Hubris should be what we’ve all been waiting for, a visually well-realized VR native that transports you to otherworldly biomes, replete with shooting, jumping, climbing, swimming, and even some basic crafting mechanics. On paper it certainly checks many of the sci-fi shooting and adventuring blocks, but look past the flashy visuals and apparent feature set and you’re left with a fairly mediocre VR shooter that just isn’t clever enough out of the gate to be truly engaging.

Available On: Steam, coming to PSVR 2 & Quest 2 in 2023
Release Date: December 7th, 2022
Price: $40
Developer: Cyborn B.V.
Reviewed On: Quest 2 via Link

Gameplay

You’re a recruit belonging to the Order of Objectivity—basically a space marine who happens to have crash-landed on a hostile world which is in the midst of being terraformed. Large terraforming towers loom in the distance above the rocky, desolate world. The only wildlife comprises of squids and a few giant bugs, and most of them aren’t friendly. You job is to kill everything, scrounge everything for weapon upgrades, and experience the majesty of probably one of the best-looking PC VR games currently available.

Exterminating the local fauna isn’t difficult—one shot and they splatter into goo. The same is almost always true for the corpo-baddies who repel from dropships to infest the inner bowels of the terraforming towers and fuel refineries. On medium difficulty, one or two well-placed shots can kill most dudes outright, save one rare tank type you meet in the final quarter of the game which may take two or three magazines from either the pistol or submachine gun.

Image courtesy Cyborn B.V.

For some reason these faceless goons don’t like the Order or its badass super soldier, Cyana, but then again, I can’t blame them. I’m a faceless goon too, albeit one with a gun and an inventory large enough to porter several junkheaps of metal scraps and other fiddly bits to a shredder which gives me the base unit of each found item: metal, fiber, plastic, and cyan: the game’s unobtainium.

Scrounging and crafting is a pretty satisfying experience, and the quick inventory system of reaching over your shoulder for either health or junk items works surprisingly well—right shoulder for health, left for junk. The flatscreen inventory, pulled up by tapping your wristwatch, is a little less effective in default mode since you can only grab one specific item at a time before it auto-closes and you have to reopen it again, but you can change that in the settings. Here’s a look at a juicer you’ll find at some point in the game which lets you craft health potions with fruit you collect:

Just plop in the required bit into any crafting machine, and you’ve got your potion, food, or gun overhaul at the ready.

The most important bit is undoubtedly how Hubris performs as a shooter, and it’s not great. Reloading and cycling through your three weapons (pistol, shotgun, submachine gun) is an intuitive and well thought out affair, although actually aiming and shooting the weapons is sadly lacking in refinement.

Both the pistol and submachine gun are very difficult to get a good sight picture, which forces you to shoot by intuition alone. You’ll typically need to correct your aim on the fly, which wouldn’t be so much of an issue if you had a few spare mags on hand. This ends up making you spray precious bullets when they might be better used with more accurate shots.

Granted, reloading is easy—just hold the empty weapon up to your head and wait the 10-15 seconds for the haptic buzz to stop. Ideally, this sort of intentionally slow reloading is supposed to force the user into a more tactical shooting stance since you can’t quickly reload, but at times this made me think too tactically. After all, if I can’t trust my own aim, I’m not going head-first into a firefight for fear of being set back to the last auto-save point in a jiff.

That 10-15 seconds in a firefight naturally forces you to make better use of cover, which is all well and good. But because there’s no incentive to rush into a firefight with less than each gun’s magazine can hold—variable on whether you have the pistol, shotgun, or machine gun—what tends to happen is this: you scoot back to a choke point and wait for the AI to stupidly file in one-by-one until a whole area is cleared of baddies. It’s efficient, but not very fun. If gun models were just a little more refined…

The array of enemies isn’t terrible once you get to the last quarter of the game, where things really pick up in difficulty and the diversity of all of the skills you learn finally come together. Still, the game’s AI is fairly dumb in how it moves about, but is strangely always accurate in its shots. Of the two types of soldiers, the one you’ll see 99 percent of the time is the standard idiot who vaporizes with one or two blasts.

There are some flying enemies too. There is one type of drone you’ll regularly come across, which requires about 10 bullets from the pistol or 24 from the submachine gun, and one type of magnetic mine that will follow you around until either you or it dies first.

