Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall is an upcoming VR action game from Carbon Studio. The game was original set for a Summer release date on PC VR and Quest, but the studio has announced a delayed release date, now set for sometime in Q4. Carbon Studio says it’s using the time to improve combat, progression, and rewards, and it will run a second closed beta for feedback before launch.
Warhammer: Tempestfall is shaping up to look like a fun fantasy action game with melee combat and spellcasting at its core. Earlier this Summer developer Carbon Studio revealed a short gameplay trailer which shows the game’s dark vibe:
The decision to delay the game may have been related to feedback from the game’s closed beta which ran earlier this year. Here’s how the studio puts it:
As you know, we are currently at a very advanced stage of the development of Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall. All of the zones, enemies, quests, items, spells and major mechanics are ticking like a Swiss watch, but… although the game is about 99% done, we concluded that we could still make it even better.
We’ve decided to implement a handful of quality of life changes and reconsider certain elements of the combat system, especially blocking. Our main goal is to make fighting Nighthaunt forces as fun as possible, whether preferring stationary or mobile playstyle. We hope you will enjoy our new weapon contact-based blocking system!
Among other unlisted improvements, players can also expect a deeper character progression system, with additional rewards for exploration.
Regarding blocking, Carbon Studio shared a glimpse of the new system, which uses quick FX to clue players into where they should block. In some ways it looks like a more subtle version of the blocking system that works to well in Until You Fall.
To gather more feedback on the latest changes to the game, Carbon Studio has announced that it will run a second closed beta; players interested in testing the game can head to the official Carbon Studio Discord for more details on joining the second beta.
Spacefolk City is a city building simulator for Quest and PC VR that aims to get you plonking down a dense city landscape in free-floating space. At least from the trailer, it looks like a deliciously weird slice of fun.
Indie studio Moon Mode is hoping to bring the single-player Spacefolk City sometime this fall, priced at $30 on the Oculus Store (Quest, Rift) and Steam for PC VR headsets.
Moon Mode says you’ll be able to hand-place buildings at any orientation to create urban layouts that appeal to the interests and abilities of your city’s inhabitants. You’ll also get the chance to decorate your city with a range of “different absurd objects and items,” the studio says. Check out the trailer below:
As you’d imagine, the bright and funky city sim isn’t being targeted solely at hardcore fans of the genre, as its focus is mainly on accessibility to the 13+ crowd.
“There are very few casual, accessible city simulators in VR at the moment,” Moon Mode says. “Of the titles that do exist, few are approachable for people who might have never played games of this genre before.”
Anyway, here’s a quick rundown of the story:
Spacefolk are stranded after the collapse of their home and you have to help them build a new city. There’s still the danger of a dying sun to contend with though, so eventually you’ll have to find a way to leave the solar system for someplace safer. Each Spacefolk has body type-specific interests, so you have to build homes and facilities to reflect those to make them happy. Some inhabitants have special abilities like walking fast, building fast, or carrying heavier loads, so you’ll need to balance who is doing what.
There’s no specific release date yet for Spacefolk City, although we’re sure to hear more as we head into fall before it launches on Quest and SteamVR headsets.
Facebook’s Beat Games today surprise-launched probably one of the most on-brand paid music packs for its EDM-heavy rhythm game Beat Saber, this time featuring dubstep’s Skrillex.
The Skrillex Music Pack is available starting today on all supported platforms, which includes Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, SteamVR headsets, and PSVR.
The pack contains eight tracks spanning some of Skrillex’s greatest hits and even the newly-released song ‘Don’t Go’ with Don Toliver and Justin Bieber. Check out the full list below:
Bangarang (feat. Sirah)
First of the Year (Equinox)
The Devil’s Den
Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites
Ragga Bomb (feat. Ragga Twins)
Rock ‘n’ Roll (Will Take You to the Mountain)
Don’t Go (feat. Justin Bieber)
Butterflies
Love it or hate it, the Skrillex Music Pack follows a growing list of paid Beat Saber content that has actually tended away from EDM, with musicians such as BTS, Linkin Park, Timbaland, Greenday, Panic at the Disco!, Imagine Dragons, and a host of artists under the Interscope music label making for a more rounded offering.
As it is, the Skrillex Music Pack costs $11 (¥1090/€9.17) for the full eight songs, or $2 (¥190, €2) per track. You’ll be able to play in both single and multiplayer mode, which offers up a new environment that the studio says resembles a music light show.
