Dead Hook is delayed until June for "important business reasons," despite publisher Joy Way saying it's ready for release.
Revealed last month, Dead Hook is a new roguelike shooter reminiscent of Doom VFR. A reworked version of the cancelled PC VR roguelike Outlier, your goal involves shooting through demon hordes. Previously targeting May 18, that's now arriving on June 29. Joy Way states "unforeseen changes in the Meta release calendar" is a factor, though it's unclear what this specifically refers to.
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Alongside a new gameplay trailer, which you can watch above, Joy Way issued this statement:
Despite Dead Hook being ready for release on May 18, we have decided to postpone the release date to June 29 due to important business reasons, including unforeseen changes in the Meta release calendar.
This extra time will be used for extra polish and finishing touches, as well as incorporating content that was planned for after the release. We truly appreciate your understanding and continued support, and we are committed to providing you, the players, with the best possible gaming experience.
Swordsman VR adds archery combat in a free update, available now on Quest, PSVR 2 and PC VR.
Developed by Sinn Studio, the Swordsman VR: Ranged Combat update introduces several new features. Alongside new ranged weapons, ranged AI, different arrow types and a "Ranged Only" Arena mode, there's also a new archery range with a scoring mechanism and adjustable targets. "Try out the infinite arrows and manual Chronokinesis modifiers, challenge yourself with increasingly difficult archery range settings," suggests Sinn in a press release. You can watch the trailer below:
First released nearly three years ago for PSVR and Steam, Swordsman VR appeared last year on Quest before joining the lengthy list of PSVR 2 launch games in February. According to Sinn's Swordsman VR roadmap, the updates won't stop with ranged combat. Further planned additions include a training ground sandbox, daily challenges, animal enemies, advanced damage display and more.
Swordsman VR is available now on PC VR, the Meta Quest platform (via App Lab), PSVR and PSVR 2 for $19.99.
VR Skater brings a new skateboarding sim to PSVR 2 on June 21, two years after releasing on Steam Early Access. Following a hands-on session with the preview build, here are our full impressions.
Skateboarding never interested me like football or rugby as a kid, but I can't deny the immediate satisfaction VR Skater offers with its movement. You'll be swinging one Sense controller like it's your leg pushing the board along, which feels pretty intuitive, as does moving your other controller to direct movement. There's then some functions mapped to button presses, like braking with the trigger or doing Ollies/Nollies with face buttons, but I soon appreciated this simplicity when speeding along levels with little time to think.
For this particular preview, only a set of tutorials and three locations in practice mode were available, which includes a bonus area called the 'Mega Ramp'. Each stage presents multiple paths to skate through, which adds excellent replayability. However, whichever path you choose, the courses themselves are ultimately linear – you're sent back to the beginning upon reaching the end – as opposed to something more in the style of a free roam map.
The courses are filled with obstacles to navigate – walls, cars parked slightly over pavements, shipping containers, and railings – with points are awarded for successful tricks.
Generous checkpoints ease frustrations if you fumble the execution, which you most certainly will in the initial stages. Pulling off tricks is where VR Skater starts to get, well, tricky. For example, doing a kickflip requires a motion where you flick the left Sense controller to the front left while midair. It sounds straightforward, but I’ll struggled to land the trick successfully and there were times were it was unclear whether it was me or the game at fault. Some work is probably needed to make elements like this more clear.
Other moves require a mix of motion-based inputs, hitting buttons, or moving the headset. That includes pulling off an Ollie to the Side, which mandates you move your controllers left or right and turn your head in the same direction. Board and lip slides involve pressing different buttons when midair, and there's a lot you need to remember. Visual representations of your controllers are helpful when playing, but you won't get any hints during levels.
I couldn't learn any advanced moves during this preview as those tutorials were off-limits, so I'm currently unsure how much trickier this gets, but I wish there were better feedback to signal what you've done wrong. I'd recommend hammering out the tutorials until the actions become muscle memory. Still, VR Skater rewards those willing to put the effort in, and I didn't mind the learning curve. Once you begin memorizing patterns, landing tricks and reaching the end without incident feels incredibly satisfying, and an energetic but limited soundtrack selection nicely complements that.
The preview only a brief look at what's to come, so that's all I can say about VR Skater right now. Ranked play and every mode beyond free practice was locked off, as was skateboard customization in the Skate Shop. I didn't get to pour over the progression system, either.
Still, in my brief time going over free practice, I've enjoyed what's available, though mechanics would likely prove frustrating for anyone seeking quick gratification. If pulling off tricks feels this good already, the full release has potential when it grinds onto PSVR 2 next month.
Hello Neighbor: Search and Rescue is now set for simultaneous release on PSVR 2, Quest and PC VR headsets later this month,
While previously only confirmed for release on PSVR 2 on May 25, we've now got confirmation that the Hello Neighbor: Search and Rescue will arrive on the same day for other platforms.
