There’s something wonderful about the ability to make music. Like so many, at least in the UK, the only real dalliance I personally had with learning to play music was to have a cheap plastic recorder forcibly shoved into my mouth at Primary School when I was about six or seven. Unfortunately, there’s only so many times you can botch playing Three Blind Mice and mangle Frère Jacques at that age before your enthusiasm for the whole thing somewhat wanes.
There is though no age barrier to begin learning anything new, and earlier in the week VRFocus brought you news of just one way you could learn how to play a musical instrument (or at least enjoy putting music together) courtesy of a new product direct from Beamz Interactive and Vive Studios – Jam Studio VR.
Supporting, naturally, the HTC Vive, Jam Studio VR is an interactive music app which allows anyone at any level of ability find out just what is needed to make music – even perform a set as a DJ. Composition, playing, learning, it’s all wrapped up in the app which contains a library of 20 plus tracks to try out. Out on Steam, the app is also available via Viveport which recently uploaded a launch trailer to its that you can see below.
Beyond that however, the developers also wanted to showcase how it operates, so as part of an “in action” video they turned to Megadeth bassist David Ellefson to talk about how you could be creating your own symphony of destruction via virtual reality (VR). You can see that too below.
VRFocus will be bringing you more release news from Vive and Viveport throughout the coming week.
It is an ambition of many people to learn how to play a musical instrument, though for most the opportunity is out of reach for a variety of reasons. Making music has just become a little easier with the launch of Jam Studio VR from Vive Studios.
Jam Studio VR is an interactive music performance app which lets anyone regardless of musical talent or experience discover what it is like to make music or perform a DJ set. Using the HTC Vive motion controls, users can compose and play musical scores, playing various kinds of virtual instruments, or make like a DJ and construct beats and loops.
The library contains over 20 interactive songs featuring well-known artists such as Miley Cyrus, The Jonas Brothers, Flo Rida, guitarist Craig Chaquico and Megadeth bassist David Ellefson. Other sings can be added through in-app purchases, such as music from Disney, or various other artist and content bundles. Once users have composed their own mix, they can record and share their creations with friends.
“Our goal is to create a whole new category of interactive music and gaming applications that takes advantage of Virtual Reality technology. Jam Studio VR delivers just that!” said Charlie Mollo, Beamz Interactive’s CEO. “Using our advanced triggering and synchronization technology and IP position, we’re able to create a truly unique interactive music experience that makes it easy and exciting to engage people of all ages and skill levels.”
“Jam Studio VR is at the forefront of creating a new category of interactive music and music gaming apps for VR. We are very excited to partner with Beamz and develop this leading edge interactive music performance application for Vive”, said Joel Breton, VP of Vive Studios. “This family friendly app will lead the way for how users create and experience music in VR.”
Jam Studio VR is available for HTC Vive on Steam for £14.99 (GBP).
VRFocus will bring you further information on Jam Studio VR as it becomes available.
Editor’s Note: This review was originally published on June 29th but has been republished due to the game releasing on Steam for download.
HTC’s mission with Vive Studios is supposedly to foster the creativity and vision needed to deliver high-quality VR experiences directly to their users. Fund them directly and publish a portfolio of quality content; that was the mission, similar to Oculus Studios. The first two Vive Studios titles — Arcade Saga and Virtual Sports (formerly known as VR Sports) — are simple and fun, but far from the level of quality people would expect. Then there’s Front Defense, which is being developed by the internal HTC team named Fantahorn Studio.
In Front Defense you take on the role of a soldier in the Allied forces during World War II (WWII) in a fight against the German armies. The concept is to deliver a trusted genre (the first-person shooter) with a popular setting (WWII) to VR in order to attract a more core gaming audience. The problem though is that it’s just another wave shooter that lacks the creativity and depth needed to be anything more than a passing curiosity.