The Skrillex Music Pack for Beat Saber is available now, featuring eight tracks including a newly released song featuring Justin Bieber.
The eight tracks include Bangarang, one of Skrillex’s most well-known songs, and a new track called Don’t Go, featuring pop superstar Justin Bieber and Don Toliver, which only released just over a week ago. Here’s the full tracklist:
– Bangarang (feat. Sirah)
– First of the Year (Equinox)
– The Devil’s Den
– Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites
– Ragga Bomb (feat. Ragga Twins)
– Rock ‘n’ Roll (Will Take You to the Mountain)
– Don’t Go (feat. Justin Bieber)
– Butterflies
These tracks span across Skrillex’s career, with some quite recent entries and some that date back to 10 years ago. I’ve been able to try the pack out early, and while I have some minor qualms, overall it seems like a solid addition to the Beat Saber catalog. While Skrillex obviously shares a lot of musical touchstones with the EDM songs that dominate Beat Saber’s OST tracks, it still has its own flair and enough variety within the pack to feel different. If nothing else, it’s good that Facebook and Beat Games are branching out and trying to incorporate lots of varied artists and genres in the music packs they release.
The environment and new color scheme are serviceable if a little less exciting than some of the more recent music pack’s environments such as the Interscope Mixtape, and eight tracks feel like a comfortable size for a single artist pack. While I’d like to see larger packs featuring many different artists, like the Interscope release, the eight tracks here feel like enough to provide some variety and give you something to explore one by one without overwhelming you, unlike other packs that personally felt like they only have you a taste of its full potential (looking at you, Panic! at the Disco pack).
Highlights in this pack include Butterflies, which has an exhilarating, bouncy arrangement of notes in the bridge on Expert difficult, along with Bangarang, which delivers a challenging and hectic beat map on Expert that feels appropriate for the song.
That being said, the Skrillex pack does suffer from an ongoing problem with new Beat Saber releases — the difficulty levels are increasingly conflated and confused, not only between music packs but between songs in the Skrillex pack itself. To get a feel for the level of a pack, I generally try each level on Expert and see how it plays, and then sometimes run through on Hard to compare the jump between tiers. With this pack, I felt some tracks on Expert were definitely easier than others, but perhaps came a bit closer to consistency than other worse offenders like the Green Day pack. Moving between difficulties felt a bit jarring in places, with Bangarang on Expert feeling quite challenging and physically demanding compared to Hard, which felt less exciting and like a big downwards jump in terms of difficultly.
The wider problem is that there is increasingly greater variance in what constitutes Expert difficulty across most releases. While I used to feel like a solid and decent Expert player, it now feels difficult to judge just how hard an Expert track will be. Some of this is probably attributable to the releases expanding out to different genres besides EDM in recent years, but it still feels frustrating to go into a level unsure if I’ve picked the right difficulty or not. While those playing consistently well at Expert+ or Expert level may not notice or care, my guess is that the inconsistency might be more frustrating to those who play at a lower level to improve or those who are trying to find the difficulty level that they feel most comfortable at.
While these concerns are valid, they also might not be as pronounced for other players. Even so, it’s less of a fault of the pack itself and more the direction of the game as a whole. Those minor qualms aside, the Skrillex DLC feels like a welcome addition to the Beat Saber music roster. Despite not being the biggest fan of the music, I still really enjoyed playing each new track and found some interesting beat mappings and exciting segments that were well thought out and exhilarating to get right.
Given the genre, this pack will probably feel a bit familiar to long-time Beat Saber players. For those who are unfamiliar with Skrillex but enjoy the Beat Saber OST selection, this pack is probably the one that feels closest to home to those OG tracks. If you’re a fan of no-frills, EDM, high octane Beat Saber, then the Skrillex pack should do the trick.
The Beat Saber Skrillex music pack is available now for $10.99 or $1.99 per track.
Beat Saber’s latest DLC is the Skrillex Music Pack, and it’s launching today.
Beat Games just revealed the pack after a week of teases. As with other DLC it’s coming to all platforms. The pack consists of eight tracks including some of the artist’s biggest hits like Bangarang as well as the newly-released track, Don’t Go, which features Justin Bieber. Yep, that’s right, the Bieb is now officially in Beat Saber. Check out the trailer below.
