It’s been nearly a year now since we’ve had to stay indoors to stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic, and you’d be forgiven if you’ve become a lot less active as a result. There’s no better time than the present though to get up and moving, and we’ve got five awesome VR games that can help you do just that.
Here’s our top five VR games to not only keep your heart rate up, but trick you into having a blast while doing it.
Warning: Make sure to clear your play area first, and stay far away from your TV, pets, babies, and priceless Fabergé eggs!
5 – Until You Fall
Doing intense cardio workouts is awesome for heart health, but if you’re looking for a more casual starting point, you definitely need to jump into this rogue-lite sword & sorcery game from the illustrious Schell Games, the same studio behind the I Expect You to Die VR puzzle franchise. You’ll get getting an arm workout in without even knowing it.
Thrill of the Fight (2016) is an oldie, but a goodie. Created by Sealost Interactive, this single-player boxing sim is considered one of the best ways to get a high intensity cardio workout and let out a little frustration while you’re at it. Sorry folks, there’s no PSVR version yet, but at this late date in the headset’s life cycle, there may never be. Look to our honorable mentions below for more great boxing sims!
Shoot, dodge, and bash a dude in the face: that’s all there is to it in Pistol Whip (2019). But when more baddies come and you have to start dodging bullets like Neo from The Matrix, you’ll almost forget you’re basically doing a pretty comprehensive cardio routine. There’s also been a steady stream of free levels this past year, making Pistol Whip even bigger and cooler.
The promise of free-style dancing and addictive synthwave tunes will have you up and grooving to the beat in Kluge Interactive’s fun and funky VR rhythm game. It’s a great go-to for single-player action, but one of the best bits is the recent addition of power-ups and multiplayer Kart-style racing, which will have you playing against friends online to see who can get the highest score. PSVR version is set to come sometime in 2021.
For the sheer density of levels, difficulties, and production value, Beat Saber (2018) still comes out on top, even years after its release. Time and time again, this block-slashing rhythm game manages to get you moving, dancing, and going back for more to get that perfect ‘S’ class result on your favorite Expert+ song, all the while tricking you into working out. Multiplayer isn’t perfect, but if you’re looking for an unbeatable workout you’ll love all of the single-player content Beat Saber has to offer.
Update (February 15th, 2021): It’s been a long year of social distancing, but also a great opportunity for studios to mobilize and offer up some great fitness-focused games. We’re constantly keeping an eye out for fun, new games though. Let us know in the comments below your favorite fitness game!
Ian Fitz, the independent VR developer behind popular VR boxing simulator, Thrill of the Fight, stated in an email to a Reddit user that even though his game designed to theoretically work well without controllers, it would not be getting support for Quest hand-tracking due to the device’s current limitations.
Thrill of the Fight is a very active and very intense VR game that pits players against AI-controlled opponents in boxing rings. As opposed to games like Creed: Rise to Glory or Knockout League, which are a bit more arcade-style, Thrill of the Fight is more focused on simulation-style gameplay. To that end, it feels more like you’re actually boxing than most others.
Since accuracy is extremely important in a game like this, Quest’s hand tracking wasn’t quite good enough (at this stage) to work for his game, according to Fitz. The full email states:
“TotF [Thrill of the Fight] was intentionally designed to be usable without button presses and so would theoretically work great with hand tracking. I’ve played around with the hand tracking on Quest though, and it doesn’t seem capable enough to handle the gameplay of TotF. The hand tracking only works when it has a good view of your hands in a specific area in front of the headset. It loses track of the hands if they are too close to the headset, too far away, or too far to the sides, so it doesn’t handle blocking or punching well.”
Based on that logic, it makes sense why the most practical use cases for hand-tracking on Quest right now revolve around menu and UI navigation and very light interactions rather than actively punching and moving around a lot. Maybe in a future iteration of the Quest when cameras have a wider tracking volume and can keep up with fast hand speeds things will be different.
We’ve reached out to Fitz as well directly for additional comment on the topic and will update this post if we hear back.
Which games do you most want to play with hand-tracking on Quest? Let us know down in the comments below!
Another contender is stepping into the ring on Oculus Quest. Grab Games’ Knockout League hits the platform soon.
The slapstick VR boxing game will launch on the standalone headset on October 17. An Oculus Store listing for the game confirms as much.