Front Defense is split up into four main pieces of content: a shooting range tutorial and three (yes, only three) different levels. You crouch down behind cover, pop up to shoot enemies, reload your gun, throw grenades, and do other WWII shooter things without ever moving from your spot. You’ll spend the vast majority of this game hunkered down on your knees miming the presence of a gun in your hands.
After playing PSVR games like Farpoint using the Aim Controller, the absence of a physical object in my hands on the HTC Vive was remarkably noticeable. People have crafted peripherals like that out of PVC pipe and there are even a handful of them in development with massive price tags or Vive tracker requirements, but there’s something to be said for a single universal gun accessory that’s officially backed and supported by a platform manufacturer like Sony.
Even though it’s 2017 and VR headsets have been commercially available with hundreds of games for over a year now, the mere fact that Front Defense is a wave shooter doesn’t automatically make it a bad game. There are lots of very good wave shooters in VR. But Front Defense lacks any unique design elements or gameplay mechanics to really make it stand out from the pack.
For everything it does well, it falters in a handful of other ways. As an example, reloading weapons like your rifle feels great. You remove the magazine, reach down to get a new one, and slam it into the base of the gun — similar to how reloading works in PlayStation VR World’s The London Heist. But then to remove the pin from a grenade you have to hold it up to your mouth (to simulate pulling it out with your teeth I guess?) and wait a second or two until the sound effect of the pin removing plays, then throw it. Nice idea in theory, poorly executed in practice.
Then there are the issues with enemies. In every level you’ll just gun down endless waves until the end. They’re not intelligent and don’t operate like any video game soldiers I’ve seen in the past 10 years. Often times I’d see them just standing on balconies waiting to get shot or blindly running between cover spots with no regard for the bullets peppering their torsos.
That all sounds harsh, but it’s true. Steam in particular is overrun with new, simplistic wave shooters created by small teams that flood the market with content each and every week. Shoot a few enemies, reload a new wave or level, rinse and repeat. But even some of the most popular early VR wave shooters, such as The Brookhaven Experiment, at least hung their hat on a specific hook such as survival horror to set them apart. That doesn’t seem to be the case with Front Defense though.
The honest truth though is that some people are going to enjoy this despite it all. If you’re new to VR, love the WWII setting, or just really like shooting guns while wearing a headset, then this isn’t a bad game. But in the grand scheme of things with all things considered, Front Defense should have been better.
Final Score: 4/10 – Disappointing
Front Defense feels like a game that was made without an audience in mind. The dedicated VR users that have enough space (it needs approximately three square meters of room) will have played plenty of VR shooters by now, many that are just better than this. The core gamers a WWII shooter is supposed to appeal to will get bored far too quickly with the lack of depth. And the small sliver of people left in the middle that are hungry enough to buy just another wave shooter will leave disappointed that this isn’t a more complete experience from Vive Studios.
Front Defense from Vive Studios is a newly created World War II shooter that does its best to emulate the feeling of being hunkered down behind cover fighting for your life in the heat of battle. Instead of running around the map while gunning down enemies, you’ll need to actually kneel and crouch down behind cover while using a variety of guns and weapons at your disposal.
In the launch trailer below you can see some of the action on display. Front Defense was first announced over a year ago as HTC’s very own Vive game and since then the internal Vive Studios developer has gone on to release Arcade Saga and Virtual Sports (formerly known as VR Sports). Both of those previous titles have a decidedly whimsical and arcadey feel, while Front Defense appears to be targeted more at the core shooter audience.
Check back tomorrow for our full review of Front Defense, but in the meantime, let us know what you think if you’re playing it already yourself. You can access the game on Viveport (or using a Viveport subscription) starting today. Check out some more gameplay videos of the game right here.
Having announced ‘Vive Studios’ at the end of 2016, HTC is steadily building up its first-party VR content offering. After a number of relatively well received titles launched under the umbrella of Vive Studios, we take the latest, Front Defense VR, for a test drive.
