You don’t see a lot of sequels in the VR space yet. Not only is it rare to have a game successful enough to fund and/or warrant a follow-up, but consumer VR headsets just haven’t been around very long yet so developers haven’t had the time. Well, Vertigo 2 from Zulubo Productions is bucking those trends.
The original Vertigo came out in late 2016 and we called it “a decent stab at an indie Half-Life” in VR. Notably, it lacked the polish to be as transcendent as it could have been. If this trailer is any indication, the sequel could be righting most of the wrongs we had with its predecessor:
Not only does Vertigo 2 look like a wild ride, it sounds like one too. This is what the Steam page says:
Deep underground in the reaches of Quantum Reactor VII, you awake to finish your journey home. No closer to your goal than when you first arrived, you must count on the help of the mysteriously familiar stranger who saved your life. On your way towards the center of the reactor, you will have to face bizarre alien flora and fauna leaking from other universes – and deadly android security forces whose job is to purge the Reactor of all life. As you try to determine who to trust, sinister forces lurk just out of sight.
With a branching story hinging on key decisions, there’s no telling what you’ll encounter in this absurd world. The only certainty is that there’s danger around every corner.
We’ll be eagerly awaiting more details on this one. The Steam page says it’s coming in 2020 and it has support for Vive, Windows VR, and Index listed (notably no Rift) but we don’t know more beyond that. Let us know what you think of it down in the comments below!
Remember that incredible boss battle with The End in Metal Gear Solid 3? Sneaking through the forest for hours on end, using camouflage to avoid detection? Sniper’s Ground looks set to capitalize on that in VR.
Indie developer Mohammed Alsharefee introduced this upcoming game to the world this week. It’s a multiplayer shooter in which players trade bullets over massive maps and try and sneak past the enemy. Check it out in the trailer below but take note this isn’t really what the game will look like. It uses Unity’s Book of the Dead Forest environment, which is not something that would easily squeeze inside a VR headset. It’s very much a concept trailer, so expect the final product to look very different.
According to the developer, this will be an in-depth sniping experience. You’ll be able to customize weapons and bullet types and even have to take the wind into account before pulling the trigger. He envisions Sniper’s Ground as a slow-paced action game, more akin to chess than Call of Duty. Expect three maps at launch and different modes include plans for, you guessed it, a battle royale game type.
But Sniper’s Ground needs your help to become a reality. Alsharefee now has a Patron campaign up and running for the game to fund it. He’s hoping to hit $400 a month, which he’d use to pick up a VR headset. Right now he’s using a Kinect and the Trinus VR app on iPhone to develop the game. That can’t be the best way to do it.
A possible release date depends on how much funding the developer gets. It’s coming to PC VR headsets but final platforms also haven’t been announced at this time.
A few years ago now we played a Chinese demo for a PSVR exclusive shooter named Kill X. The game was born out of a Sony-led initiative and developed by Viva Games. It was a little scrappy, but it had potential. Two years on, we finally have a release date and a new name for the game – Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher.
We kind of preferred Kill X, but no matter.
Immortal Legacy will release on PSVR in Europe on March 20th. In the game you play as an ex-special forces soldier seeking revenge for his mother’s death. You’ll explore an island infested with horrific beasts. Playing with two Move controllers, you’ll gun these creatures down as well as solve puzzles and explore the world.
Check out the first English-voiced trailer for the game above. It doesn’t give away much, but what’s there is promising.
When we played the original demo the game offered full freedom of movement. It was a pretty spooky experience set in dark caves with creatures that crawled on the walls. That said, it was relatively simplistic.
We’re cautiously optimistic about Immortal Legacy, then. Outside of ports like Borderlands 2, PSVR hasn’t had a full-fledged FPS in a while. Hopefully this will offer a meaty campaign with solid action and an engaging story. Visually, it looks like it’s come a long way from the last time we saw it.
The game’s already up for pre-order on the European PlayStation Store for £15.99. There’s currently no word on a US release date though hopefully it’ll be around the same time.
War Dust features twice as many players as Stand Out: VR Battle Royale with 64 total and includes vehicles, large objective-based maps, and more to try and make your Battlefield VR dreams a reality. It’s just now in Early Access on Steam (on sale for $14.99 right now) and is quite rough around the edges, but it’s certainly nailed the thrill of large-scale combat already.