Knockout League is a little different from other VR boxing games like Creed: Rise to Glory and The Thrill Of The Fight (both of which are either on or coming to Quest). While the game does have a deep combat system, it’s far from a simulation. Your enemies, for example, range from a mad scientist using technology to confront you to, well, a tea-drinking octopus named Sir Octopunch. Need I say more?
We were quite fond of Knockout League when it first launched on PC VR headsets. “Knockout League is a VR game that makes no qualms with trying to hide what it is or fool you into thinking it’s something more,” we wrote. “This is about as direct a translation of the classic Punch-Out!! arcade-style gameplay as you’re going to find and it absolutely works, even if it lacks some originality.”
The game’s since come to PSVR too.
The store listing confirms that the game will support cross-buy. That means if you bought the Rift version of the game on the Oculus Store, you’ll get it for free on Quest. Otherwise, it’ll cost $19.99.
There’s plenty more Quest goodness on the way, too. Synth Riders is due before the end of the month and Pistol Whip finally arrives in early November. Best charge those headsets.
Will you be buying Knockout League Quest? Let us know in the comments below!
CREED: Rise to Glory is a boxing game that aims to get you up and sweating with what promises to deliver the Rocky-style underdog victory that couch jockies like me have always dreamed about. While the campaign is both shorter and lighter on story than it probably could have been, it delivers some heavy-hitting game mechanics that do pretty well considering you’re effectively punching at air.
Developer: Survios Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift,), Oculus Store (Rift), PlayStation Store (PSVR) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Release Date: September 25th, 2018
Gameplay
There’s not much to know about the story behind Creed: Rise to Glory. Like in the films, you follow series protagonist Adonis “Hollywood” Creed, the son of Apollo Creed, and fight to become the champ.
Story elements are told through a radio program playing in the gym, which serves as your sanctuary where you can train before fights and hear a little bit about the boxing world outside of the gym’s four walls. A single flashback of you punching out a bouncer and presumably losing a love interest are light padding to the game’s main event: dodging and making sure your stamina isn’t too low so you can land effective punches during matches. And while I felt the story definitely could have played out to a grander, more dramatic effect with a longer arc than what its six primary enemies provided, the most important things are strong fundamentals and being engaging enough to revisit, which is clearly the case in Creed: Rise to Glory.
Image courtesy Survios
As someone who’s never boxed before, I can’t really say with much certainty how true Creed VR is to the actual sport, but it appears to have been game-ified well into arcade territory. The Rocky films, and by extension the Creed films, are fantastical fights that probably could never happen in reality anyway. Like with many sports films, the technicality of the sport is mostly lost in those big dramatized moments that challenge the main character, and help them come to a hard-won resolution. Stepping into the ring with the lights, the crowd, and the announcer, it easily matched up to my already warped expectations of how boxing is portrayed in film—that much I can say with confidence; I felt like I was in a movie, and it was awesome.
Iconic training montages with Rocky Balboa, voiced with a convincing-enough impression of Sylvester Stallone, prefaced most fights, giving you that all important cinematic touchstone.
Image captured by Road to VR
Introducing what Survios calls ‘Phantom Melee Technology’, Creed uses a sort of body desynchronization when either your stamina is low, or when you’re staggered from a powerful punch. Low stamina is indicated by the color of your gloves, which will flash red to make sure you know your punches will be slower than your actual physical ability to shadow box. This keeps you on the guard more than you might otherwise be, as the only way to recuperate stamina is by holding you hands still. Enemies will also dodge and block your hits too, making them more than just simple punching bags.
Getting staggered happens in two stages. A powerful punch can put you in a quick out-of-body experience that requires you to match up your hands to two targets, allowing you to pop back into the fight.
Image captured by Road to VR
More devastating punches can knock you way out of the ring, requiring you to ‘run’ back and jump back into your body. These are fun and truly creative ways of making you feel like you’re hanging on to a bare thread in the more difficult matches.
Image captured by Road to VR
A few methods of activating slow motion sequences really drive home the cinematic nature of the game, as you dodge a punch or land a big hit that places temporary target’s on your opponent’s body.
