowing you to throw lighting and manipulate vegetation.

On Quest the game costs $29.99, which is what it’ll cost on Rift too. We haven’t gotten to a full review of Journey of the Gods yet, but we’ve enjoyed what we’ve played. It’s colorful and innocent with some great combat and hours worth of content. It’s not ground-breaking but, for a lot of VR fans, that’s just what the doctor ordered.

Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for Turtle Rock’s other Quest game, Face Your Fears II, to hit Rift. The original title did jump from Go to PC, so we have hopes this will too.

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Review: Journey of the Gods

For the launch of Oculus Quest, Turtle Rock Studios was unique in the fact that it launched two virtual reality (VR) experiences for the standalone headset. While VRFocus reviewed horror sequel Face Your Fears 2 and found that it didn’t quite hit the mark when it came to scares and gameplay, the same can’t be said for the developers more ambitious project, a highly stylish action-adventure called Journey of the Gods.

Journey of the Gods

One of the few original titles for Oculus Quest – alongside Shadow Point – you instantly feel at home in Journey of the Gods, as it makes use of Oculus Quest’s benefits and limitations as a standalone headset. Suited for seated and standing gameplay, the latter certainly works in Journey of the Gods’ favour, offering greater flexibility when engaging in combat.

Featuring stripped back role-playing game (RPG) elements, you have to fight through this stylish land killing all manner of enemies using a formidable selection of weaponry. At its most basic you’re supplied with a sword and shield, as well as a crossbow. Both can be upgraded by scouring the landscape for hidden items, making the shield wider for better protection, or making the sword longer for improved reach in combat for example. The weapon of choice was most definitely the crossbow, however. Offering an impressive range and a quick reloading system via a crank handle, it was perfect for picking off enemies at distance or when toe-to-toe.

And then there’s the ‘god mode’ to really alter the odds. Only activated once enough essence has been collected from those purple crystals you can see in the screenshots, this mode has a dual function. As progression is made you’ll learn new abilities which can help you in battle or solve puzzles. From removing trees that can block a path to slowing time, one of the best effects is being able to rein lightning bolts down on tough foes.

Journey of the Gods

One of the best parts of Journey of the Gods is the enemy design. More often than not generic foes that you find in videogames tend not to be varied, with the variety saved for the bosses. Turtle Rock Studios has instead produced some of the most assorted, with slugs that spit, floating multiarmed monsters that spawn lesser creatures, flying beasts with protective armour, ones that simply charge at you like a bull or those with many eyes needing a sharp object to blind them. And that’s not including some of the massive creatures at the end of each level.

Because of this, plus the puzzles littered around, there always feels like there’s something to do in Journey of the Gods. That and the fact that everything just works. There never seemed to be any real glitches or other annoyances getting in the way of the gameplay.

This isn’t an open world adventure by any means. The levels, while big, are still linear with a clear path through with no real chance of getting lost. It’s a bit of a shame that there’s no way to access the upgrade location mid-level if you find enough parts – upgrades require three items at a time – only giving access once a level has been completed. It’s not a deal breaker, just a bit weird in an RPG style experience.

Journey of the Gods

Journey of the Gods is Oculus Quest’s The Legend of Zelda. Showcasing what’s best about VR adventuring, the title is ideal for those who want to make the most of their new headset purchase, with decent gameplay, narrative and fantasy feel. It may not look graphically impressive in the screenshots when compared to Apex Construct or Vader Immortal: A Star Wars Series, but it doesn’t need to. Journey of the Gods has a charm and purpose all of its own, precisely why it featured on VRFocus’ ‘Oculus Quest: The Top 10 Games to Buy on Launch Day‘ list.

100%

Awesome

  • Verdict
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Review: Face Your Fears 2

The promise of wireless freedom is one of Oculus Quest’s biggest selling points, allowing players to really immerse themselves in whatever virtual reality (VR) title they so choose. Horror is one of those genres that could benefit from a standalone headset and luckily Oculus Quest has two scary videogames to choose from on launch day, The Exorcist: Legion VR and Turtle Rock Studios’ Face Your Fears 2. However, when it comes to the latter, you shouldn’t be too scared about what’s hidden in the shadows.

Face Your Fears 2 - Screenshot (OC5)

2017’s original Face Your Fears suited that time in the industry, offering small terrifying scenes that were out to instantly shock and scare. So it’s understandable that Turtle Rock Studios has expanded the initial theme into a larger fleshed out experience, with a spooky storyline and much more gameplay to get you properly involved in the narrative.

Set inside a mansion and its grounds, Face Your Fears 2 is split into two chapters which are separated by several decades. The first takes place in recent years and showcases a promising start, the protagonist is looking for his sister who was at a party held at the crumbling mansion. Wandering through the grounds red-eyed crows squawk and snakes suddenly appear in the undergrowth. As you begin to explore further a derelict shed hides a key yet you must first deal with all the spiders, ranging from little ones on your hands to giants eight-legged monsters trying to attack you through the wooden slates.

Face Your Fears 2 has plenty of these little moments that are designed to make you jump, and even the most hard-core VR horror fans would possibly jump at least once. Just like any jump scare obsessed videogame they do start to wear thin and most importantly become easy to spot – which then kills the atmosphere. When it comes to tense, terrifying atmosphere the best parts in Face Your Fears 2 are the bits in between, when the audio and visuals work in unison, unfortunately instantly broken when an actual scare comes along.

Face Your Fears 2 - Screenshot (OC5)The actual gameplay is very by the numbers, a door is locked and there’s only one place to find a key, with the occasional moment where you need to have a brief wander – but not for too long. While there is repetition between the two chapters thankfully each does have its own unique areas so you shouldn’t get bored. What does get a little annoying – and very immersion breaking – is that certain areas can be failed and require several attempts, completely dispelling any notion of fright.

As a launch title for Oculus Quest Face Your Fears 2 really should amaze and drop you to the floor in horror. Yet at no point does the experience ever feel like it can attain those heights, treading mediocre level ground that sorely underuses the device’s ability. Face Your Fears 2 is by no means a bad VR experience it’s just not up to the calibre of Turtle Rock Studios’ previous output.

60%

Awesome

  • Verdict