Beat Saber Skrillex Pack Launches
The DLC costs $10.99 for it all or $1.99 per track. This will no doubt be a popular pack for a lot of Beat Saber fans given that the artist’s music is in line with a lot of the tracks Beat Saber first included years ago.
Skrillex joins the likes of Green Day, Linkin Park and Panic! At The Disco as artists that have official music packs in the smash-hit VR game. Beat Games also offers a mix of artists in certain packs, like the recent Interscope Pack which featured music from the titular label.
There’s still no word on possible multiplayer support for PSVR players, which is now close to a year late after Quest and PC got the update in late 2020.
Will you be picking up the Beat Saber Skrillex pack? Let us know in the comments below!
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall has been delayed. But don’t worry, it’s still expected to release this year.
Developer Carbon Studio today confirmed that the game will miss its initial summer 2021 release window and now arrive in Q4 of this year. The decision was apparently made based on feedback from a closed beta testing round for the game, which gave the studio several elements to improve on.
Namely, the game will feature an improved blocking system. Carbon provided the below GIF to show the system in action. Like Until You Fall, the game telegraphs where you need to block in its first move, though it seems subsequent attacks must be read for direction.
Carbon will also be improving the character progression feature and adding more rewards for players that explore the game’s environments. The team will run a second closed beta for the experience towards the end of September. You can find out how to get involved over on the developer’s Discord channel.
Tempestfall isn’t to be confused with last year’s Warhammer 40,000: Battle Sister. The latter game was set in the series’ most familiar universe, but Tempestfall is instead concerned with the more supernatural elements of the Age of Sigmar universe. You play as Lord-Arcanum, a magic-wielding warrior and part of a taskforce known as the Stormcast Eternals. You’ll have to battle the ghostly Nighthaunt in the realm of Shyish using first-person combat and a gesture-based weapons system. Check out the gameplay reveal in the trailer below.
As far as we know, Tempestfall is still due to launch on both PC VR and Oculus Quest at the same time. We’ll let you know if that changes.
We might be seeing another VR game from the Devolver Digital team in the near future.
Clara Sia of the publisher’s Influencer Strategy team recently put out a tweet looking for games testers with VR headsets. The project in question wasn’t disclosed and it sounds like it’s unannounced given that Sia went on to say anyone talking about it will be punted “into the sun”. So there’s that.
Devolver has published a few VR games in the past few years. It partnered with Free Lives to release enduring VR hit, Gorn, on basically every platform. We’d love to see more of Gorn, though Free Lives is currently working on non-VR city builder, Terra Nil.
Elsewhere, Serious Sam developer Croteam released a VR spin-off of the shooter series years back and has even ported past Sam games and its popular puzzle title, The Talos Principle to headsets too. Last year the team released Serious Sam 4 for PC, so there’s a chance it could be a VR version of that.
Whatever the project turns out as, it’s good to see publishers releasing more VR content. What do you think Devolver could be working on? Let us know in the comments below!
Three years ago now we reported that cutesy cat simulator, Neko Atsume, was getting a PSVR version. From today, you can finally play that game in the US.
Neko Atsume VR just launched out of nowhere on the North American PlayStation Store. The game first came to the Japanese store way back in 2018 and we’d pretty much given up hope of a launch in other markets. There’s no word on a possible European release, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.
Check out some gameplay in this oh-so-adorable footage from a few years ago.
In the game, you collect cats by laying down food and then play with them using a range of toys. There are 20 different types of cats to log, and you’ll make notes in your Catbook when you meet them. Toys include balls the friendly felines will roll around with and flowers you hold in your hand and get the critters to chase. Perhaps not VR’s deepest game, then, but who can really complain when it’s this cute?
Neko Atsume VR costs $16.99. Are you going to be picking the game up? Let us know in the comments below!
Arashi: Castles of Sin will be getting PS4 Pro support in an upcoming update.
Developer Endeavor One confirmed as much on Twitter last week, adding that the game now looks “much better”. Expect a full list of improvements when the patch goes live, though there isn’t a date for its release just yet.
PS4 Pro support should mean that the game will have improved visuals not just on Pro consoles but for anyone playing on PS5, too. Elsewhere, Endeavor noted it’s also considering adding PS5-specific updates to the game, but this might take some time.
Either way, PS4 Pro support is good to hear; Arashi has beautiful art direction with a lot of incredible sights to take in, but it’s definitely contending with the constrained power of the PS4 in some places.
