Following the studio’s acquisition by Meta late last year, we haven’t heard much about Twisted Pixel, a veteran VR game studio which made several exclusive titles for Meta. Now we’ve learned of the first details of the studio’s next project.
Following the launch of several non-VR games, Twisted Pixel Games in recent years has become largely focused on VR. The studio has built several VR games, exclusively published by Oculus Studios, for the Rift, Go, and Quest headsets. The most recent being Path of the Warrior (2019) for Quest and Rift.
Considering that we haven’t seen any new release or even game announcement from Twisted Pixel since late 2019, it wasn’t clear if the studio had remained properly intact, or if it had been absorbed into the Meta mothership and scattered to the wind.
But now we have our first glimpse of an answer. According to job postings published this year, the studio has been seeking to fill various roles to work on an “unannounced VR game using the Unreal Engine.”
Considering Meta’s priorities at this moment, it’s almost certain the game will be built for standalone Quest headsets only.
The mention of Unreal Engine (specifically UE4, as noted in some listings) is certainly interesting. There’s a very small handful of Quest games that have been built with Unreal Engine. The other, more popular choice by far, is Unity, which is largely thought to scale better to the low-end hardware of the Quest headsets; not to mention it’s almost always the first to get the latest Quest developer tools from Meta.
Other job listings for Twisted Pixel mention “experience developing a multiplayer networked game” among the ‘Preferred Qualifications’ of candidates, which gives a strong indication the next game from the studio will be built with some kind of multiplayer functionality.
Considering the timing of the studio’s acquisition announcement, we’d guess that Twisted Pixel is actively building a VR game that’s primarily targeting to launch with Quest 3, or shortly thereafter (though will probably be backwards compatible with Quest 2 as well). With Quest 3 rapidly approaching, we should learn more about the studio’s upcoming game in due time.
The virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) industries are wonderfully diverse when it comes to the job roles available, always looking to hire the best talent to work on exciting projects. Whether you’ve been an avid fan of the tech for a while or are already involved in some way, today’s VR Job Hub has plenty of new roles which can help you become more involved and shape VR/AR’s future.
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.
Twisted Pixel Games and Oculus Studios have worked on a number of videogames over the years such as Wilson’s Heartand Defector. In 2018 the studio released an on-rails shooter for Oculus Go and Gear VR called B-Teamwhich has now been confirmed to be coming to Oculus Quest next week.
Offering over the top action and cheesy acting reminiscent of80s b-movies, Twisted Pixel Games’ B-Team puts you in the midst of an alien invasion where the world’s elite forces have been demolished so now it’s up to you and your squad.
The original B-Team only had 3DoF controls to work with, so segments were split between on-rails levels where you dodge left and right as well as stationary areas for wave shooting. That basic premise remains but the studio does look to have catered for Oculus Quest’s 6DoF controllers for a more immersive gameplay experience. It’s not purely shooting and running either, as there are puzzles to solve to get that grey matter working.
You’ll be able to choose from one of four characters, each offering their own special powers and weapons which can help on specific areas. To ensure the gameplay doesn’t get stagnant B-Team has randomized levels and waves of enemies.
B-Team also features special guest appearances by Michael Dudikoff (American Ninja, Platoon Leader), Eric Roberts (Best of the Best, The Dark Knight), Cynthia Rothrock (China O’Brien, Martial Law), Don “The Dragon” Wilson (Bloodfist, Batman Forever), and Fred “The Hammer” Williamson (From Dusk Till Dawn, M*A*S*H).
With B-Team slated for release on 26th March Oculus Quest owners are going to have a few titles to choose from, with Fireproof Games’ The Room VR: A Dark Matter and Down The Rabbit Hole by Cortopia Studios arriving that same day. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Twisted Pixel Games and the Facebook Game Developers Showcase, reporting back with the latest updates.
Path of the Warrior released almost exactly one month ago on the Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest from Twisted Pixel and Oculus Studios and now it’s received the promised post-launch co-op multiplayer update.
When the game first released suddenly during The Game Awards, the lack of multiplayer was glaring. Twisted Pixel modeled Path of the Warrior after the great sidescrolling beat ’em ups of the 90s like Streets of Rage, Double Dragon, Final Fight, and others but it missed one of the main selling points of those arcade-style games: multiplayer. Running through the levels just isn’t the same by yourself.