What is it that makes the HTC Vive special and different from the other VR platforms on the market? It depends who you ask. It used to be the tracked motion controllers, but that is no longer the case. Is it the room-scale? That’s a huge plus for sure, but with a little jiggery-pokery the Rift can get close enough for some people. Is it the tracking? This at least is still best in class, for my money. Content? While you might argue that Rift and PSVR with their exclusives rule the roost here, there’s still much to recommend the Vive ecosystem.
Crawling around on hands and knees behind the virtual sandbags of Front Defense VR, there’s no need to wonder how HTC would answer the question. With its first release from internal developer Fantahorn Studio for the Vive, we find that the answer is resounding: room-scale. Specifically a play area so large that no competing platforms can come close. Hope you’ve got a nice big play space, people, because anything less than three metres square just ain’t gonna cut it with Front Defense VR. Time to build that underground VR bunker in the garden.
Front Defense VR Details:
Publisher: HTC / Vive Studios Developer: Fantahorn Studio Available On: HTC Vive (Viveport, Steam) Reviewed On: HTC Vive (Steam) Release Date: June 27, 2017 (Viveport), July 7th (Steam)
Gameplay
Front Defense VR is a World War II shooter spread over three (yes, just three) stages, and your position is entirely static so there is no question about methods of locomotion or anything like that—it’s completely ‘real’ locomotion within your room-scale playspace. For the vast majority of the time you’ll be hunkered down within your small sandbagged enclosure to avoid being riddled with bullets. You’ll pop up occasionally to start thinning out the waves of enemy troops that will swarm the area in increasing number as the situation escalates from foot soldiers to motor vehicles, mortars, armoured cars, tanks, and strafing runs from squadrons of enemy planes.
Standing against this tide of enemy combatants are you and a motley crew of anonymous friendly soldiers that appear around you, there to provide the illusion of a cinematic battle just like all the other militaristic shooters of the last two decades. There’s not much going on in their heads though, and the stilted animation fails to convince. Likewise with the enemy soldiers, their behaviours much more in line with arcade classic Operation Wolf (1987) than anything more contemporary. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in an arcade shooter.
There’s nothing to link the three stages, they exist as standalone entities and entertain to varying degrees. There’s no attempt at real depth aside from score attack leaderboards, but it really does scratch that score attack itch—it’s fun to go back into the stages and eke out a little more progress, to see the scenario escalate another notch, to survive against increasingly ridiculous odds.
My favourite is actually the first scenario, a relatively simple setup on some classically European back streets, with enemies appearing on balconies, from side streets, around corners and through distant archways. While the second encounter—defending an HQ inside a church that opens onto a town square—adds in the ability to call in an airstrike, it lacks the focus of the first. The rail yard of the third encounter, with its strafing aircraft, introduces move overt destructible scenery and acts as a challenging climax.
The weapons at your disposal are drawn from predictable stock: a pistol, a rifle, a bazooka, some grenades, and the odd fixed emplacement, like a mounted machinegun. Each is enjoyable enough to fire, with a convenient red dot projected onto enemies for the pistol and rifle making it easier to pick off distant targets. The fact that fixed emplacements are located near to the edges of the play space means that if your physical area is hemmed in by walls or furniture then you won’t be able to fully interact with and aim these elements so easily.
Most weapons are picked up by reaching into them and picking them up with the trigger which then locks the weapon to your hand while the trigger reverts to its traditional firing role. Reloading the rifle is as simple as ripping out the old clip, grabbing a new one from your side, and ramming it home. This is the best of the bunch, and feels as intuitive as some of the best games in the genre. The pistol uses a press of the touchpad to release a clip but you can’t fully slide the new clip in because you’d crash the two controllers together, so you’re left with the unsatisfying act of holding it near the bottom of the gun and releasing it to reload.