We gave Arashi a ‘Good’ rating when we reviewed it earlier this month. The game sees you infiltrate castles in Feudal Japan and overthrow warlords.
“It’s a rare VR game that gives you genuine choice in deciding how to get from A to B and, when it works, captures the slick elitism of becoming a ninja,” we said. “But it’s let down by clumsier elements, like bugs, bad enemy AI and underwhelming sword combat.”
As for other platforms, the developer indicated to us that it wants to grow the game beyond PSVR in the future, but nothing’s been announced so far.
One of VR’s biggest strengths is the ability to make those at a distance feel like they’re physically near each other. While this is great for visiting with friends remotely, there’s a number of VR companies betting that virtual reality office environments, remote collaboration, and working from home in VR are going to be the future of work. Here’s a look at a handful of VR apps built for remote collaboration.
Updated – August 31st, 2021
Team Collaboration, Presentation, & Virtual Offices
These apps are designed for professionals who need to collaborate, meet, discuss, present, and make collective decisions, as well as those who want to be able to use their PC for productivity in VR while connected with others.
“Connec2 is a virtual collaboration platform that allows you to have a lifelike social experience. Imagine a virtual extension of your workspace in which physical boundaries disappear. Teleport as your digital avatar to the virtual workspace to start collaborating together. It doesn’t matter where you are, Connec2 makes you feel present at any meeting.”
“Glue is a modern collaboration platform for teams who need remote meetings to be as great as face-to-face meetings. Glue brings remote teams together to learn, share, plane and create. Combining the best in immersive 3D graphics, virtual reality and cloud computing technology, Glue empowers teams everywhere to maximize their collaboration potential.”
“Immersed enables you and others to collaborate remotely by immersing you into the same VR workspace! Be in the same virtual room with up to 7 people! Multiscreen Sharing. Share as many screens as you’d like with others, no matter what computer you’re using. Remote Whiteboarding! Brainstorm ideas with others.”
“MeetinVR enables your company to have powerful meetings in interactive VR spaces. It enables activities which are impossible or very hard to do remotely such as to present and review products and 3D models, brainstorm, sketch, mind-map, prototype and have team-building activities. All of these while interacting in a natural and easy to learn way.”
“MeetingRoom has developed a platform which will transform how businesses collaborate. We offer a virtual meeting room with collaboration and presentation tools, manipulated by the participants; pointing, discussing, marking and deleting with up to 12 other team members using virtual reality headsets. Access from non-VR platforms is also available.”
“Step into your virtual reality office or classroom. rumii can be used across virtual reality headsets and desktops for collaboration, classes and meetings. Great for remote teams, education and digital nomads.”
“Spatial turns the space around you into a shared augmented workplace. Remote users can collaborate, search, brainstorm and share content as if they were in the same room.”
“vSpatial is a virtual reality workspace that connects users to their computer applications and coworkers in an amazing way that makes their jobs easier and more delightful. vSpatial leverages the magic of VR and makes it possible for all participants in a meeting to easily share multiple applications with each other all at the same time. This all happens simply and seamlessly, with the voice conversation moving to the next level with intuitive controls and crystal clear spatial audio. Collaboration has now become more efficient and effective saving our users time, money and frustration.”
“Horizon Workrooms (beta) is the VR space for teams to connect, collaborate and develop ideas, together. Meet teammates across the table, even if you’re across the world. Transform your home office into your new favorite meeting room—and your desk into a shared table where you can gather with your team. With the Oculus Quest 2 and Oculus Remote Desktop app, you can use your computer to collaborate side-by-side with your team in VR. Can’t make it in VR? Dial into a VR meeting through video call from your laptop or desktop computer.
Design, Creation, & Prototyping
These apps lean toward collaborative spatial design, sketching, prototyping, brainstorming, and review.
“Work together with your whole team in Sketchbox, and feel like you’re in the same room, even if you’re on different continents. Perfect for collaborative design sessions, presentations, and design reviews. Instantly start a VR meeting.”
“Softspace is a spatial thinking tool for creative individuals and teams. Build beautiful virtual project spaces where you can organize, develop, and communicate your best ideas.”
Visualization & Review
These apps are oriented toward collaborative visualization, review, and annotation of CAD designs, 3D models, big data, complex code, and more.