Now you can hop into the action with a friend, complete with cross-play support across both headsets (as well as cross-buy.)
In my review I noted that the core gameplay was fun and the setting was inventive and nostalgic, but it felt a bit shallow on the feature front. Gameplay didn’t evolve much after the first 10 minutes and it was only a little less than two hours long. Fine for what it is, but not a real revolution for the genre other than the shift to a first-person perspective in a headset.
With the addition of co-op it should be much better and more fun now. We haven’t had a chance to try out the co-op support yet, but we expect it to definitely improve the fun factor and make it a more appealing purchase for those with VR buddies.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
At last night’s Game Awards, Oculus announced it’s been working with Twisted Pixel Games to create a new VR beat’em up called Path of the Warrior, which is out now on for Rift and Quest.
Inspired by classic arcade titles such as Double Dragon (1987), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game (1989), Streets of Rage (1991) and Final Fight (1989)—Path of the Warrior promises to let you attack your opponents “with any number of objects from pool cues and trash cans to frying pans,” the studio says in an Oculus blog post.
The game, which can be played in either single-player or in co-op mode, is said to span five hours of gameplay across a number of environments, ranging from bar fights to creepy carnivals.
In the trailer, it’s clear painfully clear you can pound the squishy faces of a number of typical ’80s bad guys too, and even toss them into parts of the environment for even more points—all of it while adding to the game’s patently classic combo counter and special attack meter. The studios say you can also unlock special attack boosts by beating bosses, and save bystanders who give you power-up snacks.
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Image courtesy Oculus Studios, Twisted Pixel Games
Image courtesy Oculus Studios, Twisted Pixel Games
Image courtesy Oculus Studios, Twisted Pixel Games
Image courtesy Oculus Studios, Twisted Pixel Games
Also known for Oculus exclusives Defector (2019) and Wilson’s Heart (2017), Twisted Pixel Games has been working with Oculus Studios on the game since October 2018.
“Kicking this project off was a chance to go back and play a bunch of old brawler games that we hadn’t touched in many years,” says Oculus Studios executive producer Mike Doran. “While I’d love to do a game more like Tower of Doom or Shadow over Mystara some day, with Path of the Warrior we wanted more of a Double Dragon feel. That comes through in a few ways—the large variety of background stages and enemies being a big one. We also wanted to have tons of environmental props and ways to defeat enemies, so brainstorming those was a lot of fun. Where else can you battle a guy with daggers for hair?”
Path of the Warrior is now available on the Oculus Store for $20, supporting both Rift and Quest, which includes cross-buy as well as cross-play support.
Surprise! Oculus have announced (and released) a brand new VR game today during The Game Awards 2019 called Path of the Warrior, developed by Twisted Pixel. And guess what? We’ve already played it. Here’s the full review!
Path of the Warrior is about as close as you can get to a VR adaption of a non-VR game without actually paying the licensing fee to use the IP itself. This is, for all intents and purposes, exactly like a Streets of Rage, Final Fight, or Double Dragon game, except it’s from a first-person VR perspective. If you’re looking for a quick and dirty synopsis, that’s it. You punch bad guys, pick up stuff, and beat up bosses. That’s the game.
Now, get this: Path of the Warrior takes place in a town called Rage City. And you often fight in the streets. So…my pun in the headline is pretty genius and original, right? Yeah, I don’t think anyone else will think of that.
I grew up on the Sega Genesis. All three Streets of Rage games were in constant rotation on my system as I plowed through them each ad nauseum with friends. I couldn’t get enough of the rocking soundtrack, amazing pixel art, and edgy style. All that being said, not enough was really done here to adapt Path of the Warrior for VR beyond the minimum.
You move around each level, wait for enemies to spawn, punch them a few times until they’re staggered or have fallen down, then either keep punching them to finish them off, grab them and toss them into a part of the environment, or use a finishing move of your own. Once a wave is defeated you save a civilian that has a bomb tied to their hands. After all the waves are gone, you fight the boss then you unlock a couple mini games for each area. That’s literally the entire game for five levels.
Mechanically it’s just about flailing your arms a bit for a little under two hours then rolling credits. No difficulty options and no multiplayer support (yet) although that’s reportedly coming soon without a date attached.