We’ll be playing War Dust on Rift using a two Touch controllers. We’re starting right around 9:15 AM PT and we’ll aim to last for around an hour or more. We’ll be livestreaming directly to the UploadVRTwitch page where you can interact with us directly and chat among yourselves. Streaming is something we’re going to double down on doing more often very soon so you should get in on the ground floor of our Twitch community early! You can see the full stream embedded right here down below once it’s up:
Pavlov VRcontinues to provide the quintessential FPS experience for players who want frantic, classic game types such as Team Deathmatch and Search & Destroy in a modern-day military setting. While not as hair-raisingly intense or competitive as its distant cousin — Onward, which it is so often compared to — it does constitute a fluid, fun FPS for both friends and competitors alike.
Hearkening back to the mechanically creative attitude of Garry’s Mod, Pavlov VR also stands out for its open support of user-made maps and mods; some of which have introduced features such as day/night cycles and entirely new game modes. Furthermore, if you do decide to check out Pavlov VR for its asking price of $9.99 on Steam, then the following is a list of mods that you absolutely should not miss out on.
A classic map from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dust 2 fits perfectly into Pavlov VR’s gameplay pacing — which is not conceptually different from Counter-Strike’s pacing at all. This isn’t just a fantastic port, it’s also a fantastic first map for new players to learn Pavlov’s mechanics in. As in the original Dust 2 map, this Pavlov VR iteration is set up with the game’s bomb-defusing Search & Destroy mode in mind.
Another instantly recognizable classic from Counter-Strike, the Office HQ is a decently large map that’s versatile and perfect for any of Pavlov’s game modes. Its contrast of open horizontal space cut off by long hallways that are compromised by weaving office boardrooms leave plenty of opportunity for different kinds of play. This makes it a heavily balanced map for competitive players to round off in.
Ported in as a classic map from Rare’s GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64, Facility is a series of tightly woven corridors and shooting galleries that make for intense door-to-door skirmishes. It’s bananas to get a full room of people into this map for a free-for-all Deathmatch, since the bullets don’t really stop flying until the match is over. A word of warning: spend very little time in the central hallway or on the stairs. As other players spawn in small rooms adjacent to those primary thoroughfares, it’s easy to get caught in crossfire from all directions if you’re out in the open for too long.
Ziba Tower is another ported map, this time from Battlefield 3. Unlike many other maps in Pavlov VR, the Ziba Tower penthouse feels exceptionally clean with attention paid to small aesthetic details. It even has multiple swimming pools for you to dip your feet into. In contrast to Facility, Ziba Tower is much more spacious and can feel quite lonely without a full lobby of players or AI bots. Granted, I particularly enjoy Ziba Tower’s use of vertical space — making for really interesting Team Deathmatch sessions rife with tactical firefights between vantage points.
The Practice Range is perfect for new players who want to try out all of Pavlov VR’s weapons without feeling the pressure of enemies firing back. Even as an experienced player, this map offers a slew of versatile physics-based target practice toys that you can play with to improve your aim. I enjoy challenging myself to hit vases across the range down the ironsight of an M1911, but that’s certainly not all there is to do. There are a number of exercises on the Practice Range that are designed to test your accuracy and skill with each of Pavlov VR’s weapons, including breaching rooms and moving targets. All of them are worth doing at least once.
For those who remember spending countless nights in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s high-octane free-for-all matchmaking lobbies, Rust sets itself apart as one of the most beloved close-quarters skirmish maps in recent gaming history. In Pavlov VR, it’s sort of striking to see Rust presented to me as a virtual place that I feel I have now visited, but it doesn’t function any worse than it did in Modern Warfare 2. In fact, VR presence makes Rust come to life in a special way, if not solely because Pavlov VR’s gameplay mechanics fit naturally on top of its meticulously-crafted chutes and sandy rampways. Expect frantic and charged combat from all sides as players chase one another up, down, and around corners.
A perfect re-creation of Dunder Mifflin’s office space, titular The Office (Dunder Mifflin) is another skirmish-focused map that puts players into a tight proximity with one another. Granted, most of your time will be spent ducking behind desks and chairs or inside of Michael Scott’s personal office. Some of the boardroom spaces as well as the staircase offer more breathing room than the primary office space, but shotguns and heavy pistols reign supreme here. While the few main office areas are connected by hallways, those hallways can be difficult to defend and are quickly swallowed in gunfire during Search & Destroy mode. Meanwhile, tight doorways can provide enough cover for yourself or other players to hide in wait, which can still easily backfire either way if you aren’t paying attention.