“Experience and collaborate in your 3D-model like you are there. We allow you to experience your 3D-design rather than viewing it on a flat 2D computer screen. Make better decisions, save time and Identify design challenges together with your colleagues or customers. Increase common understanding and facilitate for more creative discussions.”
“Communicate your vision with greater clarity and gain the trust of clients. Make decisions with speed and confidence by experiencing a true to scale space. Run QA/QC to catch costly coordination issues. Walk through your 3D files with colleagues in VR, no matter their location. Multiuser provides reliable voice chat and a shared virtual environment for presentations and design reviews.”
“PiXYZ Review allows you to easily import a wide range of CAD models from industry-leading solutions, easily handling large and complex assemblies. Interact with your CAD model using manipulation and visualization tools for a desktop use. Also, instantly switch to a powerful VR mode for an immersive and interactive experience with a VR headset. Finally, collaborate easily with your coworkers thanks to an easy-to-use Collaboration mode.”
“STAGE gives you real-time communication, immersive visualization and an awareness for atmosphere. Additionally, a meeting in STAGE saves costs compared to present-meetings.”
“VISIONxR is an immersive platform allowing multiple users, in multiple locations, on multiple devices (VR, AR, desktop and mobile) to collaborate, communicate and learn together. It removes the barrier of geography, reduces time and travel costs and speeds up the process of learning and collaboration. VISIONxR is a response to the changing world of work and learning where real-time collaboration and knowledge share empower and enhance performance.”
“Meet with others inside your secure, real-time VR environment. Interact with objects and each other. Engage your audience to the max. Review sessions, then revise, republish, and re-use your immersive experiences. Work on them with others in your organization in real-time, like with a Google Doc.”
“Discover the best place for building teams to present, collaborate, and review projects together from anywhere. Put your stakeholders inside your design remotely from any location. Effectively communicate spatial concepts through immersive design reviews to unlock better decisions and alignment.”
Education & Training
These VR collaboration tools are built with an eye toward remote education, training, lectures, and large presentations.
“Acadicus provides a flexible method for delivering a wide variety of VR training scenarios. Live VR sessions enable multiple instructors and/or students to be together in VR, interacting with assets while participating remotely.”
“Engage is an education and corporate training platform in virtual reality. It empowers educators and companies to host meetings, presentations, classes and events with people across the world. Using the platform, virtual reality training and experiences can be created in minutes. The tools are very easy to use and require no technical expertise. You can choose to host your virtual reality sessions live, or record and save them for others to experience later. A wide variety of effective and immersive virtual experiences can be created with an extensive library of virtual objects, effects and virtual locations available on the platform.”
“Providing learners with quality clinical experiences is a challenge. OMS virtual reality nursing scenarios allows nursing educators to deliver immersive, standardized simulation scenarios, feedback and blended learning in one easy to set-up intuitive platform. The OMS VR platform allows nursing students to access flexible, immersive, engaging scenarios whenever they need to, achieving first rate educational outcomes whilst saving organizations time, space and money. With libraries of scenarios for nursing students, registered nurses and nurse practitioners OMS support all groups of learners.”
“Create your own immersive experiences. Combine any content to make your own VR experience in a couple of minutes. Collaborate and learn together from anywhere, synchronously or on-demand.”
Social VR Platforms
Social VR platforms are made for connecting users for general and entertainment purposes like discussions, group events, activities, and more. While there are many more social VR apps out there, we focused here on those which might provide value to those looking for remote working solutions rather than gaming and entertainment.
“AltspaceVR is the premier place to attend live shows, meetups, cool classes, and more with friendly people from around the world. All thanks to the magic of Virtual Reality.
Easily start your own meetup, show or class and discover the next frontier of entertainment and community.”
“Use cases of Bigscreen include both entertainment and productivity. It’s used as a virtual living room to watch movies, play videogames, browse the web, and hangout with friends. It’s also used for productivity as a tool for remote teams to collaborate together in virtual offices.”
Just this weekend the Voices of VR Podcast reached an impressive milestone; in the podcast’s 1,000th episode, host Kent Bye looks back at his conversations with members of the VR industry over the last seven years to parse where the moderrn era of VR started, where it is now, and where it’s headed.
Kent Bye is officially prolific. Since 2014 he’s now published 1,000 episodes of the Voices of VR Podcast which has faithfully charted the modern era of VR by giving listeners a chance to hear directly from the people working to make VR a reality. That’s an average of roughly 2.5 episodes per week over the last seven years.