Reviewing a game like Path of the Warrior is difficult and conflicting because, at it’s core it’s certainly fun.
Twisted Pixel have done a good job of channeling that 90s-era arcade style into a VR game that’s fun to play in quick 20-minute bursts per level and it’s got a great deal of visual variety since all five levels are extremely distinct with different enemies, weapons to find, and a new special power-up to gain, but it’s just not enough.
The main issue at hand other than Path of the Warrior being a generally shallow game without a ton of content is that it’s not designed well from a VR perspective either. You press a button on your controller to make a disembodied leg quickly erupt from your invisible chest to do a kick, for example. It feels downright ridiculous. You can pick up and use items in the environment as weapons, but only some of them. Chairs? Yep! They’ll even break apart! Tables? No, of course not. You can throw enemies into walls with bottles on display causing them to shatter, but don’t try picking up the pieces or broken glass.
The combat is also devoid of any physics interactions at all, instead using canned animations. You don’t even really need to put any force behind punches for them to connect either, just squeeze the trigger to make a fist and poke away like a feather if you want. Even though all the enemies look different based on each level, their strategy is always the same: slowly walk towards you and take turns punching, very slowly, and without much intent to do you harm. I think I died once the entire game and that was only because I accidentally backed myself into a corner.
Comfort
Path of the Warrior is a smooth movement only game, but you can adjust speed and acceleration. You can also turn on snap turning or adjust the speed of the smooth turning, or even disable the stick for turning to use your actual body only. You can also disable turning while moving and choose whether movement is oriented to your controller or head.
Honestly the best parts of the game for me ended up being the boss fights. Each level has thematically appropriate and wholly separate encounter with a named boss character that rumbles in with dedicated movement patterns you’ve got to memorize. One enemy has a mohawk of knives, for example, that he picks and throws at you so you need to punch them out of the air and throw the final one back. Another boss is a pair of roller-skating sci-fi women that do laps around you and throw goons your way that you need to punch back before getting trampled.
They do a great job of punctuating levels that are visually delightful to explore, but with only five 20-minute stages to get through it’s mostly too little too late.
Path of the Warrior Review Final Verdict:
Path of the Warrior is a conflicting game because it’s seeping with nostalgia and simple thrills like punching clowns in the face or shooting hoops at an arcade littered with unconscious thugs. Twisted Pixel have done a good job of replicating what it would feel like to go inside of a Streets of Rage-type video game and it mostly succeeds on that front. To be clear: Path of the Warrior isn’t a bad game, but with only five stages that take less than two hours to clear, repetitive combat, and not much depth at all, it’s nowhere near as impressive as it could be.
Path of the Warrior is now available as of December 12th for $19.99 on both Oculus Rift platform and Oculus Quest via the Oculus Home Store with cross-buy support. When multiplayer support releases next year, it will also be a cross-play title.
This review of Path of the Warrior is based on the Oculus Rift version of the game and was conducted using a Rift S with two Touch controllers.
When I heard about Defector at OC5, I was excited to see what essentially amounted to Mission Impossible coming to VR—the laughably improbable, overblown action movie that makes you feel like a true badass. And while there are some choice slices of action hero greatness served up on a silver platter, I couldn’t help but feel like Defector was still a bit under-cooked in the middle.
Developer: Twisted Pixel Games Publisher: Oculus Studios Available On: Oculus Store (Rift) Reviewed On: Rift Release Date: July 11th, 2019 Price: $20
Gameplay
As a kid growing up in the ’90s, I spent untold amounts of quarters on arcade light gun shooters like Area 51 (1995) and many of the Time Crisis franchise regulars. In a few ways, Defector reminds me of these on-rails arcade games of yore despite offering up a measure of choice when it comes to how you experience the game.
Although it isn’t an on-rails experience in the sense that you’re forcibly carried from one location to the next (it has free locomotion), Defector hasn’t made the allowances to give you any leeway to be clever, or discover alternate solutions to problems on your own. It makes me feel that, despite being able to switch the proverbial mine cart on a temporary left or right track, that the choice is only about engaging in a one-off experience you want at that moment. And I was really looking forward to a game that promised not only to let you do incredible things, but to decide how you accomplish them.