All of them are bullet sponges with no discernible weak points, save the shielded mine which can either be disabled with a spare battery orb, or by shooting it from above or below. Maybe a headshot is enough to kill a soldier? I’m still not sure since aiming is basically constant guesswork. It’s shame, because if your GPU can chug at least as well as my aging Nvidia GTX 1080, the visual experience of the game is pretty impressive (more on that in Immersion).

There was some glitchiness, although we’ve been told by Cyborn that the final release version will fix some areas with notable framerate drops. In the six hours it took me to beat on medium difficulty I never experienced a game-breaking bug though, which is a big step up from what we saw in the demo that was available back in the summer.

Immersion

On one hand, you have visually poppy scenes that draw you in, and a world that practically feels alive; that’s no small feat. I simply don’t want to understate how good Hubris looks. However, extreme polish in this one specific aspect of the game seems to highlight other parts that seem intent on detracting from the overall experience.

My placid colleague, chipper as ever despite the rotting stench of death | Image courtesy Cyborn B.V.

One of my least favorite gaming tropes is on full display in Hubris: the helpful robot who tells you everything you need to know and where to go. In short, you can forget figuring anything out for yourself for most of the game, as you’re effectively robbed of nearly every instance of discovery in Hubris until you get to, again, the last quarter of the game. You’re led by the hand to each objective, and everything (everything) is summarized ad infinitum by one of the most unintentionally condescending characters.

Lucia-bot is always “helpful” | Image captured by Road to VR

The dreaded helper-bot in question is actually supposed to be piloted by my flesh and blood commander, Lucia, who delivers lines more akin to a kindergarten teacher gently chiding me into cleaning up my blocks before laying down for a nap than, say, a battle-hardened space marine. Across the board, voice acting doesn’t feel well-directed, resulting in it actively hurting the seriousness the game works to build. If there were only some explanation for her weirdly mismatched tone, like an emotion chip gone awry or maybe I’m just a dumb toddler grown in a vat who needs constant reassurance. Nope. It’s just a weird thing about Hubris I guess.

The narrative isn’t much more than your standard sci-fi fare, which is absolutely fine, but I can’t help but think how much better Hubris would be (middling gunplay included!) if I just had a second to look around and breathe in the atmosphere without constantly being annoyed to death.

Comfort

Hubris includes a number of locomotion situations beyond your standard single-plane shooter. It requires you to jump (using the ‘A’ button), climb, swim by moving both arms, run around and strafe, and drive around in a vehicle at some point too.

Most of this is done in such a way that it’s comfortable to the user, although there are a few standout scenes when I personally didn’t want to have eyes in my head, notably when dropships fly overhead and the camera shakes so much it gave me the wobbles. Getting in the way of another character during their scripted movement will also move you without your consent, which can be jarring the first time it happens.

As you’d imagine, you’ll need full range of motion for both arms to climb and swim, so make sure to either have an adequate chair to sit in or stand up for the entirety of the game.

‘Hubris’ Comfort Settings – December 7th, 2022

Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn

Movement

Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand

Posture

Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch

Accessibility

Subtitles
Languages
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese
Dialogue audio
Languages English
Adjustable difficulty
Two hands required
Real crouch required
Hearing required
Adjustable player height
REVIEW OVERVIEW
Overall
5
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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Tommy

    The demo was really good. I will most likely still pick this up, even with a 5.

    • Runesr2

      Seems RoadToVR used a GTX 1080 which is below the recommended system requirements (RTX 2070), and they seem to always use Meta hmds, no Index. They also gave Lone Echo 2 a 7.5. I consider Lone Echo 2 and Alyx the best VR experiences ever.
      So might be a very different experience using a proper PCVR hmd and a RTX 3070+ gpu. My trust in RoadToVR is extremely low. Looking forward to test the game with my oc’ed RTX 3090 and the Index.

      • Tommy

        I’m still running a 1080ti in my PC and a 2070 in my laptop. Got my eye on a 3080ti but no money to spend on myself around Xmas. Although, I did just buy a PSVR2…
        I look forward to playing the rest of this game on either PC or PS5.