All of these systems work extremely well, but the learning curve is somewhat steep. There is no visible HP or stamina bar, so spending some extra time in training is probably a good thing so you can start to really feel out how many hits you can take and how many you can give before throwing yourself at the actual matches.
I beat the campaign mode in about an hour an a half on normal difficulty, although that was stretched out over several sessions simply based on my own admittedly out-of-shape cardio abilities. It’s easy to see using Creed: Rise to Glory in an actual cardio routine to get less than active people (like me) up from the chair and getting their heart pumping. I felt enemies weren’t terribly varied in the attack styles, as it seems difficulty is mostly based more on the NPC’s individual punch strength and HP.
While I was left somewhat disappointed by the shortness of the campaign mode, thankfully you can mix and match enemies, gyms, and boxing locales in free play. Another big addition recently announced to arrive on all platforms is PvP online multiplayer. Online multiplayer presents a good opportunity to really turn the technical difficulty up, as live players exploit tactics that NPCs simply can’t think of, like running around the ring and going for a drive-by punch. These online battles are intense, and provided some of my most tiring battles.
While at times on the cartoonish side, character models and their animations are very well-done and can be genuinely intimidating too. Seeing a near seven foot-tall guy trying to hit me in the face isn’t something I’m really used to, and even though nothing bad can happen outside of accidentally punching a wall/TV/monitor, there are some moments before the fight when you subconsciously size up the competition.
Image captured by Road to VR
Impressive and realistic set pieces help ground you in the world, although it’s clear Creed: Rise to Glory is definitely bucking up against some of the inherent limitations of the current state of VR. Without any bodily feedback outside of the controller’s haptics, it’s difficult to completely immerse yourself in the act of dodging and blocking, two things that require more than visual cues to accomplish. Oftentimes I had my gloves up, obscuring my vision, and without force feedback (which at this point isn’t possible), you just have to rely on the controller’s buzzy haptics and the game’s visual cues to tell if you’ve hit your opponent or pulled your punch too early. That said, it’s great to know that Creed VR has entirely bypassed the ‘waggle simulator’ trend of earlier titles, as it not only requires you to punch quickly, but do it accurately for the sake of lost stamina.
The game’s AI is pretty darn good. At moments I could feel the AI sussing out my head’s position and aiming accurately for my noggin despite I had dodged an earlier punch. NPCs feel mostly solid, although you can actually run through them if you want.
Image captured by Road to VR
While based mostly on room-scale movement, there are moments when you need to artificially move from point A to point B, including when you square off at the beginning of the fight and during moments when you’re knocked out and have to run back to your body to continue the fight. Moving in the game is accomplished by swinging your arms while holding down the applicable buttons on each controller, which sends you sliding forward. Artificial locomotion is generally useless during fights, so it usually comes down to standing in place and punching it out like rock’em sock’em robots, albeit with a little more finesse and dodging/blocking abilities.
Both room-scale and the game’s only other locomotion scheme, detailed above, are extremely comfortable ways of moving around VR.
That said, this is a very physical standing game that will get your heart beating, and definitely get you sweating through the padding on your headset if you’re not careful. That’s not so much a knock on the game’s comfort rating as it is an advisory to plan ahead. Pop on some gym shorts for an extended session, because you’ll soon be huffing and puffing with all the dodging, bobbing and punching you’ll be doing.
Like with many more physical VR games, there’s a risk of hyperextending your arms alla tennis elbow, so it may be best to take frequent breaks if you have some pre-existing joint issues.
Survios, the studio behind Raw Data (2017) and Sprint Vector (2018), debuted a new single player VR game this year on the GDC expo floor, an upcoming arcade boxing title that puts you in the shoes of Adonis Creed, son of Apollo Creed and protegé of Rocky Balboa.
It’s hard not to stop and gawk at people playing Creed: Rise to Glory in pair of actual boxing rings on the expo floor. While a small crowd of curious onlookers formed around the side-by-side rings, we got a chance to record a first look of the game in action.
The demo first puts you in the gym with a lifelike Sylvester Stallone where you train with heavy bags and punching dummies, each their own minigame. Later you’re tossed into the ring to experience the game’s unique desync mechanic which not only slows down your in-game boxing gloves as you lose stamina, but can knock you completely out of your body if you get staggered or even knocked out.