To be clear, Defector is also basically an arcade shooter at heart; it relies heavily on basic tropes that become a big focus later in the game, such as various gun types, infinite ammo, sparse health pickups, and a few minor bosses. When you’re not blasting away at enemies though, you’re following simple instructions from your telepresent buddy Doran—but you’re more likely chatting with NPCs and trying select the best answer from a basic dialogue tree for any given situation. More on NPCs in the ‘Immersion’ section below.
Image captured by Road to VR
Here’s a quick rundown of the story: you’re an elite spy who’s tasked with tracking down stolen ‘device segments’ which are important to the government … for reasons. Sitting in a government office, you flash back to each of your five missions, ostensibly while at your own deposition; whatever has happened in the story wasn’t good, and the top brass aren’t happy with the way things went down. You don’t have much besides a special contact lens that lets you see key items, and an ear piece, both of which are used by your support buddy Doran to feed you important info.
Minor spoiler: My favorite part by far is the first 25 minutes of the game, which is spent waltzing around undercover on a bad guy’s private jet with the aim of stealing back the first device segment to an absolutely incredible effect. After completing that part of the mission, I chose to parachute from one plane to the next, which ended with me clambering up the side of the damaged plane, looking out the open hatch, and shooting a machine gun at incoming fighter jets. The alternate pathway would have taken me through Dr. Villain’s plane to fight through all of the heavies and drive off the plane in mid-air James Bond-style.
Image courtesy Twisted Pixel
This is the ridiculous high-octane fun I signed up for, however Defector seems to dole these moments out at pretty sparse intervals for my liking thereafter, instead choosing to pad the game with its arcade shooter and its toothless NPC interactions. To its credit, Defector doesn’t bore you with a lengthy on-boarding experience, instead tossing you into new interactions as they happen, although it’s hard to call it a non-stop adrenaline ride considering.
As for the shooter bit, the game presents three types of enemies, maybe four if you count grenade-throwing goons as opposed to the overwhelming majority of the enemies with machine guns. There’s also Terminator-sized robots and flying drones, but none of the baddies present any real challenge if you ever played a VR shooter before.
Image captured by Road to VR
Like its arcade cabinet forbears, enemy AI is pretty simplistic; bad guys dash out of nowhere and basically stay put until you do your thing. Like true bullet sponges, you can shoot them directly in the head a few times before they go down. I would have liked to see more realism here and less arcade controls, but I can see how that might turn off people who aren’t in it for the shooting elements alone, and are just looking to be in an action movie.
As for the story, it predictably follows your standard action movie narrative, sending you off to interesting locales including India, London, and New York. It’s here that I wish the game would have given me more agency to explore, and accomplish missions in non-standard ways. More on that below.
Image captured by Road to VR
In the end, I spent a little over three hours on a single pass through the campaign, although you can jump back into previous missions (with the option of enabling cheats), so you revisit any one of the five missions to see where a different decision might have taken you.
Immersion
One of the most frustrating elements in Defector is talking to NPCs. On first blush, the dialogue tree presents an opportunity to get through missions in unexpected and clever ways, possibly by looking at their dossier and finding out to best way manipulate the person into giving me what you need. But the reality is most of the time you’re continuously shunted towards a single answer that is deemed acceptable by the game, oftentimes which has no guiding principle other than it just seems to be ‘right’.
Image captured by Road to VR
At almost every turn, unacceptable responses are met with the moral equivalent “Are you stupid? Try again, dumbo!” And although you’re not penalized for giving a ‘wrong’ answer, you have to doggedly click on each option to figure out which one is right in order to progress.
And then there’s the NPCs that don’t offer anything. All answers are ‘wrong’ and lead nowhere. In fact, in the second mission I was so frustrated at the lack of any clues that I asked every single NPC in the level every question until I eventually found the one that would let me progress in the story. Your mileage may vary, and you may hit on that one NPC right away by chance, but there are zero clues to get you there—all of them dead ends. That was decidedly the only moment when you deal with non-combative NPCs in the game, but I really felt like it was a missed opportunity.
Despite this, there are valid divergences in the game’s narrative, which are marked with a big green ‘ACTION BRANCH’ labels. These represent a binary choice that the player can make, which is implicitly understood beforehand—e.g. go after the big beefy boss guy, or go after the weaselly little turncoat.
