Rhythm of the Universe: Ionia is a VR adventure that promises to take you to a fantastical world filled with musical flora and fauna. Despite some earnest attempts at worldbuilding, the end result is a thin and superficial theme park ride that bears a fleeting resemblance to its flashy promo trailer.
The long-awaited ‘Aftershocks’ expansion to The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners (2020) is landing today on all supported platforms for free, which is said to bring 4-6 hours of fresh content to the zombie-slaying adventure.
Separate from the main Quest store, Oculus App Lab gives developers an official ‘unlisted’ and uncurated means of distributing Oculus Quest apps. So far the company has proven that it will remain largely hands-off on app content—and apparently price too—making App Lab useful for much more than just gaming apps.
PowerBeatsVR (2020), the high-intensity workout experience from Munich-based indie studio Five Mind Creations, is finally making its was to Oculus Quest next month, which will let you box, dodge, and squat to the beat without getting tangled up in wires … or subscriptions.
Beat Saber is getting a Billie Eilish Music Pack today, which arrives with ten of her biggest hits including ‘Therefore I Am’, ‘NDA’, and ‘bad guy’.
Ahead of what promises to be an eventful sales season, it seems Facebook is getting a head start today with the launch of a week-long sale on Oculus Quest 2 headsets.
Location-based VR destination Dreamscape and Sony Pictures Virtual Reality announced they’re launching a new VR experience that puts you and five other friends in the shoes of the Men in Black: First Assignment.
Quill is a brilliant VR drawing and animation app originally born within the now shuttered Oculus Story Studio. The app continued on after the group’s closure, but with seemingly few long term plans for the app, Facebook has decided to spin it out by handing ownership over to its original creator. As part of the transition, Quill’s proprietary file format is being open-sourced.
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual apps are performing across its VR storefronts, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the top 20 Oculus Quest games and apps as of September 2021.
Space Pirate Trainer (2017) on Oculus Quest received a substantial update last week, which brings to the wave-based shooter two new multiplayer modes, one of which basically turns your Quest into a mobile laser tag machine for some 1v1 multiplayer action. Just like the base game, the new additions are well-polished, although the large-format Arena mode comes with a fair bit of friction that may limit these sorts of experiences from taking off before VR headsets are more widespread.
One of VR’s most popular games, Beat Saber, got a multiplayer mode late last year. Unfortunately, Oculus and SteamVR players were separated, which means if your friend had a Quest and you had a Vive, you couldn’t play together. Now, almost a year after multiplayer was initially released, Beat Saber has full cross-play between Quest, Rift, and SteamVR headsets.
Squingle is a psychedelic indie puzzle game that’s available now on PC VR and Quest. It’s also the perfect example of a game that probably wouldn’t be allowed onto Quest’s main ‘curated’ store because it’s difficult to understand at a glance, despite being brilliantly creative and highly optimized to run at 120Hz on Quest 2. Luckily, thanks to App Lab, you can get your hands on the game whether or not it fits Oculus’ vision.
Stadia, Google’s cloud-gaming company, is looking for new hires with a preference for virtual reality development experience.
Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) features PC VR headset support, although it’s notably missing the ability to use VR motion controllers. Now developer Asobo has signaled that VR controller support is finally coming, and is slated to land sometime in mid-November.
