Anshar Studios, the developers behind Detached (2017), showed off a new arena shooter at Gamescom this year. Dubbed Telefrag VR, the game (still in pre-alpha) pits you against another player in a futuristic, gladiatorial-style battle taking place in impossible spaces.
Set in an alternative history where the Roman Empire never fell and eventually set out into space, Telefrag tosses you into uniquely designed arenas which were seemingly inspired by M.C. Escher’s famous lithograph of impossible staircases, ‘Relativity‘. Here, you fight in a one vs one duel to the death with an arsenal of guns and your ability to teleport inside the other player, effectively killing them instantly (hence ‘telefrag’).
Maps are littered with ramps that take you upside-down and sideways, keeping you on your toes as you have to watch out for enemy fire from all directions.
Image courtesy Anshar Studios
Strapping into an Oculus Rift, I went head-to-head with the game’s level designer Michał Sapiński for a few matches in what should have been a fundamental break in comfortable VR design. I say ‘should have been’ because in the end Anshar has pushed the envelope into uncomfortable play territory, but pulled back somewhat to leave you with your lunch safely in your stomach. Case in point: you have to walk up a ramp and twist your equilibrium into accepting a new horizontal plane, which isn’t always the most comfortable in VR—but it’s done in such a way to make it basically a snag-free experience.
When you go up a ramp and the world inevitably rotates around you, it’s basically carried out via a series of mini-blink teleportations, and not one single smooth-turning gut-wrencher. This, in effect, let me move up and down ramps at the sort of speed and carelessness you would need in a heated 1v1 battle of cat and mouse. I tend to hate those types of world-shifting ramps, which seemed to plague the early days of consumer VR, but this didn’t seem to even give me the dreaded ‘VR sweats’, a telling precursor to full on nausea. I should mention the game isn’t exclusively a teleport-only experience, but was also demoed with smooth forward locomotion.
Image courtesy Anshar Studios
Shooting was a fairly standard experience, but the notion that I could teleport and dodge shots, block them with an energy shield and get close enough to telefrag, all really emphasized the sort of balance the studio is going for. Get too close to your opponent, and you’re dead, which usually means you’re trying to use the level’s geometry to your advantage as you search for tactically useful angles to surprise your opponent. Since your teleport movements make both noise and leaves a whispy trail behind you, it’s important to keep an eye and ear out for your enemy at all costs. Check out the tutorial below to get a good idea of some of the basics:
So what’s the objective in all of this? The arena game mode, I was told, allows you to fill three slots with your choice of weaponry. In a match, your individual loadout is put up as a wager, with the winner taking the loser’s equipment. In-game currency is doled out at the end of the match based on your score. With enough cash on-hand, the loser can buy back their lost loadout; a currency multiplier is awarded to the winner, and can be increased even further depending in their win streak.
Telefrag VR is slated to arrive on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, OSVR and PSVR, although it’s currently in pre-alpha stage, so there’s no word on release date yet.
BigBox VR, the developers behind VR multiplayer shooter Smashbox Arena (2017), are making their way into new territory soon with their upcoming battle royale shooter Population: ONE. The studio showed off at this year’s Gamescom what promises to be a full-featured shooter with some of the Fornite and PUBG trimmings that you’d hope for in this distinctly VR native game.
Starting at a high vantage point, you board a one-man escape pod destined for the map below where you loot, shoot, and duke it out with other players until there’s a single person standing. Of course, it wouldn’t be a battle royale game if there weren’t an ever-closing wall of death too, which gradually limits the size of the map.
Image courtesy Big Box VR
In the case of the demo, we were only given a small fraction of the game’s one square kilometer map to play in, and were only allowed to participate in two vs two team deathmatch—a necessity to keeping things quick in the demo area. The studio is however targeting a total player number of 24 players, which will be chunked into either 12v12 team deathmatch or 24-player free for all.
Thankfully, before launching out to the abandoned town below, I got a chance to run through the basics of the games movement scheme, something that promises to make Pop: ONE unique (and not simply “Fortnite in VR!!1!”).