Not that loading the rifle is easy all the time; the game does its best to guess where your waistline is based on head and hand positions, but all too often the ammo belt actually appeared ‘inside’ me as I was crouched down, making it impossible to retrieve ammo without committing accidental seppuku with my Vive controller. Even aiming the fixed weapons can be fraught: if you move your hands too far away from the handle you become detached, and it’s often a second or two before you realise what has happened.
How Front Defense VR handles grenades must have sounded awesome in the planning meeting… “Guys, I’ve had a great idea! Let’s get the player to pull the pin out with their teeth before throwing the grenade!” Sadly the reality—after a few aborted attempts at punching oneself in the face—is that you sort of hover the hand grenade in front of your nose for a second until you hear the pin eject. It gets the job done, but it’s a far cry from the marketing vision. The bazooka suffers a similar fate, with the loading of a rocket into the rear of the weapon reduced to simply holding it in the rough vicinity and letting go, whereupon it instantly disappears into the tube. It’s pragmatic, but not exactly immersive.
Actually, the whole experience falls well underneath the expected bar for quality in mid-2017. It’s a small scale, uninspiring setup in a fairly crowded genre, riddled with some of the hoariest clichés of VR interaction and a strangely ugly 2D menu system with incongruous blue floating buttons. The visuals can’t be configured in any way, so supersampling isn’t an option for people on more capable machines. As a result, prepare to squint at distant, muddy pixels as you try to figure out which burnt out window frame the enemy soldier is occupying, or which piece of cover they are hunkered down behind.
Note: we’ve asked the developers to confirm that the lack of any graphical settings isn’t just a limitation of our review copy, and will update when we hear back. It’s possible some auto-setting of detail is in play, but if so my 980Ti was still sadly underutilised.
Mostly it’s just more of the same that we’ve seen before. There are occasional moments where the game’s own blend of enemy waves and the excitement of being hunkered down in such a large play space combine to truly immerse you in the moment, but it doesn’t last long. There’s never a sense of danger. Death often comes as something of a surprise, usually via an enemy soldier with a bayonet that manages to evade attention and puncture your spleen.
The biggest missed opportunity of all is that the developers have doubled-down on the large play area, but then only really used half of it. Only the area in front of the player is meaningfully utilised, with no threats ever coming from behind. It suits the nature of the game—defending fixed entrenchments, which logically would be set up to defend against one direction—but does seem at odds with a clear mission to promote the awesomeness of the Vive’s room-scale tracking capabilities.
There’s potential here, but it needs more iteration and polish. It needs more unique content, or even clever reuse of what’s there. Mostly it needs a package that ties it all together in a more interesting fashion than these three isolated stages. There’s fun here for sure, but I’m not really certain what Front Defense VR brings to the party beyond its commitment to a large play area. It’s as fun to shoot things in VR as it ever was, but as the market has matured a little over the last year, so too have our expectations, and Front Defense VR sadly fails to meet them.
Immersion
When it all comes together, Front Defense VR does decent job of convincing you that you’re in a war zone, battling against the odds. As much as I’m not a believer that the majority of Vive owners have the sort of space this game demands, I have to admit that if you do, it’s on another level compared to other experiences. Being set within a large fixed space really aids the immersion—if you happen to have a few dozen sandbags to hand you could probably concoct the ultimate version of this experience.
It’s not all roses though. Accidentally squeezing the hand grip in the heat of battle and unintentionally dropping the weapon while under heavy assault? Immersion killer. Clanging controllers together when reloading the pistol? Immersion killer. Smashing a controller into the headset when trying to prime a grenade? Immersion killer. The same two or three sounds/barks issuing in quick succession? Immersion killer. Trying to aim a fixed machine gun mounted in a corner of the play area and smacking into a wall? Immersion killer. Stilted people animations? Immersion killer.
Many of these issues have been solved by other developers, and clear solutions exist. Quite why the developers in this case have persisted with such obviously bad design decisions remains a mystery.