Available for PSVR 2, Quest 2, Quest Pro and PC VR headsets, Search and Rescue will be the Hello Neighbor franchise's first forray into VR. You can check out the latest trailer with some new footage embedded above.
Described as a "groundbreaking VR horror-puzzle game," the Quest store description says players will sneak around the titular creepy neighbor's house with the aim of rescuing friends who are trapped inside.
There will be multiple playable characters, each with their own abilities and items, as well unique perspectives that will help you solve the game's environmental puzzles. The store description also indicates that exploration will be non-linear in nature, with multiple paths through the environment.
Vertigo Games confirms that A Fisherman's Tale will receive a PSVR 2 port later this year.
Following yesterday's launch of Another Fisherman's Tale on Quest, PC VR and PSVR 2, Vertigo Games revealed the first entry will join the sequel on Sony's PS5 VR headset "later this year." Beyond the PSVR 2 version's existence, no specific details were announced about this upcoming port. It's unsurprising news given the sequel's release, and A Fisherman's Tale previously appeared on the original PSVR,
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We really enjoyed the original game in our A Fisherman’s Tale review. Though we believed it ended too quickly after 2 hours, we considered it a“perfect storm of gameplay, immersion and narrative.”
From slow-motion shootouts to trips across the universe and stories of loved ones lost, VR has already proven that each of its core design tenants can be tamed. But A Fisherman’s Tale might be the first to achieve a perfect storm of gameplay, immersion and narrative in a single experience. Though brief, it fuses experience and interactivity to really show what this medium is capable of.
A Fisherman's Tale arrives on PSVR 2 later this year, and it's available now on Quest, PC VR and PSVR.
Broken Edge adds the Pirate fighter and new weapon variants in a free update for Quest 2 and PC VR.
Following on from the Viking, developer Trebuchet's second Broken Edge character update introduces an eighth playable class, joining the Knight, Barbarian, Samurai, Duelist, Persian, Viking and Tyrant. Packing five different weapons, the Pirate comes armed with a cutlass, rapier, kriegsmesser, boarding axe, and a knife between her teeth. There's also the Pirate's Ship, a new arena set near a mysterious skull-shaped island.
That's not all Trebuchet's added to its 1v1 dueling game. Alongside balancing improvements, Broken Edge's new update introduces a multi-blade feature, letting you "unlock and equip various weapons to any of the game’s iconic fighters." With a Main Blade, Legendary Blade, and Legacy Blade variant, these new weapon types each offer slightly different weapon options for each fighter.
Broken Edge is available now on the Meta Questplatform and PC VR for $9.99.
Walkabout Mini Golf is an essential VR title that belongs in every library alongside the likes of Beat Saber. Whether you’re new to Walkabout or a long-time player, here’s our definitive review breaking down why it’s one of VR’s best multiplayer games.
There’s magic on the greens of Walkabout Mini Golf.
Each course features only 18 holes, but studio Mighty Coconut developed a formula that makes it one of VR’s most reliably breath-taking experiences that's both endlessly replayable and an absolutely essential multiplayer game.
Course & Hole Design
To begin, there’s the courses themselves. Theme parks are the closest places comparable to Walkabout courses.
Ultimately, Mightly Coconut leans so far into VR-first design that in some ways its courses are better than even the best Disney theme park ever could be. There’s no lines here, for example, and each hole hides a tiny easter egg, just waiting for you to find unspoiled by anyone else who has trodden those greens before.
Course design from Mighty Coconut starts with what the developers call the “Walkabout path”, which is an obvious route through the holes bringing you from the beginning of the course to its end with eye-catching reveals along the way.
In the case of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth add-on course, based on the 1980s movie starring David Bowie, designers built each hole based on a scene from the film. So, yes, you can putt through the Bog Of Eternal Stench, play through the Goblin City, and break your brain with gravity changes at the Escher staircase, but Mighty Coconut’s skilled artists also went through the effort of designing a full-scale maze for you to get lost inside parallel to the course itself. For fans with a deep-seated love of the film, Walkabout’s course is the closest anyone will get to playing inside a vast theme park inspired by the property.
Walkabout Mini Golf Review - The Facts
Platforms: Quest, Pico, PC VR, PSVR 2 Release Date: Out now, iOS coming summer 2023 Developer: Mighty Coconut Price: $14.99 (DLCs $2.99 or $3.99 each)
Maybe Labyrinth isn’t your thing, but Walkabout’s creators have shown across its eight base courses, and now 10 DLC add-ons, that their creative process is both inspired and repeatable. They’ve worked out a proven pipeline moving ideas to sketches to eye-balling sight lines in VR with Gravity Sketch. Taking guidance from real world architecture while unconstrained by physical limits, Mighty Coconut now aims to release a new course every six weeks.