Image captured by Road to VR
Ultimately, action branches are a fun little asides that ideally appeals to what you want out of the game. Are you looking for a shooting section in the mission, or are you looking to go stealth? Although the scope of the game is fairly limited in terms of mission flexibility, I’m glad to at least be able to choose what sort of ride I’m strapping in for.
Visuals are a fundamental part of immersion, and the ingredients for impressive visuals are definitely there in Defector, but the game is still in need of a little more refinement in that department. Anti-aliasing seems non-existent, and even on ‘Ultra’ settings it seems the world has its fair share of jaggies and inexplicable blur at moments. This is an honest shame, because I count many of the design elements as a net positive, such as overall character design, motion capture, set pieces—all of it has enough meat on the bone for the sake of immersion. Although as is, the game’s visual fidelity puts a definite damper on both distance shooting and making out enemies in darker scenes.
Object interaction is also somewhat of a missed opportunity; there are objects you’re allowed to pick up, and others you can’t. There’s really little rhyme or reason to it all. You can pick up a fork, but not an apple from an apple box. You can pick up a dish, but not a fire extinguisher. So on, and so forth. If you drop an item, sometimes it appears in your inventory, but if it’s a magazine, it just disappears.
Comfort
Despite a few moments when being swung around violently, Defector is mostly a comfortable game. It includes both variable snap-turning and smooth-turning for users who want max visual immersion.
If you’re looking to get the most out of your ability to move around though, you’ll want to strafe continuously so baddies can’t get a bead on your head. That sort of constant lateral movement can be uncomfortable though, so it’s nice to see that strafing is also a toggleable option.
Although ‘camera shake’ is enabled by default, which gives you more of a thrill when things start exploding around you, you can turn it off it that makes you uncomfortable.
We’re back again with another livestream planned for 7/11/19 @9:00AM PT on the UploadVR Twitch.
For today we are playing Defector, a brand new spy action thriller from Twisted Pixel and Oculus Studios that is just releasing today. You can read our full review on the site right now for more details. It’s an Oculus Rift exclusive full of action, branching story missions, and some really fun cheats.
We’ve recently switched back over to Twitch after experimenting with livestreams on YouTube for a while. Since we’re affiliated on Twitch we have some really cool perks we can offer such as awesome sub badges to reward subscribers, fun emotes, the ability to donate bits to support the stream and fund improvements, as well as a fun meta game of earning Loyalty Points to redeem for future events. We’re gonna do lots of fun stuff like giveaways too very soon that will all be automated within the stream chat.
This stream we will be using an Oculus Rift S and two Touch controllers to play Defector via Oculus Home. Here is where you can find today’s stream once it starts around 9:00AM PT and will last for about an hour or two:
Since we are migrating from YouTube you can see our most recent past archived streams over in our YouTube playlist, which is where you can watch gameplay highlights from Twitch streams in the future too. There’s lots of good stuff there so make sure and subscribe to us on YouTube as well!
And please let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next! We have lots of VR games in the queue that we would love to show off more completely.
There’s a reason spy films like the James Bond and Bourne franchises do so well, mixing ridiculous plotlines with amazing effects which provide a thrill ride for the audience. Translating that recipe across to a videogame isn’t always easy, especially when you need to fill way more than 1.5 hours of someone’s time. Twisted Pixel aims to do just that with Oculus Rift exclusive Defector. Trailers have shown the experience to be a veritable feast of cinematic stunts, a heart-pumping virtual reality (VR) extravaganza, which in part it is; just not entirely.
In Defector you play as a super-secret agent for an organisation simply called ‘The Agency’. There’s a plot involving some end of the world style plan and you and your team are trying to stop it. So the entire videogame is set out with your character retelling the story of what went on to your superiors, each level cutting back to you sat in an interview being grilled. If this sounds familiar to anyone who has a PlayStation VR and Blood & Truth then this particular sequence is almost a carbon copy, but the motion capture isn’t quite as good.
The first level is the one that’s been heavily advertised, where you’re on a plane driving a car out the back and somehow landing in another plane in one stupidly outrageous sequence. But it’s awesome all the same, knocking over a few guards on the way out. It’s just a shame that happens to be the biggest set piece in the entire title. There’s another one later on when you shoot down a helicopter, yet Defector never quite manages to retain that sparkle from the introduction.