Image courtesy Big Box VR
Firstly, you can’t jump. I would actually consider this a good thing, as jumping can be pretty uncomfortable in VR. Instead, you have the ability to climb anything by simply depressing the grip button on your system’s controller and grabbing onto any given vertical surface. High buildings beckon you to climb them, where hopefully you’ll find that sniper rifle you’re pining for.
You can fly. Well, not really, but you can gracefully glide down and shoot while doing it too. To activate the flight mode, you simply have to put your hands into a ‘T’ pose, and you glide at a fairly flat decline. There’s a super high building that I couldn’t get to, but my first objective is to climb that sucker and fly all the way down.
You can build. Unlike Fortnite though, there’s only one type of brick resource which can’t be mined or otherwise obtained without finding it directly in a loot pile. Once you’ve looted enough bricks though, a single button press brings up a highlighted blueprint of your wall/floor/ceiling’s position and you can deploy it. Besides the ability to build one very specific structure type (a flat square, that’s where the comparisons to Fortnite stop. As a VR native, I expect this to become less about frenetic construction wars (which are absolutely insane in Fortnite), and more about climbing and flying—two things that feel absolutely cool in Pop: ONE.
Despite this, the ability to both climb and build in practice act as nice counterpoints to each other. You can build wherever you want, and as high as you want, but it won’t stop the hordes from scaling your walls and ganking you in your improvised sniper’s nest.
The game also appears to have some pretty tight gun mechanics too. A manual reload function means you can’t just spray and pray, as you have to physically insert mags and charge the bolt. It isn’t fiddly either, as a mag floats just below the gun’s mag well, and is highlighted yellow until you ram it in. Your bolt is then highlighted yellow for visibility, and you charge the first round into the chamber. From what I’ve seen, there are no gun customizations though, only default weapons such as a 9mm UMP, P90, M4, sniper rifle with scope, and various pistols. Aiming and shooting is also a great experience, as it makes heavy use of iron sights, red dot reticles, and standard scopes.
Both the map and inventory are very basic at this point, both of which function as pop-up menus keyed to a button press. A quick tap on the inventory button lets you hot-swap between a your chosen gun and an empty hand, which is required for climbing.
Once you die, you’re then given a number of ways to spectate. Starting out as the size of Godzilla, you can either ‘grab’ the world to move around, move via stick, shrink or grow by doing a ‘pinch and zoom’ movement with both controllers, or go to human-size and clip through the world’s architecture as you watch the final bits play out.
Seeking Dawn (2018) is a sci-fi first-person shooter which puts you in the boots of a space marine who’s assigned to carry out a search and rescue mission on a mysterious alien planet. Including a single player campaign, and online co-op which lets you and your friends or strangers team up, Seeking Dawn promises a full-feature game with multiple hours of gameplay, however this results in only just enough incentive to keep you hunting around for that last uranium rock to spend on that OP rocket launcher you’ve had your eye on.
Developer: Multiverse Available On: Steam (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PC), PSVR (TBA) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, Tested on HTC Vive Release Date: July 12th, 2018
Note to the reader (July 11th, 2018): I wasn’t able to get into an online match during my time with Seeking Dawn, so I’ll be posting an update once the game goes live and multiplayer servers are up and running.
Gameplay
As a soldier of the First Centauri Republic (FCR), you’re after the missing Major Walker and his team who were sent to the alien planet to find what promises to be a powerful key to put an end to the ongoing war with the Alpha Centauri Commonwealth (ACC), a new nemesis in the 24th century universe of expanding human influence over the stars. The story is your standard sci-fi shooter fare, so don’t expect much more than a SyFy ‘B’ movie script and voice talent. While it can be cringey at times, it’s mostly an innocuous pretense to the alien-ganking action.
Like a jack of all trades, Seeking Dawn carries with it a longer than usual list of features for VR games currently: single player and online multiplayer co-op, resource gathering, weapon & equipment crafting, base construction, and survival elements that require you to stay properly fed, watered and full of appropriate ammo types throughout the game.