Creative direction at Mighty Coconut flows from studio head Lucas Martell, and artists at the company are now digging through our collective unconscious for stuff to reimagine with a Walkabout path punctuated with 18 holes of mini golf. Current releases include “Lost Cities” like Atlantis, Shangri-La, and El Dorado, as well as Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and even Cyan’s classic PC puzzle game Myst sees its memorable island reimagined with a light mini golf twist. Yes, in Walkabout Mini Golf, you can stand in Myst’s library with friends for the first time in 30 years or investigate the steampunk artifacts in Captain Nemo’s opulent quarters on the Nautilus.
Before you even hit your first ball in this game, Mighty Coconut puts you in a beautiful place with satisfying sounds and calming music. Further, each course’s holes are designed according to a unique “shape language” differentiating it from others. There’s a remarkable lack of windmills, the classic mini golf obstacle, and then you play a course like Quixote Valley which is littered with them across a windy seaside villa that looks drawn straight from a Studio Ghibli film.
Walkabout’s designers saved windmills for this hilly course only to deploy them in inventive ways, like actually keeping your ball on the green rather than letting it fly off a hillside. While you’re sure to hate some courses due to occasionally cruel hole designs, every one of Walkabout’s locales is a gorgeous place with an obvious path ahead inviting you on a journey.
Physics & Gameplay
Then you hit your first ball and realize the physics feel enough like the real thing that this simulation will bring you the same joy and frustration you experience hitting physical balls. Here, too, Walkabout outstrips traditional mini golf in some fundamental ways.
Walkabout Mini Golf Reivew - Comfort
Walkabout Mini Golf supports both teleport and artificial stick-based locomotion and you can change settings at any time. Snap turning and teleport is the default, and there's also a flight-mode that can be accessed without going to the menu. Your speed in both flight mode and with stick-based artificial ground movement is adjustable. The game can be played comfortably standing or seated with only one controller.
Your putter can’t collide with the environment so you don’t have to worry about your ball being too close to a barrier – you can just putt right through it. Further, your putter auto-extends to the green, so you can take your shot seated, standing, bending, or even laying down (yes, I’ve tried) with one arm hanging off the bed to swing. There are no hitches in the fabric of the greens either, so if you hit it right the ball should move more predictably than on many physical courses.
Sure, occasionally a ball might fly off in a weird direction which doesn’t seem right but, overall, Walkabout Mini Golf is in the same exact same sweet spot as its physical counterpart. In both, the difference between your ball flying off into the weeds and an occasional hole in one is you carefully positioning your feet, taking a couple practice swings, and calmly following through on your shot.
Pro tip: If you hold the grip button on your controller you can keep your ball in active play, useful for those occasional moments when your ball might have veered off the green but is slowly rolling back toward it.
Lost Balls, Hard Mode, Flying, & Fox Hunts
There's a hidden ball at every hole in each Walkabout course. When you find one, just pull the analog stick on the controller downward and you can vacuum it up into your collection.
Find these colorful designs as you play and, when you finish a round and get back to the welcome shack, you hear the balls roll out onto a tabletop where you can examine each up close and pick one for a future round.
If you find 10 hidden balls on a given course, or if you score below par, you unlock a “hard” version of the course with redesigned holes and new lighting. Long-time gamers might fondly remember getting to the end of Pokemon Gold or Silver only to discover the entire Kanto region from the original Red & Blue game is playable upon completion. Walkabout’s designers create a similar feeling of delighted discovery anytime you unlock a course’s hard version and you get to see it again in an entirely new light.
Some examples:
Quixote Valley shows you lightning reflecting off the night waters as a stormy clouds roll in from the distance.
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea exchanges the darkness of the deep ocean and its giant squid attacking the Nautilus for the bright orange of a bubbling undersea volcano.
Atlantis glows as if it was suddenly set in black light.
Labyrinth gets redecorated for Jareth’s masquerade ball.
Myst's puzzle-based holes become way harder to solve, and there's even new areas of the island to see.
On every hard course near the first hole there’s now a clue leading you on a treasure hunt. Called “fox hunts”, you can look at your wrist to study the next clue. Then you can search as you play or simply forget mini golf altogether and learn to fly. Just point your controller toward the sky, press the analog stick upward, and suddenly you and your friends are flying around the landscape in search of the next clue. Of course, you can simply press the trigger at any time to teleport back to where your ball is and keep the game moving.
If you find every clue, you unlock a specially-designed putter you can equip back at the welcome shack next to the balls.