        • Runesr2

          I also just bought a PS5 and will get the PSVR2, the exclusive games do look great. And with foveated rendering providing 3-4x more performance according to Sony, effective performance may be lifted to RTX 3080-3090 levels, we’ll see :-)

          Downloading Hubris now :-)

          • ViRGiN

            LMAO, as a PCVR elitists, YOU GOT INTO A CLOSED WALLED GARDEN OF A CONSOLE?
            What a hipocrite.

          • Runesr2

            Also have the Rift CV1 – and access to another closed garden, lol.
            Getting PSVR2 is just an add-on – I still have PCVR, I fail to see any logic in your comment.

          • ViRGiN

            “just an add-on”. no you fool, it’s a complete PCVR replacement. PSVR2 makes PCVR absolutetly obsolete.

      • MeowMix

        The GTX 1080 and RTX 2070 are pretty similar in performance (outside of Ray Tracking); so unless Hubris uses RTX features, RtVR using a GTX 1080 is appropriate.

        Not sure how a ‘proper PCVR’ hmd would impact anything; the encoding overhead incurred by the Quest is only 3-5%. The bigger influencer on performance is the crappy OpenVR API (~20% performance loss), but it looks like Hubris uses OpenXR APIs so it should hook directly into the Oculus runtime.

        • Runesr2

          I could barely get 90 fps in the Hubris demo using res 150% with the Index and an oc’ed RTX 3090 – unless devs performed magic, you’ll need much more gpu power than a GTX 1080 can provide for this game. Devs were working on DLSS some months ago, of course not a word about graphics settings from another lackluster RoadToVR review.
          Is the game the same experience using a GTX 1080 or a RTX 4090? Of course not – not even remotely.
          Using a GTX 1080 for this game may be like using a bicycle to test a new F1 racing track, lol.

          • MeowMix

            Devs have supported specs listed from RX 580 to RTX 2070. Anything in-between is appropriate.

            Who cares what the ‘Max’ settings deliver, the majority of users don’t have a RTX 3080 or better GPU. I say this as someone with a RTX 3080, but I recognize we’re the exception to the norm.

          • Tommy

            I used a 1080ti for the demo and it worked just fine. I didn’t have to lower any settings either. Usually, I have to perform magic, especially for flat to VR games.

          • ViRGiN

            The game is literally the same on both GTX1080 and RTX4090. Literally indentical.

  • Alberto Ombra

    STOP Stunning VR Shooter… more skyrim similar game!

    • Tommy

      Stop slow and boring shooters. Give us more Serious Sam type mayhem.

  • Ad

    I don’t think VR is going to make it.

    • Octogod

      VR already made it.

      It’s a multi-billion dollar industry enjoyed my tens of millions. Will there be hundreds of millions or billions? Who knows. Enjoy the ride.

    • philingreat

      PCVR might not make it, but VR in general already did. The Quest 2 is one of the best selling gaming consoles since October 2021 on Amazon in the US.

    • NL_VR

      ok bye, you been negative on these boards now for two years now?
      Never saw you as a troll just like a negative user who doesnt seem to like anything. maybe you should change hobby

      • ViRGiN

        I see you as toxicly, overly positive guy who BELIEVES repeating the same lie 100 times will suddenly make it true.

        • NL_VR

          well cry me a river. you are just a troll. now BELIEVE THAT

  • ViRGiN

    SteamVR exclusive? Man, fuck Valve.
    I will never support a giga corporation run by a fat man who performs virtue signalling by turning their own Steam shop into black and white theme just to bow down to a dead communist, like they did couple of days ago. Valve is the biggest tech company actively supporting both China and Russia.

    • NL_VR

      All hail lord gaben

    • Ookami

      wut??

  • ViRGiN

    Also, what a launch! 104 players peak on SteamVR.
    That’s even less than Vail VR had with its infinite marketing lol.
    And PCVR elitistst couldnt stop themselves with mentioning this “high end” game for months. And they are still porting it to Quest. What happened to NO COMPROMISE PCVR games? Obviously it’s “DUMBED DOWN” to run on Quest.