Image courtesy Multiverse
Shooting is a simple experience. All guns have a projected aiming reticle that requires no need for lining up the sights and aiming down the barrel. All guns are single-handed, so you can choose to go dual auto-pistols, or even dual rocket launchers if you have the material. Simply grip to reload, or wait for the last spent cartridge to exit the gun.
Basic crafting materials are found in a number of ways; everything you destroy drops something valuable to the overall goal of building guns, armor, mini construction factories, ammo – everything has its price. Enemies drop meat, and crafting items like collagen which are used in construction. Trees, which you explode with your handy Woodchucker, give a few types of wood and health-restoring berries. Dedicated mineral deposits, which you can explode with your Excabreaker, give out a number of minerals that are important to crafting guns and other non-lethal tools. Your Woodchucker and Excabreaker are invaluable, as you use them up the very end of the game to harvest resources.
A tree ready to explode, Image captured by Road to VR
That said, there are no tech trees, or upgrade systems—what you see is what you get, and you’ll predictably abandon about half of the 5-6 total guns as you encounter more powerful enemies like high-level ACC soldiers. In the later quarter of the game, I found myself using the rocket launcher almost exclusively, as it provides infinite ammo and does around 400 HP damage; this felt a bit cheaty, as I would launch a barrage of rockets at a wall where I suspected enemies to be, and hit points would magically register. For a game that boasts crafting as a big feature, I was expecting a lot more variability in that department. Once you get the hang of clearing an area of minerals and trees, crafting really just becomes a timed hurdle to obtaining any specific weapon (eg: a big boss is coming up, and surprise surprise, I see my first deposit of uranium – something required for a level item.)
Crafting guns and tools, Image captured by Road to VR
In short, weapon and tool crafting is fun to begin with, but soon becomes a dull chore with expected rewards handed down at important intervals in the game, making it essentially a monolithic loot chest with tedious extra steps in between.
To manage all of your weapons and tools on the go, you’re given what I consider a basically good and functional inventory system. A button press brings up a ring with a limited number of slots, and by selecting the weapon or health item, you equip it in either your left or right hand to be used. Because of how often you use the Woodchucker and Excabreaker though, I would have much rather preferred a hotbutton to quickly switch between guns and tools for quicker harvesting and battle readiness. A larger inventory, which is best consulted when out of harm’s way, lets you swap out items into your quick inventory.
Full inventory, Image captured by Road to VR
Enemies are varied enough to keep things interesting. Regular enemies include flying bug-types, massive tanks, fast tiger-like aliens, hopping scavengers, and ACC soldiers of various abilities. While you can count the number of bosses on two or three fingers, they always prove to be extremely tough—which when compared to the crappy little baddies running around, make for a clear ramping of difficulty. To beat the mid-game boss, I struggled for over an hour to scavenge wood to create enough bullets to take him down. Only near the end did I feel like the difficulty plateaued to an even pace.
Image courtesy Multiverse
The game includes a single prefabricated base, and that’s where the part of the game forces you to throw some resources at building turrets during specific times (no random attacks). But even skimping on turrets and using my own two hands proved to be a fairly simple.
Image captured by Road to VR
Like with crafting, this is a moment when I wish the feature set could really lived up to my expectations instead of being a couple of wave-based defense missions. I wanted to build out my base and have to worry about defending them from savage alien beasts, but instead I was given a voice over prompt from my omnipresent Captain Coleman for the games few base defense missions.
My personal gameplay time was 11 hours, which is about half as long as the studio says it should take. I’ll admit I was using the fastest possible way to get from point A to point B: walking at max speed with automatic running, which I’ll talk about in the Comfort section below.
Immersion
Immersion is a bit of a mixed bag in Seeking Dawn.
Every once in a while you’re treated to real moments of awe, as you round a bend and find yourself staring at an enormous mushroom swarming with neon jellyfish, or what I can only describe as a skyscraper-sized alien Brontosaurus who curiously casts a look in your direction from what seems like a mile away. There are a few giant baddies out there too that will have you fearing the long trudge back to the start of the level if you forgot to set a teleporter node. The set pieces and level design are definitely highlights in Seeking Dawn.