TTT is a game mode that was already popular in Garry’s Mod, but has taken on new life inside of Pavlov VR. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a play on the classic murder mystery whodunnit, where up to three players are traitors and up to seven players are civilians — including one sheriff. Either the civilians outlive the timer (or eradicate the traitors), or the traitors murder the civilians before the timer runs out. While regular civilians can’t tell who’s a traitor and who’s a fellow civilian, the sheriff is immediately visible to every player at the start of the game. Traitors are visible to other traitors, but are outmatched from the very beginning — rewarding a sleuthier approach to picking off civilians rather than take them on full-stop. Unless the sheriff gathers the bulk of the civilian players into one spot early, they are usually the first player to be picked off, making sheriff the most gruelling position to play as.
Pavlov VR’s iteration of TTT comes in a few different flavored maps, including Manor and Asylum, but many players agree that it has been done best with Village. Based on Kakariko Village from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, this version of TTT comes with plenty of nooks and crannies for traitors to hide out in, as well as a testing machine that allows players to determine who’s a civilian and who’s a traitor.
While not introducing any new gameplay, Hyrule Market is where I’ve had the absolute most fun playing Team Deathmatch and Deathmatch modes in Pavlov VR thus far. It’s a complete reimagining of the Hyrule Market from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, including a perfectly simulated day/night cycle that adds a level of dynamic ambiance unseen in other maps. The vast majority of the combat takes place across the town centre, but there are surprises around every nook and cranny. For example, as you enter different shops and buildings, their correct OST plays, which is uniquely delightful and sure to evoke nostalgia on its own. But the cherry on top is the fully-explorable Temple of Time, which you can enter at your own peril.
Jailbreak’s slower-paced cops and robbers affair stacks (up to) three guards against up to seven prisoners. The job of the prisoners is to pool resources together so they can craft the tools necessary to escape from the prison. Meanwhile, the guards are meant to stop them from doing precisely that. But when a prisoner dies, they respawn inside of their prison cell with none of their items, meaning that it’s in a prisoner’s best interest to avoid incurring the wrath of the guards at all.
There are very few mechanical rules in place to hold Jailbreak up — a double edged sword, allowing guards to abuse their power and randomly shoot prisoners for looking at them the wrong way. Instead, the modders opted to leave Jailbreak’s abstract rules listed on the walls of the prison. To follow those rules and decide when/how to enact them, any given guard requires a combination of reading comprehension, snap problem-solving and empathy. As such, Jailbreak is best seen as a game mode where the player engages real humans behaving in eerily appropriate ways when put into certain positions. Guards act flippantly with their power while prisoners scurry around trying to avoid dying and therefore losing their items.
Violence isn’t always a winning strategy as a prisoner, but killing a guard and taking their key makes the process of moving between locked doors far easier. And the moment at the turning point when you finally kill a guard who’s been excessively aggressive to you and the other prisoners is a satisfying moment indeed. As is the moment when you lead your fellow prisoners to an escape route only to realize that one or two prisoners are left stranded, so then the five of you shoot your way back into the prison to execute a final stand.
The thrill of playing as a prisoner in Jailbreak comes from each risk assessment you have to make before taking the next necessary step forward, each step getting more important than the last, driving a feeling of tension that leads to the cathartic moment of escape. As a guard, however, Jailbreak can be more or less boring depending on what kind of person you’re willing to act as.
This is why ultimately, Jailbreak exceeds at creatively using Pavlov VR both to place human behavior under a microlens and provide a compelling gameplay reason for true multiplayer role playing in VR. It’s also where I’ve had the most fun playing Pavlov. Well done!
Note: Jailbreak Mod also has a sequel, Jailbreak Mod 2, which takes place on a different map and contains slightly advanced rules. Some players believe this second iteration is a big step backwards from the original, citing unintuitive map layout and issues with a new crafting menu interfering with the Oculus Rift control scheme.
It’s a massive joy to play Pavlov VR; not only for its punchy VR gunplay, but also because of the modding community that continues to add new maps and content for repeat players to consume and explore. That said, if there are any maps or mods you feel deserved to be on this list, then let us know!