To end on a high note, though, the necessity to get down low and crawl around on the floor a little really helps to set the experience apart from others that are primarily standing. In this regard at least, the game is in rare company.
Comfort
As there is zero artificial locomotion, comfort is perfectly fine throughout. The only caveat is that—if you intend to survive for more than ten seconds in the game—you will need to get down low either by crouching or crawling around on the floor. Depending on your fitness (my aging bones were protesting at the end of a protracted session with the game!) this may or may not be an issue. Knee pads optional.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
MakeVR ist eine 3D-Modellierapp vom Entwicklerteam Sixsense, das bereits für das STEM-System, einem Full Body Wireless Motion Tracking System, bekannt ist. Die App ist bereits seit einigen Jahren in der Entwicklung und wurde letztlich am 27. März, gemeinsam mit den HTC Vive Studios veröffentlicht.
Startschwierigkeiten während der Kickstarter Kampagne und Kooperation mit HTC
Bereits zu Beginn des Jahres 2014 startete das Unternehmen eine Kickstarter Kampagne, bei der sie 66.294 USD sammelten. Leider betrug das Ziel 250.000 USD, weshalb man die Sammelaktion abbrach. Entsprechend gab es Anpassungen am Projekt. Ursprünglich sollte die App lediglich Support für die Oculus Rift bieten. Dies wurde zugunsten der HTC Vive geändert, denn mit diesem VR-Headset ist die App nun kompatibel. Damit das funktioniert, wurde der Support für die Controller an die HTC Vive angepasst. Außerdem unterstützt HTC nun die Entwicklung, weshalb die App unter dem Namen der Vive Studios veröffentlicht wird und den entsprechenden Titel trägt.
MakeVR die App für 3-D-Modellierung
Mit der App MakeVR kann jeder Nutzer 3D-Inhalte erschaffen. Dabei ist nicht einmal viel Vorerfahrung nötig. Egal ob (un-)erfahrener CAD-Modellierer oder einfacher Nutzer, nach einer kurzen Zeit soll jeder imstande sein mit der VR-App zu arbeiten. Zudem unterstützt die App das 3D-Drucken der erstellten Inhalte. Dadurch kann man seine Kreationen direkt zum Leben erwecken. Als Grundlage verwendet die MakeVR eine professionelle CAD-Engine mit THI, wodurch sämtliche notwendigen Werkzeuge vorhanden sind.
Die beiden Partner HTC und Sixsense entwickelten ihre Virtual Reality App nicht nur für den Einzelnutzer, sondern erhoffen sich von ihrem Produkt die Verbreitung im industriellen Markt. So sollen bald viele Firmen die MakeVR als Grundlage für neue innovative Modelle verwenden. Im Gegensatz zu Konkurrenzprodukten, die ihren Fokus auf das freie Modellieren legen, besticht MakeVR in der Präzisionsarbeit, die durch die verwendete CAD-Engine möglich ist.
MakeVR ist im Viveport, HTCs digitalen Laden für VR-Erfahrungen, für ca. 26 € erhältlich.
MakeVR is a name you might not have heard in some time. Created by STEM System developer, Sixense, this is a 3D modelling app that’s been in development for some years. Longer, in fact, than the platform its debuting on today, the HTC Vive.
Since a cancelled Kickstarter campaign in early 2014 — which raised $66,294 of its $250,000 goal — Sixense has refined MakeVR, expanding beyond its initial Oculus Rift support and adapting its controller support to include the HTC Vive wands. It’s also now a Vive Studios title, meaning its development has been assisted by HTC. From today, however, the app is actually available from Viveport, HTC’s digital storefront for VR experiences, as a commercial product. It costs $19.99.
MakeVR is designed to open the doors to 3D content creation for just about anyone with accessible design that can get even inexperienced CAD modellers or random Vive users up and running with it in a short amount of time. 3D printing support allows you to bring your creations to life, and the app allows for real-time scaling of creations.
