Damaged Core is a first-person shooter from High Voltage Software that’s offering a unique solution to one of the biggest problems facing first-person games in VR today—locomotion. And while the game’s own brand of teleportation may take more than a minute to explain, the results culminate in a fast-paced, explosive jaunt through a large futuristic battlefield that will have you spanning the entire map with ease, and a deadly purpose.

The Story

Off in the not-too-distant future an artificial super intelligence has emerged, the Core, and it’s not the enlightened nanny-bot 5000 that we hoped it would be—more like the malicious AI that Elon Musk and Bill Gates have been warning us about.

HVS_TheCore
the Core, a massive disembodied artificial intelligence

As the game’s human-friendly AI, your quest is to fight the Core by hacking into its robot foot soldiers, letting you effectively leap frog your way across the map through the bodies of the robot army and using them as fixed nodes for your disembodied consciousness. And while the game’s locomotion scheme is useful for getting you from place to place, it instantly becomes apparent that your new found ability comes with some added tactical benefits.

GDC Demo

The demo I played at the pre-GDC Oculus press event was one of your standard FPS ‘protect the whatever’ mission, in this case a drop ship from the rebel faction. Navigating through a series of broken buildings by way of hacked robot enemies and a friendly (and suspiciously convenient) non-combatant camera drone, I made my way to football field-size opening featuring a ton of incoming bots attacking the ship. Up until then I only had command of a single robot type, a laser rifle-firing human robot that had the ability to zoom in with its sniper scope.

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is it worth more alive or dead? kill or possess, you decide.

And that’s when the demo started throwing new classes of robots at me—a robot with a shotgun, a hard-to-hack giant bot with a powerful laser, flying bots—all streaming in from behind broken buildings and beaming in from wherever their offsite base was. This is where the game makes use of teleportation not only as a story-cohesive way of getting around the map, but as a method of forcing you to use it tactically. You begin to see the benefit of hacking a bot behind an enemy group, or a lone laser sniper across the map so you can pick off belligerents attacking your drop ship. Big laser bots are menacing until you can destroy their jammers and pop into their braincases for a massive blow to the smaller bots below.

The Controls

I played the game standing up with the supplied Xbox One gamepad, admittedly not my first choice for a first-person shooter in VR, or my second or third choice for that matter. The game is really engaging despite the gamepad, and I even forgot for a moment that I was dealing with a gaze-based aiming system—normally something I hate using based on my firm belief that the human neck isn’t supposed to be used as a fine-pointing device. While Damaged Core would certainly benefit massively from reliable hand controllers and abandonment of gaze-reticles in general, it’s still massively fun to have your robot shot to death and jump into the body of a new host across the map at the last second, something that actually a necessity to move along in the game. Even if I’ll be playing with a little begrudgingly with a gamepad, I’ll still be playing.

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teleport to the bot in the back and take out the entire squad

What’s next?

What we saw at the pre-GDC Oculus event made a strong case for expansive teleportation-based first-person shooters, and while the 20 minute demo I played never once felt gimmicky, the long-term success of it will weigh heavily on unique mission types that exclusively use the teleportation mechanism as a core game mechanic. Repatterning the game off of existing FPS tropes could force the title to rely on the ‘giant crowd of bots’ trick I saw in the demo to give you full map coverage, which although fresh and engaging now, could leave you feeling like you’re playing the same ‘protect the thing for some reason’ mission over and over. I only played the tutorial and first mission though, and I look forward to discovering what’s next in the game.

Damaged Core is an Oculus exclusive that’s been slated for an unspecified spring release. No pricing information has yet been made available to the public, but we’ll be keeping an eye on the game in the next few months to see just where it goes.

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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 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • VR Geek

    I wonder if we will look back and wish Oculus waited till the Touch controllers were released before releasing the Rift. I could wait if it meant all games releases could count on Touch being in everybox. This game sounds absolutely amazing and based on Scott’s review I cannot help but wish it was not a Xbox controller. Done that for the past few years and really, really do not like. Feels so wrong to me and a bit of a kill joy especially for those not familiar with the controller layout. Great review all the same!!!

  • Arv

    I’m very surprised that High Voltage didn’t use the CryEngine for this game. They did an unprecedented lifetime licence deal with Crytek a while ago.

    Looks great, I’m not a big fan of the teleportation mechanic for VR games but don’t mind it being used in games with a sci-fi setting such as this game and Budget Cuts because contextually it makes sense.

    I’ve been a big supporter of High Voltage Software ever since they developed The Conduit for the Wii. The level design was awful but they were the first developer to nail FPS pointer controls using the Remote and Nunchuck, and their Quantum3 engine was technically VERY impressive.

  • brandon9271