Yearning for an old-school Call of Duty 2-era WWII-focused first-person shooter (FPS) in VR? Does the modern, Counter-Strike style setting of Onward and Pavlov not do it for you? Then Front Defense: Heroes could be just what you’re looking for. And luckily this weekend (starting today and running through 1PM PT on Monday, 4/29, anyone can jump in to play for free on Steam.
For what it’s worth, Steam’s got it listed as only featuring Vive support.
While we didn’t love Front Defense: Heroes at launch, it had a solid foundation and has received a few key updates since release. Most notably, they finally added full, smooth locomotion so you no longer are forced to use the awkward mixture of first and third-person movement.
Here’s some footage of the new smooth locomotion:
The game features a handful of maps, a few core game mods like Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, with up to 5v5 matches. Its gone the makings of a solid VR shooter and this weekend’s influx of players — plus a whopping 50% discount if you want to buy it and keep playing after the weekend – bodes well for the health of the player-base ideally.
If you decide to take the plunge and check it out over the next few days, you can join the game’s Discord channel for updates and to find people to play with.
Here is some gameplay from the launch version of the game:
When an indie developer sets out to make a fast-paced action game in VR it usually takes one of two forms. The first form is a traditional wave shooter that usually forces a player to stand still, without moving, as enemies come barreling down towards them. You shoot, they die, and you repeat that until you eventually get overrun. Then there is the type that is still usually a wave shooter at heart, but it ramps up the flashiness with full movement, more weapon variety, and a bit of bombastic glory.
For the most part, Overturn by YJM Games falls into that second category. The visual style and over-the-top intensity reminded me a bit of Sairento and Raw Data, as there is a heavy mix of shooting guns and slicing blades. You can see it in action in the trailer below:
Overturn successfully ran a Steam Greenlight campaign last month and is set to release on Steam. During the demo I played the action felt good. I could move around the environment quickly by combining full locomotion with teleportation and the mixture of slicing enemies and blasting them away was very satisfying.
However, it’s unclear how well this will transition into a full game. The speed of gameplay is reminiscent of arcade-style action games, but the VR market has mostly moved on from those at this stage. If there is a narrative hook present and enough missions to keep people playing, then it could work. The flashiness is complemented well by a bold art style that does a great job of evoking the cyberpunk meets retro-futuristic art style. Action plays very smoothly as well.
In the future YJM Games also plans to include multiplayer options as well, which should help expand the amount of content available.
Overturn is set to release on Steam on October 17th, but we don’t know the price point just yet. Once available, it will have support for both Rift and Vive.
Editor’s Note: The majority of this review focuses on the game as it was at launch on Oculus Rift with Touch and HTC Vive. Since then it has been updated with full locomotion and new maps. For our thoughts on the PSVR version, you can read more here and see the updated section at the end of this review, which was contributed by Staff Writer Jamie Feltham.
Standing back-to-back with my fellow zombie slayer, UploadVR’s very own Joe Durbin, I peer down the barrel of my pistol at the walking corpse that’s stumbling toward me. I glance down at the ammo belt around my waist and notice I’m running low — only about 4 shots left after this clip is done. The hulking mass of a former human is only a few feet from my face now, so I level my sights at its head and squeeze the trigger. Click. Out of shots. I frantically release the magazine, then slam a new one into place by bringing the gun down to my belt, and raise my arms again just in time to blow a huge chunk of its head off, dropping it to the ground, just before it gnaws on my face.
Wave completed. I take a deep breath and get ready for the next onslaught.
This happened in Arizona Sunshine’s multiplayer horde mode — a small slice of the game that would have been enough for most developers to sell as a standalone product. Instead, with Arizona Sunshine, Vertigo Games have packed in not only a single player and multiplayer horde mode with endless waves of zombies, but they’ve also thrown in a robust campaign mode that can also be played both alone and with a friend. It combines together into a deep and diverse overall package that leaves me wanting more as I write these words.
Before approaching this review, I had to ask myself: What really makes a good zombie game? Obviously, zombies are at the core of the experience. They’ve got to be scary, first and foremost. In Arizona Sunshine there are a handful of moments that raised my hairs and gave me goosebumps, but it wasn’t as frequent as other games that bill themselves as primarily horror experiences. Instead, just like its approach to everything, the horror elements are only a small part of a much more complex puzzle.
