Games
10 VR blockbusters that will make reality seem, like, so yesterday.
The dilly-dallying is over. While the past two years since the Oculus Rift’s announcement have been a torturous trudge through the doldrums of backer updates, not-quite-reveals and ‘when-it’s-done’ answers to the question of release dates, Steam and HTC are now forcing other VR headset manufacturers’ hands with the announcement that their own headset – the HTC Vive – will sitting on people’s heads by Christmas. Which means we can all now stop fretting about the tech, and start fretting about what we’re going to be using it to play. Below we’ve sorted our top 10 games that we know – more or less – will be available for you to play in some sort of virtual reality come December. So, sit back, strap in and take a tumble with us down the virtual rabbit hole.
Doom 3 BFG edition
When Oculus brought on Doom creator John Carmack as chief technical officer, it also got the right to Rift-ify one of the early-2000s most legendary horror games: Doom 3 (or rather, the revamped BFG edition). There's plenty of horror already playable in virtual reality – and plenty of corresponding YouTube playlists of teenagers pretend-screaming at them – but Doom 3 isn't an Outlast or a Slender. Doom 3 is survival horror from a time when men were men: when monsters invaded your Mars mining colony, you didn't hide under a desk or make a shaky-cam night-vision documentary, you stuck on some heavy metal and relied on health packs instead of that namby-pamby autohealing-while-you-hide-behind-a-wall.
EVE: Valkyrie
And if Doom 3 didn't put you off space altogether, here's another reason to look around your humdrum workaday Earth office and be grateful that your biggest problem is a faulty coffee machine. EVE: Valkyrie, the first-person dogfighter spin-off to EVE: Online, is all your classic Star Wars and Battlestar ship-to-ship battles distilled into one game and pitilessly beamed into your brain through a VR headset, which allows you to swivel in your chair just in time to see the cause of that missile alert blast you into drifting miasma. And unlike the other games on this list, EVE was built from the ground up to be played with a headset, making it one of the best tech demos for VR you’ll ever play, to boot.
Hawken
When Oculus first took its DK1 on the road to shows like London's EGX, the queue of people lining up for a go stretched on for over an hour. Or quite a bit longer, if you wanted to play Hawken, instead of Surgeon Simulator or War Thunder. But the wait was worth it: doing the whole Titanfall thing before Titanfall, Hawken tucks you in behind the controls of a giant, lumbering mech and has you rumbling your way through abandoned cities looking for other robots to knock holes in, all in glorious 360 degree VR-o-vision – which now, given the resolution bumps of the newer Oculus prototypes, should no longer feel quite so much like trying to pot an exploding snooker ball while aiming through a hessian sack.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
We called this Kickstarter's most ambitious project when it was announced, and while there are now plenty of other challengers for that particular crown, you still couldn't sniff at the scope of Kingdom Come: Deliverance with anything less than a dilated elephant's trunk. "We are trying to mix the freedom of Skyrim, the storytelling of The Witcher, the setting of Mount and Blade and the tough combat of Dark Souls into one single package for people who like those games," the game's creative director told us. And what about VR support? "Pfft! Why not?" he didn't say, but might as well have done, whilst smoking a cigar made of backer money. First person medieval warfare? Let’s do this already.
Elite: Dangerous
A sort of cross-species interbreeding between EVE: Valkyrie and Euro Truck Simulator, Elite: Dangerous is a slower, more ponderous space sim for people who see blowing up pirates only as a way to let off steam after a hard day's ferrying cargo. Like the original Elite, the goal here isn't wanton destruction: it's building up from a one-man ship to establishing yourself as a kind of spacefaring Donald Trump. Which isn't to say that Elite's dogfighting in any way pales in comparison to its more single-minded, shootier cousin – we nearly cricked a vertebra trying to follow enemy ships through our fighter's wrap-around canopy.
DayZ
Arma 2 – the hyper-realistic military shooter upon which the DayZ mod is based – has had unofficial Rift support for a while, and the developers of this pitiless zombie survive-em-up have been very public about their love for VR technology. “I can hands down say that it will make DayZ a thousand times better and that’s not an exaggeration,” project lead Dean Rocket Hall said in a Q&A shortly after the DK1 was demoed. And how. Just imagine standing atop a flat roof, gazing out over a burbling swarm of the dead as the sun sets in the distance. And then whirling round to see a stranger realistically clobber you over the head with a canoe paddle for a tin of sardines.
Dying Light
The problem – if it can be called a problem – with games like DayZ is that they nail one aspect of the zombie apocalypse so well that other zombie games shooting for the same start feeling like a slavering horde of also-rans. If you’re making a zombie game today, you’re rapidly running out of gimmicks – which might be why Dead Island developers Techland arranged Dying Light’s unlikely marriage between first-person zombie-bludgeoning and Mirror’s Edge-style free-running. In the Rift, this makes for some properly close calls: scrambling up a tower to escape screeching pursuers, looking down at the ground far, far below and realising the only way off is to zipline 200 feet to a rooftop below. We’d almost rather be eaten, thanks.
Star Citizen
More first-person spacefaring from crowdfunding’s biggest game (which has squirreled away just over $75 million (€70m) since its Kickstarter launched back in October 2012). The difference between this and EVE and Elite? Star Citizen will, from launch, also allow you to park your spaceship and hop out for a spot of face-to-face trading on the planets you visit, will include a single player campaign called Squadron 42, and even offer zero-gravity shoot-outs – Battlefield on the ISS. And as a proud, PC-only title, it’ll look fabulous doing it, too.
Titanfall
We’ll be upfront: Titanfall’s official launch into glorious all-around-y-vision might never happen (although you can hack together a sort-of-functional version right now if you like, using third-party PC drivers). However, the developers did say when Titanfall was approaching launch that they’d been playing around with Rift support in the office, and that they’d been stoked with the results. A further nugget of speculation: to mark Titanfall’s first birthday, Respawn recently made the season pass for Titanfall available for free – most probably a decision made to lure lapsed players back into the fold. If that’s the way Respawn are thinking, then announcing towards year’s end that they’re including VR support as well would be a smart way of further rekindling the game’s popularity (as well as building hype for the recently-announced sequel).
Trackmania 2
Oh, this is going to make us ill. For the uninitiated, the Trackmania series is a racing game with a build-it-yourself track editor in which players snap together courses (like a virtual Scalextric) and challenge others to complete them. Nice people build round tracks, maybe with a couple of wahey-there-steady-on jumps scattered around to spice things up a bit. Other people build stuff like the track in the video above. Now imagine doing that sort of thing in first-person VR, without ending up upside down in the corner of your lounge twitching like an overturned beetle on a hotplate.
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