That being said, there are lots of nice little touches throughout the videogame, such as the Indian market where you can play BlackJack and other gambling games. Easy to while away too much time in there. Or there’s a great bit in the first level involving a fistfight with a bodyguard. The mechanics are really well done and thought out, especially when you can grab him by the collar and smash him into a mirror. Again though, it’s a flourish of awesome that’s then never repeated – there are melee weapons but some more fist fighting would’ve been nice.
Defector seems to have this throughout, good bits then parts which let the experience down. Weapons, there are some interesting options available, from pistols which set opponents on fire to the gauntlets which are able to shoot electrified rounds as well as deploying blades of pure energy. The downer, the weapons holster around the waist tends to drift occasionally or twist. So that in a firefight the ammo isn’t always in the right position. And why is it clear? As if it’s some ethereal loadout.
What was nice and helped to keep interest in the plot was the conversation choices and the branching narrative. Rather than being spoken to, all the main dialogue was a two-way conversation. They were linear, so even with up to four options to choose from one was usually always correct. There were particular characters where if you got answers wrong then that could mean your death – high stakes are always important for spy’s – so it was fairly important to keep an eye for clues. However, these conversations lock movement, which felt too restrictive in a title where you’re able to freely run around most of the time.
And there are plenty of options on that front. Yes, Defector is geared towards a smooth location system for optimal gameplay but there plenty of in menu choices to tweak movement. Snap turning, vignettes and more are all available, so most players should find a setting that suits.
For such a big blockbuster release which has been heavily advertised, Defector was over way too quickly. The first run-through took just over four hours, without trying too hard, completing a few side objectives along the way. There are only five levels in total so Twisted Pixel will be counting on the replay elements to keep players entertained. And there are a few. Four of the levels have a specific story branch to alter certain outcomes while completing specific actions will open a myriad of unlockables, from development art, character models and even a throwback to gaming of old, a cheat list.
You don’t even need to go through the entire storyline again, with a quick start mode allowing level selection alongside choosing to start before or after the branch choice; which was a nice touch.
Defector is such a mixed bag. The production values are top-notch as you’d expect from Twisted Pixel and Oculus Studios, and Defector employs great ideas for an exciting adventure, most of the time. A little more gameplay variety would’ve been nice, jumping out of windows, rappelling down ravines, climbing the Effiel Tower in a suit, you know, stupid spy stuff. It should have been Oculus Rift’s answer to Blood & Truth, however, the experience just misses the mark.
Defector, the VR spy thriller from Twisted Pixel and Oculus Studios is finally here, but does it deliver on the promise of being like Mission Impossible in VR? Find out in our Defector review.
The best way I could describe Defector would be to call it like an exercise in bare bones wish fulfillment. You get to do cool spy stuff like shoot guns, jump out of airplanes, and blow up secret underground bases, but in their obsession with making you feel like a spy saving the world, the developers forgot to craft a world worth saving.
At the very start of Defector you get to pick either male or female and choose the skin tone of your hands, helping you put yourself in the shoes of the main hero. The story plays out as a series of flashbacks in which you relive five key missions that lead up to climactic events on Liberty Island, near the Statue of Liberty in the United States. Each mission is about 45 minutes to an hour long with a key branching point that diverges the plot and gives you one of two different outcomes. How you resolve each mission contributes to the overall narrative and ends up offering two very distinct ending options.
Playing Defector from start to finish only takes about 4 or 5 hours even if you do take your time a little bit, and you can probably spend another hour or two choosing different options on subsequent playthroughs. The nice thing about the ‘Quickplay’ choice from the main menu is that it lets you jump directly to the branching point and skip the preamble of the level that’s always identical.
Defector’s main problem is that it does a poor job of establishing any connective tissue between the five levels other than very loose character motives. The opening mission has a cool reveal moment in which an enemy ends up being your partner in disguise all along with some high stakes intensity as you try to escape a flaming plane hurtling towards the ground but that intensity never resurfaces again. During the level’s climax I shot down over a dozen fighter jets using nothing more than an assault rifle, like any action movie star would do.
Then every other level features some new cast of characters. There are double crosses, interrogations, espionage, and everything else you’d expect from this sort of game, but it’s all abbreviated. You never spend more than a few minutes with any character so there is zero development to make you care about the fact that Mr. X (that’s the bad guy’s actual name) turns out to be a double agent.