You’ll hear them shuffling toward you, growling and moaning with each step, and you’ll feel the terror as an entire horde of them comes pouring over a gate or down a mine shaft after you. That’s all here. But what you won’t find is the inability to escape, or reposition yourself, or at least move out of the way. So many other zombie shooters in VR right now are obsessed with either locking you in place, neutralizing your ability to move other than what your room allows, or location-based teleportation to pre-defined areas. Luckily, Arizona Sunshine’s movement system offers flexibility, even if it’s still a form of teleportation.
By pressing forward on one of the Oculus Touch controllers’ analog sticks, or pressing the touchpad of a Vive controller, and then aiming out in front of me, I can choose where I’d like to teleport in the world, which results in a blink of the screen to simulate the movement. You’re faced with managing an endurance meter so you can’t just endlessly teleport across entire levels. It’s an effective solution to the movement problem, one popularized by Cloudhead’s The Gallery, and it avoids motion sickness. However, it would have been nice for the option of a more traditional control scheme for those that don’t suffer from motion sickness.
Even though the zombies in Arizona Sunshine retain a lot of what make zombies so scary in pop culture, it loses some of that effect once you realize how simple the A.I. is in the game. They either slowly walk around until noticing you, crawl on the ground if shot in the leg, or sprint toward you. One thing I really appreciated is that, regardless of the type of zombie, they’re lethal. If you make the mistake of letting one get close enough to hit you, they’ll start wildly flailing their arms making it tough to shoot their head and dealing severe damage very, very quickly. Within seconds, a single zombie can drop you from full health to death without much trouble. Luckily, there’s no risk of turning from a bite to worry about that I noticed.
Throughout the campaign mode I grew fond of the main character’s wit and humor. I began the journey waking up inside of a cave, presumably a hideout location. A zombie head rolls into the cave after getting lopped off by a bear trap — a safety precaution the main character took before resting. Jokingly, he refers to the dead monstrosity as ‘Fred’, a comical moniker he uses to refer to any and all zombies throughout the game.
After exiting the cave, I hear a human voice over the radio for the first time. I set out on my mission to find the source of the transmission and, ideally, a safe haven from all of the madness. It’s a simple story that never veers off track and has zero twists or turns, but it gets the job done. The focus isn’t so much on the overarching narrative, but more so on the world and the main character’s relationship to the apocalypse that makes it so pleasurable to play through.
Over the course of the 4+ hour campaign, the character’s humor is effective at offering a foil to the otherwise horrific hellscape of the Arizona desert during the apocalypse. Between scavenging for food and ammunition it’s refreshing to hear the protagonist remark about how ugly one of the Freds appears to be, or how the horde of Freds is ruining the intimate get-together he had planned for the single dead zombie in the middle of the room. Hearing my character exclaim, “You just had to invite your entire damn family, didn’t ya Fred!?” is much more entertaining than the stock grunts and complaints.
That personality shines through in the end, as well as his anger and frustration mounts and all serves to mark the ending of the campaign in a huge climactic battle. That personality was enough to make it an adventure worth taking, but it never ascends to he heights of other narrative VR games, such as The Gallery, in its storytelling. The utter lack of any other characters, or at least diversions in the plot, make this a very by-the-numbers story of the zombie apocalypse, one that we’ve all heard before, even if it’s exciting to play again in VR.
Which is what a lot of the experience boils down to. In terms of game design and mechanics, there isn’t a whole lot to make it sound very exciting on paper. You can move around large environments, point flashlights in the dark, shoot zombies, and fight for your life — but that’s been in games for years. The difference between a game like Arizona Sunshine and anything you’d play on a 2D display is that in this game, you feel like you’re part of the world. You embody the character, rather than piloting them through the window of your television.
My memories of playing the game feel more like I visited this place and vividly recall getting lost in the mines, scared for my life. In this way, it’s much more than just a simple video game. By crafting a full campaign mode that lasts several hours, Arizona Sunshine effectively transports you to this other world in such a convincing way that you feel what your character feels much more so than you would in any other traditional game.
Playing the campaign in multiplayer offers the exact same experience, but increases the difficulty in just as many ways as it decreases it. While you have a second pair of guns and pair of eyes in the world, you don’t have twice as much ammo to go around, forcing you to share and ration out each stash. The dark levels also require immense teamwork as only person is afforded the use of the flashlight. You better trust whoever you’ve asked to watch your back.