Survios hasn’t announced which platform the arcade boxer will hit when it arrives later this year, although we’ve seen it demoed both on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Hot on the tail of Survios’ latest release, Sprint Vector (2018), the studio today announced their next VR project, Creed: Rise to Glory, a VR boxing game being developed in partnership with MGM as a complement to the upcoming Creed II movie. While there’s a handful of VR boxing games already available, Survios is promising something called ‘Phantom Melee Technology’, which the company says will offer “an authentic immersive experience that truly makes you feel like a boxing world champion.”
Survios’ latest VR title, Sprint Vector hinges entirely around a unique and highly effective locomotion system that the company calls Fluid Locomotion. The system allows players to navigate immersively and comfortably in VR at high speeds, and it’s clear that Survios put a lot of time and effort into developing the system.
With Creed: Rise to Glory, due out later this year, the company is building the game upon a new set of VR mechanics which Survios calls Phantom Melee Technology. The system, the company says, will enable a more realistic and immersive feeling of boxing in virtual reality:
Creed: Rise to Glory advances virtual reality through Survios’ new Phantom Melee Technology, addressing the ongoing challenge of crafting impactful VR melee combat through a player-avatar disconnect. Phantom Melee Technology relies on a combination of Responsive Control—which triggers strategic desynchronization when the player is staggered or knocked out—and Virtual Stamina, which mimics the slowing effects of fatigue after the player delivers frantic punches or a flurry of blows, to produce authentic hit reactions. The result is a believably intense, wholly immersive boxing sensation.
Survios is working with MGM (Creed IP holder and investor in Survios) on the new title, and the pair plan to bring it to both VR arcades and home VR headsets, though specific platforms haven’t yet been announced. In the game, players can expect to put on the gloves of Adonis Creed, son of heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, and get some coaching from Rocky Balboa.
“In all the VR experiences we build, we aim to make our players feel empowered, and Creed: Rise to Glory accomplishes this in a very cinematic and active way,” says James Iliff, Survios’ chief creative officer. “We’re throwing players into iconic boxing arenas, trading blows with the top fighters from the franchise, all while experiencing the thrills and showtime dramatics of the ultimate Hollywood-style boxing exhibition. With our new Phantom Melee Technology, the game provides an authentic immersive experience that truly makes you feel like a boxing world champion.”
It certainly sounds interesting, and made all the more intriguing thanks to Survios’ strong track record; we’ll have a chance to find out soon how well it all comes together as the company plans to demo the new title at GDC 2018 in San Francisco next week.
Sony has finally released word on when PSVR owners will be able to get their hands on the popular VR boxing title Knockout League; it’s officially coming to PlayStation VR February 13th. The game has been in Early Access on SteamVR, Viveport, and the Oculus Store for almost a year. It’s uncertain if the PSVR release will mark the game’s exit from Early Access on the platforms listed above.
Update (02/11/18): According to a recent PlayStation blog post, ‘Knockout League’ will be landing on PSVR headsets February 13th. It comes alongside PSVR titles ‘Drunk n Barfight’, ‘Sprint Vector’, ‘Pop Up Pilgrims’, and ‘CubeWorks’.
Original article (12/13/17): Announced at PSX 2017, the full version of Knockout League, with its 9 opponents and training modes will make the transition to Sony’s VR platform. Played from a first person perspective, with motion controllers enabling 1:1 fist tracking, boxing is a natural fit for the current generation of VR hardware. Knockout League differentiates itself from other VR boxing games with an arcade presentation reminiscent of Nintendo’s classic Punch-Out!! series, and opponents with wildly different personalities and fighting styles.
Developer Grab Games specialises in AR/VR experiences, having created John Wick Chronicles (2017), Knockout League, and other mobile apps. Their current major project is the ‘Grab AR Tabletop Platform’, which was showcased at Google’s hardware event in October.
Knockout League (2017) is a single-player, arcade-style boxing game that promises to get your heart pumping as you duck, block, and punch your way to victory. Harking back to NES classic Punch-Out!! (1987), you learn pretty quickly that a storm of punches—the moral equivalent of button-mashing—will get you nothing if you can’t time them correctly to your opponent’s repertoire of moves. So while Knockout League can’t promise what you might call “boxing sim” realism, it definitely delivers a lot of fun along with the stark realization that I clearly don’t get enough exercise.
