Beat the snot out of angular red men with
improvised weapons in Superhot.
that hasn’t materialised. A few cool
ideas, such as Samsung’s 360-degree
camera for immersive video
experiences, were eventually laid aside
as gimmicks without staying power.
Until the technology behind VR can be
perfected to provide total, unbreakable
immersion, the onus lies on the
software to carry the format forward.
Here’s the sad thing: current VR
games are a sorry bunch. There are a
few real gems out there (check out the
‘Games Worth Playing’ box), and some
full-fledged triple-A releases have been
retooled for VR with varying degrees of
success, such as the excellent Skyrim
VR or the slightly wonky Borderlands 2
VR. But as a general rule of thumb,
good VR games need to be built from
the ground up to work in VR, and most
developers won’t dedicate the time
and money to make that happen on a
large scale.
Plenty of people are willing to take
a stab at producing a game for VR,
though, perhaps just out of the novelty
of it. What this leads to is a wealth of
titles that are short games at best,
glorified tech demos at worst. Many
developers seem to begin with a
unique, interesting idea for a game
that would work well in VR, but lack
the resources to produce it in any
form that lasts longer than two
hours. Some are insultingly short;
Accounting+, a game from Rick and
Morty star Justin Roiland, is hilarious,
well crafted, and less than an hour
long. And it costs £12!
The alternate approach has been to
produce virtual sandboxes for gamers
to simply mess about in. This is the
bread and butter of so many YouTube
and Twitch channels – nonsensical
tomfoolery in a variety of settings,
often employing a key mechanic to
keep things interesting. Blade and
Sorcery puts players in a medieval
arena and arms them with a range of
era-appropriate weapons and magicalspells for beating the living daylights
of hapless goons. Gorn does a similar
thing, but with cartoonishly
proportioned gladiators and ridiculous,
over-the-top gore.Finding the formula
Fooling around in VR is fun enough,
but these games don’t have storylines,
objectives, or even really any
quantifiable amount of game content.
Pavlov VR is a lot of fun with some
mates, as you mess around with
automatic weapons in a facsimile of
Counter-Strike, but it quickly starts to
feel more like a demonstration of what
VR is capable than an actual game.
Indeed, virtual reality ‘experiences’
are commonplace, enabling VR headset
owners to immerse themselves in
another life for a short while – all too
often, a very short while. That could be
a gun range, a rollercoaster, even a
plank overlooking an 80-storey fall.
We’re not going to talk about the erotic
ones, we leave those to less refined
journalists. But the point is that VR
‘games’ often aren’t games at all,
merely snapshots, glimpses into
exciting worlds and scenarios that
are snatched away almost as soon
as they begin.
Even some of the ‘proper’ games
released for VR are lacking in content,
polish or simply quality. One problem
with virtual reality is that games come
in a huge variety of genres, many of
which simply don’t work in VR. That
said, some genres fit excellently with
the format of VR. Puzzle games can
work excellently in virtual reality,
particularly locked-room puzzles, such
as the comedic spy jape I Expect You to
Die. News that The Room is coming to
VR was greeted with joy by puzzle fans
and VR aficionados alike.
Firstperson shooters work relatively
well in VR, enabling players to pull off
manoeuvres that would be impossible
within the confines of a conventionalGorn’s exaggerated bodies and showers of blood look great in VR.© SUPERHOT TEAM, FREE LIVES60 |^ |^ March 2020
Games
worth playing
For every good game playable in VR,
there are about 7,000 bad ones, based
on our expert (not exactly accurate)
calculations. Those good games do
exist, though. Right off the bat, we’ve
got to recommend Beat Saber, a
high-octane, neon-tinted rush of
adrenaline – Guitar Hero by way of
Star Wars. Your two controllers
become lightsabers as coloured
blocks race toward you, demanding
that you destroy them in time to
the music. Similarly fast-paced is
bonkers extreme sports game Sprint
Vector, which sees up to eight players
race through all manner of futuristic
locales at blistering speeds.
Those interested in a more cerebral
experience might enjoy Budget Cuts, a
tongue-in-cheek stealth title that puts
you in the shoes of a human employee
in a workplace full of robots. Armed
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you sneak around, hiding from
camera-headed bots. It’s got a brilliant,
dark sense of humor that reminds us of
the original Portal.
Black comedy seems to work well in
VR, for some reason. Duck Season takes
you back to a childhood in 1988, where
you’re eager to play the newest hit
game – a thinly veiled Duck Hunt
rip-off. However, it quickly becomes
clear that something is awry inside the
Duck Season cartridge, with strings of
horror, action and stealth gameplay
complementing the opening arcade
shooter elements.
Arizona Sunshine and Space Pirate
Trainer are both enjoyable bouts of
zombie- and robot-blasting
respectively, while the fantastic
Superhot is even better in VR. It brings
a glorious sense of mastery when you
Matrix-dodge out of the way of a
bullet, throw a bottle at your assailant,
and snatch their dropped gun from the
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puzzle game as it is a shooter, and it
feels as good as it looks.