HTC and Sixense hope that MakeVR becomes an industry standard tool, using a “professional CAD engine” to provide users with advanced tools. This is a hotly contested use for VR right now, though. MakeVR isn’t competing with other creative apps like Tilt Brush and Oculus Medium so much as it is VR4CAD and others that aim to capture the professional market too.
Of course when MakeVR was originally announced it was intended to be used with Sixense’s own position-tracked controllers, the STEM System. The controllers have had a troubled life since successfully closing a Kickstarter campaign in late 2013, though, and still haven’t been shipped out to backers. When we caught up with the company earlier this month we still couldn’t get a clear picture of when they might become available.
Vive-maker HTC has been adamant that it’s against exclusive content in the VR ecosystem thus far. In fact, it would go as far as to say rival Oculus’ exclusive games are “problematic” for the industry.
Speaking to Gamespot, Vice President of Global VR Content Joel Breton said that Oculus’ own approach to exclusivity with its Oculus Studios games was “hampering developers’ ability to create large communities by blocking them out from other platforms.”
Continuing on, he explained that even though these games might not exist without Oculus’ funding, making them exclusive was “problematic” for developers in the long-term as they can’t develop “relative to the market size” and that Oculus was “putting more cash in than the market can ever recoup, or the developer can ever recoup” thus studios might struggle to adapt with future titles. He said studios were “going to struggle because they’re not able to develop at the size and scope that the market is at.”
The just-released Oculus exclusive Robo Recall was developed with a budget close to the original Gears of War and given away for free.
He pointed to Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator [Review: 8/10] as a case for bringing titles to all available platforms. “They are certainly a success story in early VR of finding a good concept that they can develop within the scope and budgets that make sense for today’s market,” Breton said.
Now that it’s funding and developing games with its Vive Studios banner, though, it’s time to put its money where its mouth is, and the company certainly looks to be doing so. Breton said that HTC is looking to bring its first Studios title, Arcade Saga, to Sony’s PlayStation VR (PSVR). He said that Sony “expressed a willingness to let us do that.”
The game, which was revealed alongside the announcement of Vive Studios itself late last year, already launched on the HTC Vive and came to the Oculus Rift a few days later, but bringing it to Sony’s headset means porting it to another platform entirely, rather than just translating it from one PC-based VR headset to the other. Arcade Saga is a fairly simple compilation of three arcade classics refitted for VR including brick breaking and futuristic bow and arrow shooting.
HTC considers Arcade Saga as a first-party developed game, meaning made internally. As for second-party content, which is made by partners and funded and published by the company, Breton said that developers are free to do what they like. He pointed to Grab Games’ Knockout League, which HTC co-published on Vive, but is also available on Rift. It’s up to the studio itself as to if it comes to PSVR.
Breton disagreed that not creating exclusive content could hurt HTC’s headset in the long run. “Here’s the bottom line,” he said. “We’re not using content as a weapon. We’re using content to help create and sustain the VR ecosystem.”
This week at GDC 2017 the head of Vive Studios, Joel Brennon, announced a brand new title for the HTC Vive headset developed by Free Range Games. It’s called VR Sports and if that sounds familiar it’s because it should.
Last year Oculus Studios released a game called VR Sports Challenge (8.5/10) — shown below. This was a launch title for the Oculus Touch controller platform and it featured a variety of different sporting mini-games that showed off the capabilities of the new devices.
Sports applications are a simple, easy to understand and fun for VR users. However, like all Oculus Studios games it could only be played on the Oculus Rift headset.
VR Sports Challenge focused on football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. The Vive Studios answer, VR Sports, drops the last word of the title and focuses on ping pong and tennis exclusively. And it absolutely nails it.