In every interview over those seven years, Bye has concluded each discussion with the same question for the guest: “What do you believe is the ultimate potential of virtual reality?”
The podcast’s 1,000th episode looks back on answers to that question over the last seven years, which make for an excellent view of the many different aspirations for the technology and how ideas about it have evolved over time.
Here’s how Bye says it all started in 2014:
The first Oculus Developer Kits (the Oculus DK1) were shipped in March of 2013, and I bought my DK1 on January 1, 2014. I attended the first professional conference during the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference on May 19 and 20th of 2014 where the excitement about the potentials of this new medium was palpable. I ended up recording 44 interviews over those two days because I wanted to capture what felt like a historical moment within the community of early adopters and innovators who would prove to become key figures in the development and continued evolution of what’s possible within the VR medium. I feel like I’ve been in a collaborative conversation with the broader VR community over the past 7 years helping to document the full range of applications, but to also tap into the more philosophical, ethical, and future dreaming potentials for where this could all go.
A “collaborative conversation” indeed; Voices of VR Podcast is unique in the way that Bye has focused on being as much of a listener in his interviews as he is a host. The result is a podcast which really captures the essence of its name and feels like a clear window into the minds of people ‘in the trenches’ of the VR industry.
Looking for a summary of the best VR FPS and shooter games available on Oculus Quest? We’ve got you covered — here’s our top 10.
The Oculus Quest library is only growing larger and stronger by the day with a few options available in most genres. For first-person shooter fans, we’ve put together this eclectic list of shooters available on Quest. Some of these games stay quite faithful to the traditional conventions of the genre, while others put a twist on the gameplay in fresh and exciting ways that feel particularly potent in VR.
Here’s our list of the 10 best FPS games available now on the Oculus Quest. You’ll be able to pick all these titles up from the Oculus Quest store.
Honorable Mention: Dr Beef’s Classic Ports
Team Beef, consisting of some community developers and spearheaded by Simon ‘DrBeef’ Brown, consistently create fantastic ports of classic games available to sideload through SideQuest such as DOOM 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and more. To learn how to sideload, check out our guide.
10. Phantom: Covert Ops
Phantom is one of a few games on this list that gets in on a technicality. It’s more of a stealth game than it is a shooter but, even with that considered, its FPS mechanics are still more developed that a lot of other entries in the genre. Set over the course of a single night, you infiltrate a hostile facility by kayak and use silenced weapons to sneak through trenches. Get caught and you can rely on a trusty machine gun to get you out of trouble, too. Phantom is a polished experience any shooter fan should consider.
This was a somewhat unexpected arrival on Quest — the high graphical fidelity of the original game meant that a Quest version seemed unlikely. However, while the visuals aren’t on par with the PC original by any means, the entire core experience remains in tact and provides Quest players with an expansive wave shooter on a grand scale. It’s time to mow down some robots!
After what many described as a rough launch, Larcenauts fought its way back with immediate updates to fix the Overwatch-inspired shooter’s biggest flaws. Now, with manual reloading and sprint options included, it’s much easier to dial in on the fantastic hero shooter gameplay, which has been finely balanced to make sure each character plays an important role. Larcenauts takes a bit to really learn but, once you do, you’ll find one of VR’s deepest and most rewarding shooters.
With the success of Fortnite and the battle royale genre, something similar coming to VR was inevitable. Late last year, Population: One filled that gap in the market.
If you’re looking for a VR battle royale to play with friends, then look no further. This three-man squad-only shooter follows the same basic premise as Fortnite complete with a basic wall-building system, but the addition of climbing and a deployable wingsuit for gliding sets it apart by letting you scale any building or structure.
The game has received plenty of post-launch support and content updates, so if you’re looking for a multiplayer VR FPS to sink your teeth into long-term, Population: One is probably your best bet.
What this military-themed shooter lacks in visuals on Quest, it makes up for in performance, content, and gameplay.
Similar in pace to a Call of Duty game, Contractors features a wide selection of loadout options and different guns, all with active reloading. There’s tremendous freedom of movement as well, if your stomach can handle it, like being able to jump, sprint, and slide around maps. You can play solo missions, but the real focus is multiplayer, where you’ll be able to choose between co-op objectives and online competitive PvP matches.
