Gamescom 2019 is still in full swing, and while the massive halls at the Cologne-based gaming expo are predictably filled to the brim with non-VR games, there’s been a number of interesting VR titles to pop up here, including Neat Corporation and Fast Travel Games’ upcoming sequel to the humor-filled stealth assassin adventure Budget Cuts (2018), Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency.
Fast Travel Games, the studio behind bowshooting adventure Apex Construct (2018), showed off their upcoming title The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets at Gamescom this year. Getting a chance to pop in for a single level, the admittedly short game offers up casual diorama-based puzzles and a heartwarming story cast in the golden hue of a childhood memories past.
Initially arriving last August as VR’s premiere live-remixing rhythm game, Survios’ Electronauts lets players fiddle with the individual tracks and pieces of popular songs, mixing loose effects and loops together with vocal and instrumental stems at their own leisure [our review]. The free ‘Heatwave’ update nearly doubles the total track count to more than 80 songs.
I didn’t know what to make of Paper Beasts when I heard about back at its reveal in April. Billed as an exploration game inspired by big data, or the unfathomably large data sets that can reveal unseen trends, the game promises to toss you head first into an abstract living world that has emerged from “the vast memory of a data server.” It sounded wild and mysterious at the time, but after playing the 20-minute demo at this year’s Gamescom, I got a much better grasp on what lays ahead.
Sony Interactive Entertainment announced Monday that the company is acquiring Insomniac Games, a storied game studio and one of the most experienced in VR development anywhere in the world. The studio has developed three Oculus exclusive titles, with its fourth and largest yet, Stormland, still due to launch in 2019.
HBO, Warner Bros., and Survios today released a new VR game set in the wild (and often terrifying) android-filled universe of Westworld.
Oculus announced that it’ll be showing Stormland’s co-op multiplayer feature at the PAX West event next week.
Gamescom 2019 kicked off today in Cologne, Germany, and there I got a chance to go hands-on with the upcoming sequel to Budget Cuts (2018), the cheeky stealth assassin adventure from the Stockholm-based indie studio Neat Corp.
Beyond the known world is a galaxy of infinite exploration and endless possibility. That is, of course, until you meet your end at the whim of an angry detachment of Sentinels, or breathe in too many atmospheric toxins and collapse on the surface of some backwater planet. With over “18 quintillion” procedurally-generated planets to explore, there’s heaps to see (and flee in terror from) in No Man’s Sky VR. While No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has called the new BEYOND update the ‘2.0’ version of the game, No Man’s Sky’s brand new VR support feels like ‘1.0’ in many key respects, jarringly reminding me that while the sky’s the limit for the studio, their flagship title’s initial entry into virtual reality has some serious turbulence to work through.
Sony, MWM Immersive, and Tequila Works today announced that their upcoming VR adventure Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son is set to launch next month, which includes support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PSVR.
Survios, the VR studio behind Raw Data (2017) and Creed: Rise to Glory (2018), today announced that their upcoming pirate ship battler finally has a release date; it’s slated to arrive on September 10th for most major VR headsets.
No Man’s Sky, the galactic sandbox game which launched back in 2016 is getting a major update today which includes full VR support. The ‘BEYOND’ update is now available on PS4 with PSVR support and on Steam with support for Vive, Index, Rift and other SteamVR headsets. Developer Hello Games says that the game’s entire feature set is compatible with VR, and that VR players will be able to play together with non-VR players.
Nate Mitchell, Facebook’s Head of VR Product, and the last of Oculus’ co-founders, has announced that he’s leaving the company.
With a development journey starting way back in 2014, Dexta’s Dexmo haptic force-feedback VR gloves have come a very long way. I recently went hands-on with the latest version of the company’s gloves, which are now production ready, and came away impressed with their compact size and freedom of mobility.