Multiplayer & Guest Pass
Sure, Walkabout can be picked up solo and provide 20-30 minutes of satisfying singe-player play, but it is in Walkabout’s multiplayer sessions that the game truly shines. Private rooms are shared via custom room names and, as such, I’ve never encountered a single troll or had a bad multiplayer experience in the game (there's "quick match" too). I’ve played multiplayer sessions in Walkabout extending from Quest 1 to PSVR 2, and it’s not uncommon for someone to run out of battery because nobody wanted to stop.
Mighty Coconut even enabled a guest pass feature which allows anyone to enjoy a round in a DLC course that’s only been purchased by one person in the group. You can’t collect the hidden balls if you haven’t bought the course, though, nor can you solve the fox hunt, but it’s still a fantastic feature we wish would become more common in VR games.
Walkabout Mini Golf Review - Final Verdict
Walkabout’s flexible blend of low stakes mini golf, beautiful environments on top of satisfying layers of discovery that can be picked up or dropped at any moment puts this game in a category of its own when it comes to multiplayer VR. Walkabout Mini Golf is the reason to keep your headset and controllers charged and it is, perhaps, VR’s first piece of software that’s so good it’s worth scheduling time on your calendar to play it with friends, family, or even your coworkers.
Walkabout Mini Golf is one of VR's best games and essential to every headset's library.
UploadVR focuses on a label system for reviews, rather than a numeric score. Our reviews fall into one of four categories: Essential, Recommended, Avoid and reviews that we leave unlabeled. You can read more about our review guidelines here.
Dungeon Full Dive brings tabletop adventures to PC VR via Steam Early Access this October.
Announced two years ago, Dungeon Full Dive looks considerably different from other VR tabletop experiences like Demeo. While the latter uses procedurally generated dungeons and preset characters, Dungeon Full Dive lets you build original maps and create your own heroes. Supporting up to eight players per campaign with crossplay support between VR and flatscreen PC players, you can play with a bird's eye top-down view or from your character's perspective.
Elaborating further, developer TxK Gaming Studios confirms Dungeon Full Dive "will include game mechanics and stat integration for DnD 5e on launch," offering the ability to import character sheets and notes. The official website says you can play any tabletop RPGs that you want through this platform and, alongside creating your own campaigns, pre-built campaigns are also included which can be modified as you see fit.
Dungeon Full Dive arrives on October 23 on SteamVR, with a Next Fest demo dropping on October 9. As for Quest, the official website FAQ states "after the full release, native Quest support is one of the first things on our roadmap." Find out more in our previous developer interview below:
Quantaar, the Smash Bros-like VR party brawler game, will release next month for Quest 2, Pico 4 and PC VR.
Quantaar sees you assume the role of a floating avatar above a 3D arena and go head-to-head with other players in third-person brawler fights. It will be available from June 7, with support for cross-platform PvP multiplayer.
There will be multiple heroes to choose across class-based roles such as Fighter, Assassin, Generalist and Shooter. Heroes can be enhanced with 'Cores' and competing across the different games will earn in-game tokens, which can be used on new heroes, cosmetic hero skins and avatar costumes:
As players immerse themselves further in the Quantaarverse, they’ll quickly memorize class attributes, learn to outfit their heroes’ four Core slots wisely, and balance their teams to maintain a consistent edge in battle. Expertly time hero ultimate abilities and grow to master each of the game’s modes to reign supreme on the ranking each season.
Quantaar will feature three main game modes at launch – Brawler, 2v2 and Soccer – across multiple arenas.
Developers Pumpkin VR hosted a pre-alpha for Quantaar on PC VR almost two years ago, but the concept and early development work have been around for even longer. After an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign and a pivot away from an arcade-focus in 2020, Quantaar will release in full next month for PC VR and standalone systems.
The developers indicate that "multiple modes and plenty of seasons" are in store for Quantaar post-launch. You can check out the release date trailer embedded above.
On Twitter, Puzzling Places developer realities.io teased new multiplayer functionality with a GIF that seemingly shows one user handing off a puzzle piece to another.
Puzzling Places is a fantastic VR puzzle game available across multiple platforms, including Quest, Pico and PSVR 2. It features stunning puzzles made out of 3D photogrammetry scans of real life locations and objects, which you reconstruct using reference images and a spread of 3D jigsaw pieces around you. Here's an except from our review of the original Quest release in 2021:
[Puzzling Places] has cemented itself as one of the best and most unique puzzle games on the platform, presenting a virtual spin on the classic jigsaw puzzle, incorporating some stunning 3D scans of real life places and objects. Like Cubism and other puzzle games of this nature, it’s perfect to use as a calming, meditative experience and leaves you with satisfying and beautiful end results. At a time where the world is slowly coming back to life, it feels apt to be able to immerse yourself in the construction of your own tiny pocket of somewhere far away.
Since release, realities.io consistently adds new paid and free content to the game, which has expanded its library of puzzles significantly over time. The addition of multiplayer will no doubt add a whole new dimension to game – stay tuned for more details