Pistol Whip is not a shooter in the traditional sense — you’re wielding a gun, but you use it in a way that combines shooters with rhythm games, mowing down enemies to the beat of the music. The more in time you are with the track, the higher your score. While it’s a well-worn comparison at this point, the game lands somewhere between a Beat Saber and Superhot hybrid, and definitely not in a bad way.
The game launched with 10 original tracks, but has since added a bunch more in free post-launch updates, such as the Mad Max-inspired ‘Full Throttle’ level, which you can see in the footage embedded above. If you’re looking for a shooter-rhythm game hybrid, then give Pistol Whip a shot.
Rebellion’s VR spin-off of its shooter series took a while to materialize, but the wait was well worth it. VR breathes new life into an aging formula with fantastic weapon handling that asks players to manually reload rifles and large levels that have you mixing up stealth with full-on firefights. Though Sniper Elite VR might be a fairly routine shooter by flatscreen standards, its full campaign makes it a refreshingly meaty Quest offering, and one of the best VR shooters.
If you’re looking for a competitive multiplayer shooter on Oculus Quest, then Onward has to be your pick. In his review, David dubbed Onward as the definitive military sim FPS — you play in 5v5 battles against other players online, with an array of weapons and three game modes to choose from. While it’s missing the visual fidelity and some of the custom features from the PC VR version of the game (many of which have been promised to arrive in a future update), it is still easily one of the best multiplayer VR games on the Quest. As David put it, “this should be in every Quest user’s library that enjoys shooters — hands down.”
As a survival game, shooting is only one part of the overall Saints & Sinners experience (and the game’s real joy is in its melee weapons). But Skydance Interactive’s physics-driven approach makes for some of the most interesting weapon handling you’ll find on Oculus Quest, with pistols that need to be properly steadied and two-handed weapons that can be a genuine handful if you don’t get the right process down. This makes raids on enemy camps and back-against-the-wall zombie shootouts unlike anything else you’ll find on the platform.
Superhot has found itself near the top of so many of our lists, but for good reason — the game is an innovative take on the FPS genre. While it’s fun on any VR platform, the Quest is undoubtledly the best headset to play the game on. The wireless freedom truly unlocks Superhot’s full potential — you can spin, bend and crouch your way out of sticky situations that culminate to make one of the most inventive and unique shooters in VR history.
Those are our picks for best shooters on Oculus Quest, but what are yours? Let us know in the comments.
We’re always updating our lists and writing new ones for various VR platforms and game genres — keep an eye out for more in the near future. In the meantime, check out our list of the top 25 games and experiences on Quest.
Note: This article was originally published with five games in August 2020. It was edited and updated to include a further five games in March 2021.
Another VR travel app is on its way to Oculus Quest and PC VR headsets. This time it’s Brink Traveler.
Listed now on both the Quest Store and SteamVR, Brink will launch on September 9. The app features 12 locations with a total of 18 spots to explore, each realized in full scale. Check out the trailer for the experience below.
The app’s current locations include Arches National Park, Death Valley National Park, Antelope Canyon and Haifoss Iceland among others. As you explore you can check out notes to learn more about your environment. You can also take photos that you can share with friends. Brink itself says that it will also be adding new locations over time.
Brink isn’t the only VR travel app to release lately. Blueplanet brought more locations to VR with volumetric capture a little earlier in the year. Given that the entire world has been in various stages of lockdown over the past 18 or so months, there’s never been a better time to check out just what VR travel can do.
Will you be picking up Brink Traveler next week? Let us know in the comments below!
VR modder praydog is working on mods for Capcom’s recent remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3.
A first (and very early) look at the mod was posted online today. It shows footage from inside Raccoon City Police Department before moving out into the city in a sequence seen in Resident Evil 3.
Take a look below but, again, the mod is very early on so you’ll have to excuse the rubbery arms and side-by-side recording.
Even with those issues considered, though, this seems like impressive work. Both Resident Evil 2 and 3 are played in third-person, so praydog has not only had to get them running in first-person but also implement motion controls for the guns.
These are remakes of the original PlayStation games that released for PC, PS4 and Xbox One a few years back. Resident Evil 2 in particular was incredibly well-received, and we shudder at the mere thought of meeting either the massive Tyrant or the dreaded Nemesis in VR. In fact we already saw the former inside headsets in a Japan-exclusive arcade experience in 2019.