Then going one step further, Arizona Sunshine also offers a dynamic horde mode as well. You can play this endless wave section of the game either alone or, as we would recommend, with up to 3 other people, scaling it from either 1-4 players total. Each time we tried it out the zombies came from different locations, in different quantities, and different styles. Just like in the campaign mode, some of them were wearing helmets, while others were not. In later waves they started running and pouring into the arena in larger numbers, amping up the intensity even further.
Each time we tried to plan out our positioning, watching each other’s backs. It never panned out how we’d have liked. Eventually we got overrun, chaos ensued, and we died. But hey — at least we put up a good fight, right?
The horde mode is great, addictive, and immensely exhilarating, but I came away wishing for more. There only appears to be a single map with the same layout and time of day settings. There’s no progression system other than spawning newer and better guns as the rounds go on, and once you play it a few times, there isn’t much else to see. I’d love for some unlockable customization options, the ability to increase rank, acquire abilities, place environmental defenses like walls or barricades, or at least try out more than a single level. Those would make for great additions in an update.
Over half a year on and Arizona Sunshine finally arrives on PSVR as a slightly watered down but still very much enjoyable experience. You get all of the same modes and features, but an added twist on the campaign that lets you play with the new Aim Controller. Graphically the game’s taken a big hit, though it’s by no means unsightly and playing with the rifle-shaped device is a real joy.
PSVR’s tracking and feature limitations are never too far from your mind; the Aim jitters when looking down the sights, and walking/turning with the Move controllers is cumbersome at best. Still the game gives you plenty of options to fine-tune the experience and the core gameplay is just as fun as it is on PC. If you can’t go Rift or Vive, then the PSVR version is still a great choice.
Final Score:8.5/10 – Great
Vertigo Games proved that even in the most saturated genre we’ve seen for VR games this year — shooters with zombies — there was still room for something fresh. Arizona Sunshine combines the narrative power of a fully-featured 4+ hour campaign mode, with the intensity of a wave-based horde mode, and then adds multiplayer to both experiences. The protagonist’s witty humor make it worth recommending on his charming personality alone, with enough depth and variety to keep people coming back for several hours. By doing so many things so well, Arizona Sunshine quickly rose to the top of the pack as the best overall zombie shooter we’ve seen yet in VR.
Arizona Sunshine will be available on Steam for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, as well as on the Oculus Home Store for the Rift. The game is also now available on PSVR with optional Aim Controller support. You can find more purchasing options on the game’s official website. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Onward rocks. The, military-sim, multiplayer shooter won our award for Best VR Shooter at the end of last year and was in the running for best overall game as well. Onward pits two teams of up to four players against one another on one of seven maps. Teams have to use intelligent communication, informed strategy and an array of realistic firearms to either protect or capture each map’s objective.
Onward is a multiplayer-only game, a huge risk for a VR-only title, but no matter what time you log on, you’ll always be able to find multiple Onward matches to jump into. This speaks to the quality of the game and the ravenous community it has inspired since launch. What’s even more impressive is that Onward was created by essentially just one man. A first time game developer named Dante Buckley who dropped out of college to make it happen. He is only 20 years old.
We recently had the chance to speak with Buckley again to discuss how the game has grown since we last interviewed him and what new features fans can expect him to add in 2017 and beyond.
“It’s been cool,” Buckley said, in his typical understated fashion, when asked how he’s been enjoying the success of his game.
Never one for self-promotion, Buckley is much more excited to discuss the future of Onward. We asked him to share what sort of upgrades, additions, and add-ons fans of the game can expect from him in 2017. He began with one word that should be music to many players ears: co-op.
Right now, Onward players can only battle it out against human opponents. But, according to Buckley, he is currently working on adding a mode in which players can work with their friends to wage war against AI opponents instead.
“Pretty much I want to create a way for players to work together against an AI,” Buckley said. “Something I’ve learned is how important it is to build multiplayer experiences that players can enjoy together.”
Buckley is keeping the details on this new modes exact rules, features, and release date to himself, but did say that fans can expect to see it by the end of this year. Coming sooner than the co-op mode, however, will be Onward’s first new map to launch since the popular Suburbia battlefield released several months ago.
“There’s definitely going to be a new map in the next patch,” Dante revealed. “I won’t say right now when that patch is hitting or what the new map is, but I think people will really like it.”
In addition to adding a new map, Buckley is also working hard to make sure the existing maps in the game are fair and balanced to players. “Right now not every map is 100 percent balanced so that’s something I’m definitely paying attention to and working on updating regularly as patches come out,” he elaborated.