Image captured by Road to VR
The game’s visuals are certainly a cut above many, but I do have a few healthy niggles. Smaller geometry like plants and ammo boxes pop in after only a short radius, and faraway textures can look muddy at times even on high settings (low is decidedly much more messy). Several times I’ve wandered into a level to find it barren of enemies, only to hear the drumming beat of the fight music piped into my ears as creatures pop out of nowhere. This only puts a slight damper on the overall effect: a varied, iridescent world that transmits an eerie beauty across several biomes. Dank cave systems open up to underground crystal structures, pulsing alien trees loaded with glowing fruit, and even a few hellish underbellies littered with bones and rotting corpses, and some with burping volcanoes and dizzying heights.
Let’s make no bones about it: Seeking Dawn is very much a game that relies on some traditional gaming shorthand that’s oftentimes more concerned with delivering an efficient way of traveling, killing enemies, building structures, etc, than giving you a 1:1 experience of crash landing on an alien planet.
Hit counters let you know when you’ve landed a critical hit on an enemy, and big white numbers pop up above their head to tell you what it’s worth. This is convenient, and maybe even forgivable for a sci-fi shooter game, but it still feels like I’m playing a game, with all the regular traditional conventions attached.
Image captured by Road to VR
Object interaction is carried out via ‘force powers’, meaning you need to hit a single button to quickly collect crafting items, even ones out of your arm’s reach. This is much more comfortable than having to pick up the thousands of items, but it does come at the cost of hand presence. Once an item is locked on, you can’t let go until you reinsert it into your inventory, or swap it for something else.
Comfort
Seeking Dawn offers a bevy of locomotion choices suited for most people: head and hand-relative forward locomotion, smooth turning, snap-turning, ‘blink’ teleportation (driving a ghost of yourself until you reach your desired teleport destination) and of course room-scale locomotion, although there’s not much of a reason to move around your room outside of the standing position. You can also play seated, although you’ll be ‘seated’ in the game as well. There is brief exception during climbing portions of the game, where handholds may be out of your reach.
One other locomotion style rounds out the bunch. There’s also a ‘swinging your arms to run’ mode which turned out not to be as fun or comfortable as I’d hoped, as it introduces artificial head-bob. This in general is something most VR developers stay away from because of the associated nausea, although it seems the arm-swinging did help mitigate this some. Instead, I opted to use head-relative walking with an automatic run option which lets you pick up speed gradually.
Mixed Realms is bringing its action-packed cyber ninja simulator Sairento VR (2018) to Rift users for free this weekend, which includes a campaign mode and online multiplayer for up to four other players in PvP and PvE modes.
Now out of early access, Sairento VR was recently revealed to be in the top 24 best-selling VR games on Steam of 2018 (so far). There’s reason: high-flying ninja power fantasies galore.
With the ability to fly high into the air, executing quadruple jumps, wall runs, power slides, and back flips, you rip through enemies with katanas, guns, bows, throwing glaives, shurikens, and kunais—everything the aspiring ninja may need with its nearly 20 weapons at your disposal.
The free weekend for Rift users is already in effect, and continues through Monday, July 9th at 3:00 AM ET (local time here). Check out the game here.
Oculus has been holding free weekends for select multiplayer games for some time now, and it’s a great way to pack the servers with fresh players so you can see a multiplayer game at its best. These tend to coincide with sales to entice permanent ownership of the game; Sairento VR is now 20% off, knocked down from $30 to $24 for the duration of the free weekend.
Multiverse Inc., the studio behind VR sci-fi shooter Seeking Dawn, today announced the single/multiplayer game is soon heading out of closed beta and launching on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets on July 12th. The studio says support for PSVR is slated to come “later this year.”
Promising a ‘full-length’ VR game, Seeking Dawn is said to offer a 20-hour single-player campaign, co-op gameplay with up to three other players in campaign mode, and multiplayer deathmatches in a “sprawling Survival setting.”
Stepping into the boots of a 23rd century soldier on a hostile planet filled with alien predators and gun-toting enemies, you follow the trail of an allied recon squad to uncover the mystery of why they came (and why they’re gone).