It’s like Twisted Pixel picked the climactic moments from a cookie cutter spy film and snipped out all the rest leaving a mostly uninspired greatest hits of what a narrative designer might think makes a good game. It honestly reminds me a bit of early 2016 VR game design more so than a mid-2019 Oculus exclusive. The $20 price tag starts to make sense when Stormland and Asgard’s Wrath are due out in a few months by comparison.
Don’t be mistaken though: I actually really did have fun playing Defector. It’s got a ton of small, interactive moments that truly sell the experience from a VR perspective. Jumping out of an airplane felt amazing, putting on a Mission Impossible-style mask to impersonate my enemy was immersive, and punching bad guys with a shock-powered super glove was an appropriately campy gadget that Bond would have been proud to see.
The branching moments offer great replayability by actually being dramatically different scenarios. There are even cheat codes you can unlock for completing side objectives that add nuance to a game not seen often these. I remember unlocking hilarious cheats in Uncharted 2 that did things like turn off gravity, make Nathan Drake enormously fat, or even switch character models around. Some of the cheats in Defector include switching the shader to a red-hue similar to the Virtual Boy, pixelating all the visuals, or one called ‘Hot Potato’ that forces you to reload weapons rapidly before your gun explodes.
Clearly Twisted Pixel had fun making Defector and there are some really good bits here, usually the parts that ask you to set aside your guns and use your brain instead. Every character has a name and a dossier you can pull up full of background information (such as a guard’s closet obsession with pop music) that can be used implicitly while talking. Navigating the branching dialogue trees was a lot of fun even if it could have been more immersive. For example, requiring me to speak the lines aloud to make a conversation choice, quickly choose on a timer such as in TellTale games, or at least some sort of system that isn’t literally just looking at my choice and clicking a button, would have been nice.
Guns could use some work too. Technically there are a good number of different weapons to use throughout the levels, but they all kind of feel the same. Other than fire rate variations shooting a pistol or SMG or assault rifle is basically identical, including how you reload by ejecting a magazine, grabbing a new one off your belt, and slotting it in.
Comfort
Defector only supports smooth locomotion movement, but it accommodates a wide range of comfort levels within that control scheme. You can enable snap turning instead of smooth turning to cut down on sickness issues, as well as FOV dimming via what’s called ‘Tunneling Mode’ in the options. You can also adjust turning velocity, turning acceleration, and walking speed. You can even turn off strafing and turning all together if you only want to allow roomscale movement for those.
I don’t like making comparisons much in reviews, but in the case of Defector it’s hard not to. Just a few weeks ago PSVR exclusive Blood & Truth released (with tons of similarities as a game concept) and despite it not even having full, smooth locomotion at all and existing only on inferior hardware it ended up being a much deeper, more engaging, and more robust experience that develops a stronger story full of more nuance. It lacks the mission replayability that Defector has, but mostly excels in every other facet.
In the end Defector is a good, fun game at a very fair price point that offers some cheap thrills, loads of replayability, and a handful of truly thrilling moments that successfully let you live out your Bond, Bourne, or Mission Impossible power fantasy from the safety of a VR headset. But it could have been a whole lot more because that’s all it is: a highlight reel. It never digs deep enough, shoots fast enough, or runs far enough to be considered worthy of mentioning in the same breath as those spy thriller greats as anything other than a cursory imitation with a small bit of heart.
Defector is developed by Twisted Pixel Games and releases today exclusively for Oculus Rift headsets via Oculus Home for $19.99. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
B-Team also features special guest appearances by Michael Dudikoff (American Ninja, Platoon Leader), Eric Roberts (Best of the Best, The Dark Knight), Cynthia Rothrock (China O’Brien, Martial Law), Don “The Dragon” Wilson (Bloodfist, Batman Forever), and Fred “The Hammer” Williamson (From Dusk Till Dawn, M*A*S*H).
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Defector’s main problem is that it does a poor job of establishing any connective tissue between the five levels other than very loose character motives. The opening mission has a cool reveal moment in which an enemy ends up being your partner in disguise all along with some high stakes intensity as you try to escape a flaming plane hurtling towards the ground 
