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 colored 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 with a
portal gun and office supplies, 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
Tr ainer 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 air to finish the job. It’s as much
a puzzle game as it is a shooter, and it
feels as good as it looks.Beat the crap out of angular red men with
improvised weapons in SUPERHOT.that hasn’t materialized. 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 AAA 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 magical spells
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 CounterStrike, but it quickly
star ts 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-story-high fall. We’re not going to talk
about the sexy ones; we leave that 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.
First-person shooters work relatively
well in VR, enabling players to pull off
maneuvers that would be impossible
within the confines of a conventionalGorn’s exaggerated bodies and showers of blood look great in VR.©^SUPERHOTTEAM,^ FREELI
VESthe state of VR
50 MAXIMUM PC JAN 2020 maximumpc.com