Seeking Dawn is still available for pre-order for $35 on the Multiverse website. Closed beta slots are limited to 500 players. The full release will be available on the Oculus Store (Rift) and Steam (Rift, Vive, Windows VR) for $40.
We haven’t had a chance to step into Seeking Dawn, although gameplay video suggests polished visuals and some fairly Halo-esque gameplay.
If you didn’t get a chance to jump into last month’s Echo Combat open beta weekend, the upcoming online shooter expansion to Echo Arena, then you’ll have another chance soon, as the studio is opening up their pod bay doors to all Rift users starting today, August 16th.
Update (August 16th, 2018): Echo Combat Open Beta 3 kicks off today at 10:30 AM PT (your timezone here) and ends Sunday August 19th at 10:00 AM PT. Developer Ready at Dawn has confirmed that the so-called ‘Gear Patch’ brings three new features: Arc Mine, Stun Field, and Energy Barrier. The patch also includes a range of gameplay and balance changes, as well as bug fixes. You can find the full patch notes here.
Update (August 7th, 2018): A third Echo Combat open beta is set for the weekend of August 16th, the folks at VRespawn reported. As with the prior open beta, we expect it will open sometime around 10:30AM PT (your timezone here).
According to a video on the official Echo Games YouTube channel, the August 16th open beta weekend will also usher in the ‘Gear Patch’, which we expect will focus on tweaks to equipment like grenades and abilities, possibly even introducing some new elements.
Update (July 19th, 2018): Celebrating the one-year anniversary of Lone Echo (2017) and Echo Arena’s release, the upcoming team shooter Echo Combat is getting its second open beta period this weekend, starting July 20th at 10:30 AM PT (local time here) and going through July 22nd at 10:00 AM PT (local time here). The latest open beta is said to deliver “a more stable gaming experience,” and the ability to use your weapon in your left hand.
According to a Ready at Dawn blog post, this weekend’s open beta “is the first of many scheduled throughout the rest of the year and leading up to Echo Combat’s official release. Alongside more opportunities to play Echo Combat until release, players can also look forward to new content monthly.”
Original Article, Updated (June 20th, 2018): Echo Combat throws you into a beefier combat-ready avatar with a few guns and abilities at your disposal. Offering a payload-based objective, much like the gametype in Team Fortress 2 (2007) or Overwatch (2016), you push the cart on a track through the winding maze as an attacker, or defend the advances of the cart by pushing it backwards and running down the three-minute game clock. Check out our full hands-on from the closed beta for a better idea of what to expect.
Ready at Dawn says that players can expect continued open beta periods leading up to the game’s launch later this year. The full release is slated to cost $10, so now is a great time to find out if the zero-G shooter is right for you.
Ever since the early days of PSVR, fans have been hoping for games like Counter Strike or Rainbow Six—the sort of team-based shooters most gamers are familiar with one way or the other, be it on PC or console. Now First Contact Entertainment, the studio behind VR shooter ROM: Extraction (2016), have set their sights on the multiplayer, objective-based shooter genre; what I experienced at E3 2018 has not only shown that the four vs four shooter checks all the right boxes, but it does it with the sort of immersion PSVR players have been waiting for.
Standing with my PS Aim and a PSVR headset, I strapped into the four vs. four match of a classic attack/defend mission. The map was a sprawling open-plan office space, not unlike what you’d find only a few yards away from the convention floor in downtown LA where E3 takes place.
Image courtesy First Contact Entertainment
Picking one of the 12 characters – a nondescript white guy with a beard (so basically me), I was first assigned the role of attacker. Starting the match, my three other teammates and I were tossed into the far-side of the map with a few objectives to complete. We had to locate a secret document which would then reveal the coordinates of multiple sites. Killing the other team is predictably the best way to complete these objectives unabated.
There were only three standard loadouts available in the demo: a 5.56 caliber G36K assault rifle, a 12 gauge pistol-grip shotgun, and a silenced 9MM MP5 submachine gun. For the demo, each class had its own locked-in secondary weapon (a pistol) and plenty of extra gubbins such as smoke bombs, flash bangs, and frag grenades, although I was told the final game will feature plenty of opportunity to customize loadouts.