Knockout League Details:
Developer: Grab Games Available On: Oculus Touch, HTC Vive (Oculus Home & Steam) Reviewed on: HTC Vive Release Date: January 24th, 2017
Note: This game is in Early Access which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game’s current state, and will not receive a numerical score.
Gameplay
The game starts out with a simple training session that details all of the moves you need to know as you go against the 4 available opponents; Brazilian fighter ‘Tri-Tip’, warrior princess ‘Crimson Fang’, saber-wielding pirate ‘Scurvy Jones’, and posh English octopus ‘Sir Octopunch’.
Each of them has a signature power move that they unleash, oftentimes after you attempt a KO. Of course, taking one of these to the face can mean a near instant game over, but dodging a few punches afterwards thankfully lets you recoup your health automatically. You’ll know when you’re almost down for the count though, as each punch landed on your soft, baby face makes the world a little less colorful and also applies a ‘punch-drunk filter’ to further distort your vision.
The moment you time it just right though, and successfully dodge or block the move and deliver a series of counter blows, you really can’t help but feel like Rocky Balboa (the times he didn’t get beaten, obviously).
Knockout League reallyseems like its ready for prime time with its patently smooth scene modeling and character animations, but the paltry sum of only 4 AI opponents means you can complete the entire game in about an hour. This can be forgiven somewhat since it’s still in Early Access, and the developers have said they’ll be adding more unique opponents and additional game modes in the next 3-5 months. Hopefully it will be enough time to add more features, because as it stands currently, there isn’t any type of spendable in-game currency or any other customization options outside of picking your own name.
That said, this is one of those games you’ll force on your friends and family to try, because while definitely a shorter experience, it’s something that is sure to get plenty of laughs while testing the aerobic ability of everyone involved. Playing through each boss is certainly a workout, one that left me heaving a little more than I rightly should.
Immersion
Since this isn’t a boxing simulator, you should know there’s a few limitations put on you from the very beginning. Firstly, don’t think that you can back away from a punch in Knockout League or use the whole ring’s space to your advantage, because the game only provides you with about a square meter of space to move in—and that’s regardless of how large your room-scale setup can manage. Leaving this pre-set area will pause the game, so this forces you to actively engage your opponent in a few ways that the AI can react to, necessitating ducking and moving either to left or right of punches instead of instinctively backing up.
Fights are forward-facing, so besides ducking and moving out of the way of punches, you’ll have to block too. This wasn’t exactly my strong suit, as I could rarely activate a block in time. I couldn’t really tell if it was my fault, or the fault of the game, because quickly bringing my hands up to cover my face and activating the split-second blocking mechanic usually resulted in a smack to the jaw. I quickly learned to block though on the last boss, Sir Octopunch, because he would toss multiple impossible-to-dodge, boxing-glove clad tentacles at a time.
Punching, like in Punch-out!! is extremely mechanical, and relies purely on your ability to find out when the AI opponent is vulnerable—usually before a signature powermove, leaving them wide open to a sock right in the kisser. This, again, is another time when you have to abandon your real world expectations of fighting. There was zero reaction because I didn’t punch at the AI’s specified time, even when opponents seemed vulnerable and I clearly landed punches to an unprotected spot like the stomach or the head. Knockout League is an arcade-style game, so you’ll have to train your reptile brain to accept all of that as the punches fly.
Comfort
There is no artificial locomotion in Knockout League, meaning there’s little chance that you’ll feel any different from walking around in the real world. This makes this, and games like this, an exceedingly comfortable experience to play for extended amounts of time.
Through no fault of its own, Knockout League can get your VR headset a little sweaty after a while, so if you’re seriously thinking of playing the game for more than 15 minutes, you should consider some sort of removable cover to protect your headset’s facial interface from absorbing your smelly, bacteria-laced face goo. Both Best Buy and individual sellers on Amazon offer suitable solutions should you want to stop living like a grease-faced ham demon.
Summary
While still in Early Access, and in need of more features, opponents, and general customization to bolster replay value, ‘Knockout League’ is by far the most fun you’ll have getting punched in the face. The game’s art direction and atmosphere is extremely competent and the opponents movements, although necessarily predictable, give you quite a workout. There’s no denying the game’s charm as it harks back to arcade boxing days of old.