I had the chance to try VR Sports during a meeting with Vive at GDC this week. I was booted into a room that looked like Pearl Jam’s AirBnB. The walls were grungy, a chalkboard was covered in graffiti, and there was a bonfire next to a motorcycle for no reason at all. Contrasting this grunge was a pristine, red and blue ping pong table. Across it stood my opponent: a man comprised of a head, torso, hands and nothing else. One would think these physical limitations would hold him back in a game like ping pong, but he overcame them gloriously.
Ping Pong in VR Sports plays phenomenally. I love the game in real life and seeing it brought into VR with such amazing physics and satisfying haptics brought an instant smile to my face. The only thing that reminded me that this was not a real ping pong match was that I was slightly more successful than usual inside the game’s engine than I am in the real world.
This is not to say that the game was easy, however. Mr. No Arms across the way got more than his fair share of shots past me and made some amazing saves. I eventually won the game. But not by much.
Tennis is similarly realistic and physically satisfying in VR Sports. Every time your opponent sends the ball your way the game warps you to the best position from which to return if all you want to do is focus on swinging correctly. However, you can use the trackpad to warp around the court freely as well.
Both sports will also feature either a casual or challenging play with tournament mode, as well as cometitive head-to-head multiplayer for each available at launch. Each sport has six different opponents, along with with different corresponding environment to match and different play styles.
VR Sports should have actual ping pong manufacturers shaking in their boots. I can’t imagine families of the future spending hundreds on a table when something this convincing is playable with VR.
VR Sports is slated to launch on Steam with HTC Vive support on March 14th for $19.99.
Vive Studios and Grab Games launched Knockout League this week to bring arcade boxing to virtual reality.
Grab Games made the classic boxing game for VR, and Vive Studios is publishing it today on early access on Steam for the HTC Vive. HTC is investing heavily in VR, which could be a $25 billion market by 2021, according to tech adviser Digi-Capital.
Vive Studios is the VR content development and publishing initiative at HTC, the company that created the HTC Vive based on Valve’s SteamVR technology.
“We’re excited to be supporting great developers at Vive Studios, and partnering with Grab Games on Knockout League is another step forward in bringing high quality, super-fun VR experiences to market,” said Joel Breton, head of Vive Studios, in a statement. “Knockout League is a fast-paced boxing game that will give you a real work out, combining the action of arcade-style fighting games with the thrill of physically fighting opponents in VR.”
Grab Games counts ex-Konami developers among its founders. The single-player game is a fast-paced VR experience that was inspired by console fighting games. It’s available today for HTC Vive on Steam for the special early access price of $18. It is also available in China on the Viveport store.
Players have to move, dodge, and swing at cartoon boxers. Players feel the thrill of accurate punches and movement as they stand toe-to-toe with fighters. Foes range from human boxers to fantastic creatures.
Above: Knockout League is on the HTC Vive.
Image Credit: Vive Studios
In the early access version, players have a chance to experience the first four fighters in the game, each with a different fighting style. It will also include a tutorial training mode to teach key game strategies, along with mini-games such as speed bag to get players warmed up and ready to fight.
“As huge fans of the boxing genre, we’ve always wanted to build a unique action-based boxing game, and Vive gives us the perfect platform to realize that vision,” said Anthony Borquez, CEO of Grab Games, in a statement. “We’re eager to see how gamers embrace this kind of VR experience and give us feedback on early access as we create future content. Our team has more than ten years of experience in game development — we’re passionate about games and we want to bring the same kind of memorable experiences to virtual reality.”
Vive Studios and Grab Games will continue to add content between now and the launch of the full version of Knockout League, expected in the second quarter of 2017. In addition, Grab Games is planning to add compatibility for the recently announced Vive Tracker, which enables developers to incorporate everyday objects into VR.
There is though no age barrier to begin learning anything new, and earlier in the week VRFocus brought you news of just one way you could learn how to play a musical instrument (or at least enjoy putting music together) courtesy of a new product direct from Beamz Interactive and Vive Studios – Jam Studio VR.