Firefights are definitely familiar in respect to traditional shooters, although having the extra latitude to aim down the red dot sight of the assault rifle in my hands, physically peer around corners, and burp out a smoke grenade for cover is really the satisfying and immersive parts I’m more used to in the many PC VR shooters I’ve played like Onward or Pavlov.
Image courtesy First Contact Entertainment
The headset’s integrated mic also means you’re able to talk naturally and coordinate with your teammates so you can divvy up areas and lay down suppressing fire. You’re always in contact with your teammates no matter where they are, although thanks to spatial audio you always have some idea of where they are relative to your position, even when they’re obscured by walls.
Getting a chance to play defense, we decided to first locate the other team’s objective, and hide in there waiting for them. As soon as they opened the door, well, we all died when they tossed in grenades and shot the holy hell out of us. But it was a fun tactic to try out to say the least.
The game’s locomotion scheme combines smooth forward motion with snap-turning, although I saw there’s also a smooth-turn option available for users less susceptible to artificial locomotion-induced nausea.
Image courtesy First Contact Entertainment
According to the First Contact, there will be nine maps in total at launch, which are set in Russia, the UK and the Middle East.
As a side note: the game also supports DualShock 4, although the demo was presented with Aim, which was a much more immersive that it would otherwise be on gamepad. If you have a PSVR and haven’t bought an Aim controller yet, this may just be the game that pushes you to shell out the 80 bucks—a steep price for sure, but something I’d consider crucial to maximizing immersion in Firewall Zero Hour.
The game is slated to arrive on PSVR sometime in 2018.
Echo Combat, the VR shooter expansion to Ready at Dawn’s successful VR sports game Echo Arena, is heading into open beta this month. And unlike its sporty counterpart, which was released for free to all Oculus Rift users, the shooter is going to be priced at $10 when it releases.
There’s no official launch date for Echo Combat yet, but the open beta is set to kick off June 21st for free. You can sign up here for more information.
For VR fans going to E3 this year, which takes place June 12-14 in Los Angeles, Oculus will be hosting public demos of Echo Combat at the Alienware booth (South Hall #647).
We recently went hands-on with Echo Combatin a closed beta session, and it proved to be just as engaging, highly-polished, and comfortable as Echo Arena, albeit with a new objective-based payload gametype that pits you in a three vs. three shooting match to either attack – pushing a giant pink flamingo payload to its goal on the other side of the map, or defend – make sure that doesn’t happen.
While you wait for Echo Combat, check out our video of a full match, which includes the newly redesigned lobby and all of the shooting fun of the upcoming shooter expansion.
Ready at Dawn, the studio behind zero-g adventureLone Echo (2017) and its companion multiplayer sports game Echo Arena (2017), held a closed beta session with their upcoming Oculus Rift expansion Echo Combat last week. Given a beefier-looking avatar and a few guns—reflective of my new goal of disintegrating the opposite team members with impunity—the game essentially presents you with a gametype that fans of Team Fortress 2 (2007) or Overwatch (2016) will instantly recognize: payload—push the cart on a track through the winding maze, or defend the advances of the cart by pushing it backwards and running down the clock.
Before getting into the gameplay aspect of matches though, let’s first talk about the lobby, the place where you can practice and learn the finer points of the game before foisting yourself into a match. This is where you learn to use the game’s zero-G locomotion style which lets you move through the world by physically grabbing onto structures (and people) and pushing off with your hands. Echo Combat features the same amped-up version of this seen in Echo Arena, and it’s an absolute joy to see it in the context of a shooter, as it’s both comfortable and extremely immersive—making you forget that you’re actually in your apartment punching that stupid lamp and loudly cursing at 3 AM.
Awakening in the new lobby for the first time, I was immediately struck by the size of the place now that the doors to Echo Combat are open; it feels at least two times as large as the lobby was before, and is filled with spaces to chat, customize your avatar, or practice shooting.
The shooting gallery, which features a few structures stocked with moving dummies, has a console where you can change your guns and see what effect each gun has on the dummy’s health bar. Currently there are three guns available: a one-handed shotgun (Nova), an automatic laser pistol (Pulsar), and a powerful semi-auto railgun pistol with a laser sight (Comet), a gun that features both a charge-up and cool-down time.