    • Norbert Kiss

      Just an easy calculation! Now 9400 people are playing on steamvr…
      According to the last reports there are 18500-20.000 vr arcades on the planet, 30% of which are now open and running steam vr…
      which means there are about 3000 people in the world playing steam vr at home! Now someone tell me that steam vr is not dead :D

      • ViRGiN

        PCVR userbase is estimated at about 2 millions.
        You know what has 2.5 million players? Contractors VR xD

        • NL_VR

          Peasants always over represented

  • Jeff is beck

    I’m probably gonna sell my headset, the wow factor is gone

    • ViRGiN

      Great tech, with very inmature software.
      That’s why PCVR was always dogshit, and Quest 2 is awesome. Even if you don’t use it too much, it costed pennies to get into, even after price hike.

      • NL_VR

        Quest need some love just to push the performance just a little further..
        Come on Quest shills
        ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

        • ViRGiN

          “be happy you’re getting any PCVR games at all” vs “wow wireless VR is so much fun, and there are always tons of people online in games!”

          • NL_VR

            There is no VS you can enjoy both.
            It’s called PC master race

          • ViRGiN

            That’s disgracists.
            Master disgrace maybe.

  • Nick

    What in the world is happening to VR games? Its like Xbox exclusives over here – disappointing or non-existent…

  • ViRGiN

    At least these developers realized that PCVR is trash, and began developing for Quest long ago. Shame they didn’t launch at the same time tho.

    Everything dies on PCVR within a week or two. Bonelab? 11k concurrent players on launch, shrunk to 2% now. An “awesome” HL2 VR mod for free – 1400 players on launch, back to 5%.

    Top 10 popular games by player count is pretty much unchanged since consumer VR. It’s ALWAYS variation of rec room/beat saber/blade and sorcery/gorilla tag/pavlov. Super high end games worth getting PC for!

    Also the immortal string of elite excuses. It’s summer, OF COURSE it’s too hot to play VR! Meanwhile the number of players is far, FAR lower now in the cold months than it ever was in the summer lol.

    But but half-life alyx! Microsoft Flight Simulator! It will never run on your MoBiLe PhOnE VR!

    SteamVR is not a walled garden! You get to keep your games forever! If you change your headset in 10 years, you can still replay Alyx! You can still play gorilla tag! Who wouldn’t want to play old games!?

    PCVR is stagnant because GPUs have inaccesible! Ignoring the 90% of SteamVR base that has somewhat decent PC to already play today.

    The next RTX card will double the performance at lower price! People will finally be able to play Alyx at medium settings!

    Please insert conspiracy theories why PCVR did not take off down below!

  • NL_VR

    why do you cry if developers make PCVR games?
    Shouldnt we just be glad that PCVR games are made even if the playerbase is so small?
    you got a strange point of view here, is it because you cant play the games?
    i dont understand this problem many people here seem to have to PCVR games and those who play PCVR.
    i think most people prefer the PCVR version of games if they can choose between Quest and PCVR. :P

    • ViRGiN

      > i think most people prefer
      i think not.

      > Shouldnt we just be glad that PCVR games are made even if the playerbase is so small?
      shouldn’t we strive for better and more? PCVR people shilled for PCVR for over 6 years already. talking positively did not change anything.
      GTA 5 VR mod did not change anything.
      shouldn’t we be seeing an insane growth after all these years if this was as good as propaganda would make you believe?

      • NL_VR

        Of course we should Strive for better and more.
        It cant happen if there are no games so i dont se why you should complain that there actually are games coming out.

        • ViRGiN

          I don’t see why would you complain about someone having negative opinion over this game, which is where it all started.

          Quit your toxic positivity.

          • NL_VR

            Crybaby

          • ViRGiN

            Refund please

    • Gonzax

      Agreed!!

      And of course most people prefer to play PCVR than Quest, why would anyone, except Virgin of course, prefer to play crappy quality instead of having the best possible version?

      And I love my Quest 2, by the way, but I’d never play the Quest version of a game that can also be played on PC.

  • I love this review: accurate and fun! Great job, Scott

  • Jeff is beck

    Shut up

  • Gonzax

    40€ for a 5-6 hour game?? How in the world did they think that was a reasonable price to ask for an indie game with such a short length.
    Good graphics is nice but gameplay is king and way more important.

