Reviews
234
Overall, the few minor gripes shouldn’t take away from just how captivating Gloomy Eyes is. It masterfully commands a mysterious yet gorgeous art style and pairs it with brilliant animation. The level of detail is so high, and the world so beautiful, that I can see myself revisiting the experience more than once, just to get a better look at things. People of all ages, even with little VR experience, should enjoy Gloomy Eyes, and it’s short enough that they may as well give it a try.
The Wizards never lets you forget you’re playing a VR game. Rarely do more than 10 seconds pass without the need for grand hand gestures to summon magic or for you to reach out and interact with things around you. They’ve got a great magic system that’s intuitive and fun to master in a fantastical world that provides a unique type of adventure you won’t quite find anywhere else.
Pro Putt joins a growing list of VR titles that brilliantly capture the essence of a sport that inherently makes sense on the platform. It caters to both longtime golfers and casual fans with a wealth of options. A relatively small number of courses hold it back from full marks but, if you aren’t getting out on the green enough these days, Pro Putt offers a compelling alternative.
Pixel Ripped 1995 is a bigger, bolder, and even more nostalgic walk down memory lane that shifts the focus from the late 80s to the early 90s — perhaps the most iconic and formative decade of the video game industry to date. By mixing together riffs off of popular games such as Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, Streets of Rage, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario, and more, Pixel Ripped is a sleek and powerful blast of nostalgia that brings back potent memories of hunching over CRT TVs in the dead of night playing games.
There’s a fun focus on planning and improvising in Final Assault, making it an engaging, albeit somewhat less involved, entry for the genre even if it wasn’t on a headset, but in virtual reality, the RTS shines as an imaginative chest of colorful toys. Just make sure when you’re planning your attack to call in a supply drop of dramamine.
A-Tech Cybernetic is a steadfast example of the trials and triumphs of Early Access development. If you bought this game back in 2017 and kept up to date with its new chapters over the ensuing years, you probably had a great time with it, at least in parts. But, arriving as one complete package in 2020, the game can’t hide its age, offering fun, flawed shooting built on overly simple foundations with too many bugs to overlook.
It’s exciting to see a developer that was so previously rooted in the fast-paced action shooter category branching out to something more slow-paced, narratively-driven, and visually unique. The gameplay certainly leaves plenty to be desired in the wake of Half-Life: Alyx, but in terms of its story and setting there is enough here to make it worth a recommendation — especially in comparison to similar experiences already available on Quest.
The Room VR: A Dark Matter is an exemplary puzzle game that not only serves as a prime example of what makes puzzle games so compelling in the first place, but elevates the genre via VR with supreme interactivity, excellent visuals, and a palpably mysterious atmosphere. It’s only held back slightly by some minor frustrations with pacing and difficulty, but is otherwise one of the best puzzle games available in a VR headset.
Even Down The Rabbit Hole’s sheer existence seems like lunacy. It’s as strange a VR game you’ll find, one that refuses to be pegged down to any one demographic or tick any certain box. There might be a touch of tameness to some of its puzzles and the adventure is over a little too soon, but when the game tips its box of ideas upside down, magic usually falls out. Down The Rabbit Hole is as Mad as a Hatter, and that’s exactly what you’d want it to be.
Though you’ll find yourself hungry for more, there’s something comforting in the knowledge that, for Valve, this is the dawn of a new era. Half-Life: Alyx makes good on its second chance, it is as essential a VR game as you’ll find in 2020, but perhaps the most exciting thing about it is the message is that the best is yet to come.