No word on when the mods might release just yet but we’ll let you know as soon as we heard word.
Resident Evil 7 does of course already support PSVR but the game was in first-person. Earlier this year Capcaom also released the first-person Resident Evil 8 but there was no VR support to speak of. We’re hoping that support might be introduced for Sony’s PS5 VR headset, which is expected to launch next year. Meanwhile, Facebook is developing an official version of Resident Evil 4 for the Oculus Quest 2, which is expected to launch later this year.
That makes the first Resident Evil one of the few entries in the mainline series not to get some sort of VR support. Who’s going to change that?
An FCC listing for Facebook’s Aria Glasses, which are being used internally for AR research, provides new details via a user manual and various other testing and compliance documents.
The Aria Glasses were first announced at Facebook Connect last year. They are not a consumer product or a prototype for AR glasses, but are instead designed to be worn by Facebook employees as a research tool that will “help us collect data to uncover the underlying technical and ethical questions and start to look at answers to those,” as Facebook representatives explained when the project was announced. Aria Glasses do not feature a display and are intended to capture research data while the wearer goes about their day.
Project Aria “will capture the wearer’s video and audio, as well as their eye tracking and location information. The glasses’ on-device computing power will then be used to encrypt and store information that, when uploaded to separate, designated back-end storage space, will help our researchers figure out how AR can work in the real world,” Facebook explained. “Our future AR devices must be more perceptive in order to be more genuinely useful to us. In order for devices to understand where they are in relation to people and other objects, and how to make sense of any given situation, they need a virtual 3D map of the things around you. But it’s far too power-intensive to scan and reconstruct a space in real time from scratch, so AR glasses will need to tap into an existing 3D map we call LiveMaps. LiveMaps uses computer vision to construct a virtual representation of the parts of the world that are relevant to you. With these 3D maps, our future devices will be able to efficiently see, analyze, and understand the world around them and better serve those who use them. These devices will keep track of changes, like new street names, and update them in real-time. The Project Aria device is testing out how this can work in practice.”
Now, we have a bit more information and our best look yet at Facebook’s Aria Glasses by way of documents within a FCC listing that was made public recently, as reported by Protocol’s Janko Roettgers.
The documents include a user manual, where the glasses are referred to as “Gemini EVT” and described as “prototype equipment … intended for limited distribution only for purposes of testing and data collection.”
The manual also reveals that the glasses support prescription lenses, and that they do not fold down like a normal pair of glasses — the temples remain fixed at right angles from the main frame.
The user manual also includes photos labeling individual parts and external buttons. As you can see in the image embedded above, the glasses offer a mute switch, power button, proximity sensor and status LED.
When the mute switch is set to mute/privacy mode, red is visible on the LED indicator. The right hand side also features a capture button pictured below, but the document (at least at the time it was written) says it is only used to power on the device.
The glasses also come with a microfiber cloth, a power supply and a USB cord with a magnetic connector that attaches to the left temple of the glasses. In the manual, Facebook says this connector is “sensitive” and that users “may have to physically hold it together momentarily for the device to be enumerated and/or initiate charging.”
The glasses connect to an internal mobile companion app, called Ariane, and the footage collected from the cameras can be transferred and viewed on a computer as well.
While the Aria Glasses are not the consumer AR glasses many are expecting, they do give an insight into the research process Facebook is undertaking to move toward consumer AR. On the Project Aria site, Facebook is clear that the glasses are for research work only.
The footage, embedded below, was posted to Reddit and shows Hackl playing a real life keyboard while using an AR overlay on the passthrough view to learn songs in real time.
The concept is similar to VRtuos, which we wrote about last year, and other similar VR piano apps available for Quest. The notes appear above the keys in sequential order, in a synthesia-like fashion, allowing you to learn a piece in real time without the need for sheet music or any existing knowledge.
Piano apps on Quest have had to use hand tracking and virtual piano calibration to line up the virtual keys with your real piano. While it worked pretty well, there was sometimes still a small feeling of disconnect between playing the real piano and seeing the virtual one. However, using AR to present the notes overlaid on a live view of a real piano has potential to be a game changer.
What’s especially notable about Magic Keys on Quest is that it’s an AR app, developed initially for tablets and then the HoloLens and Magic Leap One. Now that the Quest’s experimental passthrough API is available, it has been ported over to the Oculus Quest.