    • shadow9d9

      Quality over quantity. Your mentality encourages padded game length akin to what happened to epic fantasy writing.

  • Gonzax

    Of course people have problems paying 40€ for a crap game that lasts only a few hours. It’s a very different thing when you pay that money for good quality and length. I don’t see anybody complaining for paying 60 bucks for HL Alyx, do you?

    And your numbers make zero sense, by the way; also, people playing VR arcades?? really??

    • ViRGiN

      I complained about Alyx being absolute crap walking simulator in corridors, carried on SINGLE HANDLY by half life title.

      Change this game to HALF LIFE HUBRIS and you get yourself a best seller.

      YOUR numbers doesn’t make any sense. Double the 9400 number he said. 18800 people in VR, and just a handful playing Hubris? Success my ass!

  • ApocalypseShadow

    Definitely needs improvements before hitting PS VR 2. We know the graphics will be fine. But the gameplay could use a tweak.

    Only thing is, if it can’t beat Farpoint VR that came out years ago on PSVR, then that’s a problem. Here’s hoping they see their mistakes.

  • Ad

    VR itself is dead. Mobile or PC. Retention is terrible, releases have almost stopped (the upload showcase was just depressing), people try it and then go back to normal games, developers don’t want to touch VR because there’s a single vendor, nothing is figured out, risk is through the roof, and it’s just much easier and more lucrative to make normal games. And honestly, I don’t care. It’s weird that when you buy a headset you have to join a cult where the only thing anyone cares about is more heads inside headsets. “VR isn’t great now but with more people buying it, it’ll become amazing!” That’s ponzi logic.

    • shadow9d9

      Quest 2 has sold over 10 million and will continue to grow.

      • Ad

        It sold 10 million in the past 3 years, what about the next 3? I think the next generation of VR will be smaller than this one.

  • Ookami

    I was worried this would be the case. The graphics looked great, but nothing in the gameplay trailer hinted at anything really special.

  • Runesr2

    My suspicion was confirmed as I changed OpenXR from Steam to Oculus/Meta.

    Now the game started in the CV1. Using maxed out in-game graphics settings, ss 2.5 was too much even with the oc’ed RTX 3090, but got solid 90 fps or close with ss 2.0. Note that ss 2.5 is 27 mill pixels per frame (same as Index res 300%), and ss 2.0 is 17 mill pixels (same as Index res 200%).

    Suddenly, gone was the blur, all looked as sharp as can be with the CV1.
    Some lcd users complained on Steam that ambient occlusion was wrong causing shimmering textures and incorrect depth perspective. And I get that too with the Index, so issues are more profound than just TAA blur. And some places are too dark for lcd, can’t see a thing.

    But using CV1 all is perfect, no blur, no shimmering textures and ambient occlusion is perfect – and inside dark caves I can see everything. Even controllers work better.

    I think Hubris has been in development for 4 or 5 years, it was never designed for lcd.

    It feels like an Oculus game, devs even followed Oculus advice of only supporting OpenXR. Feels like a true Rift CV1 game.

    The game totally is a 10/10 to me with the Rift CV1, but I’d be pressed to go beyond 8/10 with the Index due to the blur, shimmering textures and bad blacks.

  • SeinF

    If PCVR is comepltely dead then how is it Bonelab, 2 months ago, had a player count of nearly 12,000 players on steam?

    The audience is there for PCVR games if they are big senough releases and actually good. It’s just mediocre games like this that get completely overlooked.

    • shadow9d9

      That is really nothing though… and Bonelab was a poorly rated game that was hyped due to the mainstreamers that buy those sandbox without a good, real game situations.

      Quest games sells 10 the amount of their pc counterparts. PCVR audience is miniscule and don’t buy games outside of 80% off sales.

  • Boland

    Thanks for the chapter!! See you next season!!!

  • Matt Kayser

    Couple of quick notes: if you hold the pistol with both hands, you get a laser sight. It’s kind of a trade off between winging it with one hand or using both and getting more precise aim. I think you can also lower the level of chattyness of the drone. It’s more fun on hard difficulty, FWIW. Different strokes, but I really enjoyed this game. I’d give it an 8. I should note that I played it on PSVR2, so some of these improvements may have been added later.