Co-op is not the only new game mode Buckley wants to add to Onward. He also detailed his version of an escort game mode that could work within the existing team structure of the experience.
“Basically what I want to do is make one person on one team a high value target,” Buckley explained. “He’d only have maybe a pistol and it would be his team’s job to make sure he gets all the way across the map to a designated safe zone. The target can’t really fight back on his own so this mode would definitely be more about running and hiding and using really good teamwork.”
Buckley also shared that he is working on revamping Onward’s loadout system to make it more balanced. Right now, players can select one of several classes and pick their favorite main weapons, side arms, grenades, etc. for that class. Dante’s vision for the future, however, involves a point system that forces players to be more strategic about what armaments they select.
“Each player would start out with a set amount of points at the start of the game,” Buckley said. “Then each thing you pick for your loadout would have a certain cost that you have to spend. I think that will help balance some issues and also give players a chance to be more strategic and specialized.”
There are a lot of changes coming to Onward this year, but Buckley is also clear that much of the game will not change. According to Buckley, the game’s punishing realism, minimal HUD, and library of weapons will all remain primarily unchanged as these new features get added.
Onward is available now on Steam for $24.99. You can play it on either the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift with Touch controllers. For tips and strategies on getting started with the game, make sure to check out our Onward Field Guide.
We know, we know, you’re sick of wave shooters. Who isn’t? Well you might want to take a look at Vindicta, then. Yes, it’s got guns, and plenty of enemies to use them against, but they’re not coming at you in waves, and you’re certainly not rooted to the spot; Vindicta wants to bring a full FPS campaign to your HTC Vive very soon.
Like many of you, this week’s teaser trailer for this new title from Game Cooks had us intrigued, so we reached out to the developer to find out a little more. We came away with more than we’d expected, including the first footage of gameplay from Vindicta, which you can see below.
Based on the clip, you might think the team’s been chipping away at development for six or seven months.
In reality, it started last December.
That’s what Director of Publishing Lara Noujaim tells me when we speak over Skype. “We’ve been really aggressive,” she says, explaining that the game really came together in January. “We set a very aggressive timeline, and I’m really happy because we’re meeting all of our timeline targets.”
Game Cooks seems to have accomplished a lot in that small amount of time; Vindicta is aiming to launch in Early Access in April with “four to six hours” of its campaign in place. The story sees you cast as Agent V, an elite agent tasked with infiltrating UB Industries, an evil company amassing a secret robot army. You’ll make your way through a sprawling facility dismantling your metallic enemies.
While sneaking does play a part in the game, it’s a shooter first and foremost. “A lot of effort was put on the shooting,” Noujiam explains. “We actually had weapon experts, ex-army who came to our office and tested it out just to make sure that the effect of shooting was realistic as possible.”
Weapons should feel chunkier and carry weight as a result. “The team are big FPS players, so they take inspiration from everywhere, even movies,” she adds, noting that one of the guns in the trailer reminds the team of Suicide Squad. In fact, as we talk, the rest of the team is apparently still in the office at 8:00pm, playing Counter-Strike.
To get about you’ll use a mix of both room scale tracking, allowing you to physically walk around spaces, and swinging your arms to simulate running, a method we haven’t seen used in many games of this caliber so far. The team was eager to avoid teleportation and other VR shooter tropes. “There’s nothing wrong with them, we just wanted to try something different,” Noujaim says. Instead, it wants an active shooter that keeps you moving, adding intensity to the action by keeping you on your toes.
Part of that comes through different enemy types. You’ll constantly be on the lookout for flying drones and crawling spiders that edge towards you as you fend off more traditional infantry. As you can see from the gameplay, you’ll also be able to shoot the heads off of friendly robotic scientists because, well, for the hell of it.
It’s hard to believe that Vindicta is really the product of just two months’ worth of work, but Game Cooks appears to be a committed team and there’s still another two months to go before release. Following the Early Access launch, Game Cooks will be looking to add more to the campaign, though the direction it takes will be dependent on how reception it gets in pre-release. The developer is also planning a multiplayer mode. Until April, you can follow the game on an official website.
Disclaimer: Vindicta will be on display at UploadVR’s GDC Mixer next week, though this content was arranged separately from that agreement. For more, you can read our Code of Ethics.