Captured by Road to VR
You’re also given a single, slowly respawning detonator grenade that you can pull from behind your back to do further damage. A second ordinance weapon was greyed out, so there’s likely to be something else to choose from in the future. Additionally, you have one of two secondary abilities at your disposal—group health regeneration, or a threat scanner that can temporarily reveal enemies from behind walls. All of these things are pretty well understood in traditional shooters, so anyone familiar with Team Fortress 2 should immediately grasp the gametype.
After screwing around in the shooting gallery, I was ready to head back to the main hall of the lobby to search for a match. Like Echo Arena, there’s a miniature version of the map available in the lobby, so you can exchange the finer points with other players. Since nobody really knew what they were doing at this early point in the game’s life, most of us just gawked and shrugged our shoulders, hitting the ‘find match’ button on the lobby’s console, and starting without a care for strategy.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
Randomly assigned, I first started on defense, which gives you a head start to make your way to the enemy’s farthest spawn point, the first of many checkpoints between the payload and its goal on the opposite end of the map. After being absolutely amazed at the size of the map, which features strategically placed choke points, multiple side areas, and plenty of nook to hide in and behind, I finally make my way to enemy spawn to see the cart is actually a big pink flamingo, like an oversize version of the pool inflatable. Grabbing onto the flamingo, you automatically push it in the desired direction on its glowing blue track.
Like Echo Arena, there’s also a few launch tubes available to get you back into the action a little quicker.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
It seems everything comes in threes with Echo Combat. You have three minutes on the game clock to battle in the three vs. three match, with three guns to choose from.
It’s important to pick the right gun too, because you can only swap out when you spawn in the small waiting area during matches, and because the guns are physically integrated into your robot hands, you can’t pick up an enemy’s gun or dual-wield either. While I was initially hoping for more than just three single-handed guns, I get the sense that the studio thought long and hard about making every choice a team-based decision, and creating necessary bottlenecks to create interesting gameplay.
These bottlenecks force you to cooperate with others and divvy out responsibilities like “Ok, you two be medics with shotguns and push the payload, and I’ll cover with scanner and the Comet and snipe from behind.” Because everyone has a mic, that sort of cooperation is to be expected, the team with the best ability to organize will probably win the match.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
Initially I thought playing the game’s single map would get tiring after a few matches, but it’s actually big enough to provide hours of gameplay. Of course, I would love to see more maps, more guns, and more objectives in the future, but my guess is many players will still find the game engaging enough in its current form to keep the servers bustling for some time, as it’s proven to be a balanced and super satisfying shooter in its own right.
That said, Echo Combat will likely need a greater iteration cycle over its sports counterpart Echo Arena to stay relevant in the long run, which largely gets a pass for featuring a standard playing field, much in the same way any physical sport does. Either way, users should be happy for some time, as the franchise’s zero-G movement scheme has proven to be robust enough to allow fast, comfortable, and extremely fun gameplay, and I personally can’t wait to see what comes next.
Once the game goes live, we’ll have a full review to better assess everything coming to the game at launch. In the meantime, check out our video of a full Echo Combat match.
With shooters like PUBG (2017) and Epic’s Fortnite (2018) taking the traditional gaming world by storm as of late, many VR developers have seen the success of the battle royale games and attempted to replicate the winner-take-all game mode in virtual reality. While far from the first to do so, Against Gravity’s social VR game Rec Room (2016)is diving head-first into the battle royale genre with its newest activity, something they dub Rec Royale. It’s currently in open beta until the end of today for PSVR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR, and is slated for full release on June 7th.
If you haven’t played Rec Room before, here’s a quick primer:
Rec Room is a free social VR game set in a cartoony re-imagining of a YMCA, replete with activities like dodgeball and low-gravity racquetball, but also more fantasy-based multiplayer games, called Quests, that let you team up with other players to have mini-adventures. You can also style your avatar in a number of ways, with some default items like hats, clothes, hair (etc) on offer, but now players can also earn in-game coin by exploring the platform and completing Quests. The more you play, the more coins you earn, and you can buy items in the store—all of it for fun, with no microtransactions or real world currency implied. Although free, it’s also one of the highest quality VR experiences out currently, and offers many of the same features you find in other social VR apps like being able to make friends, host private chats, and although it lacks the ability to share photos and stream video not captured from within the confines of Rec Room, people usually come back for the insane amount of games on the platform.
Image courtesy Against Gravity
Now for Rec Royale:
This isn’t Rec Room‘s first shooter, as both paintball and a few other Quests feature guns too. Keeping with the game’s family-friendly vibe, Rec Room’s guns are modeled after either paintball guns or Nerf-style toys that let out varying degrees of splats and pops. Oh, and there’s a crazy number of kids on the platform too.
Putting a blanket mute on everyone in the game is an option if you don’t feel like chatting, trash talking, or dealing with kids under 13 (12 and under are officially limited to junior accounts, which prevent them from hearing and transmitting via voice chat and have other privacy restrictions). If you don’t mute everyone though, you’ll really only have to deal with about a minute of chatter before the game starts, and all 16 players are ready to hang glide from the giant flying gondola to the map below.
Image by Road to VR
Experienced battle royale players will instantly recognize what comes next. You have to scrounge for guns, ammo and health and duke it out with everyone on the map, all the while paying attention to the constantly shrinking barrier, called ‘The Swarm’, that limits the size of the play area, resulting in closer quarters combat until only one player is left. The map isn’t very large, but decidedly large enough for 16 players.
Image by Road to VR
You’re given two hip holsters for guns, and are allowed to fire only one at a time (no dual wielding). It took me a while to get used to the guns, and find out which ones were peashooters and which ones could land powerful shots. A mix of pistols, automatic rifles and sniper rifles fill the map, a big island which includes summer camps, mountains, forests, outposts, ravines and lakes—plenty of places to stock up and hunker down for when the Swarm begins. Drinkable health potions let you add health and armor, and of course you can loot your fallen enemy for anything they were holding.
Reaching to your back, you can also take out your map, which shows your position on the island, and where the Swarm is at any given time.
Image by Road to VR
Games are typically very quick thanks to the 16-player cap on player numbers. Since all players have an integrated mic, there’s a lot more teaming-up than I originally expected, as the beta only offered a free-for-all deathmatch. I don’t suspect there will be any real punishment for players caught teaming up, although a team switcher icon in the lobby leads me to believe there will also be eight vs. eight team deathmatch available too (see update below).
Rooms featuring both teleportation and ‘free’ locomotion are available, but I found myself playing in the free locomotion games for greater immersion. Variable snap-turning is available as well, letting users with 180-degree sensors setups engage in the fun too while seated or standing.
Image by Road to VR
Once the game is over, you’re tossed back into the lobby to either chat with other players, or restart a new game.
That said, optimization can definitely be improved in Rec Royale; UI objects like your healthbar can be jittery, and judder is pretty apparent in the beta overall—not a gamebreaking, or entirely uncomfortable occurrence, but definitely on the checklist of things to address before serious shooter fans can call Rec Royale a true winner (winner, chicken dinner). This is, afterall, a pre-release open beta, so there’s bound to be bugs.
In the end, Rec Royale has proven to be a really fun game in its own right, and is built on some very strong core foundations, that over time could become a big draw for the already successful VR social platform. Giving people a reason to come back and stay is fundamental to continued user engagement, and it’s clear Rec Room is hoping to land another big score with Rec Royale. I would personally love a larger map with more players, but as Against Grav makes continual strides to attract users, we can only hope for more, bigger, and greater things to come.
Update (6:00 PM ET): A member of Against Gravity reached out to us to clarify some points in the article. It was previously reported that children 12 and below weren’t allowed on the ‘Rec Room’ platform, but the studio has since updated the terms of service to allow children 12 and under, provided they signup with a junior account, which includes certain restrictions including the inability to transmit or hear voice chat.
Against Grav also reiterated via Reddit that the open beta was indeed intended for solo gameplay only, and that the inability to team-up was “a temporary pain that will be solved soon.”
