Above: Defense Grid 2 on consoles and PC.
I leaned in and admired the swirling clouds of dust near the palm trees and dove underwater so I could see what my base looked like from below. But as beautiful as everything was, I couldn’t spend all my time just staring at the world. The alien creatures moved in fast, and I attacked them with lasers, cannons, and tesla towers. I also had access to a powerful orbital beam that I could summon every five minutes.
One of the things Hidden Path wanted to do for the VR version was encourage exploration. You can unlock new parts of a level by looking for different environmental triggers. For the demo, pressing a button on different radar dishes caused new sections of the base to rise out of the sea, offering additional tower spaces. Other items throughout the game will have different effects or serve as collectibles.
According to Hidden Path CEO Jeff Pobst, it’s faster and easier to build towers in VR than it is with a mouse and keyboard in the original version. The studio didn’t expect that to happen when it first started making the game. In fact, it was Oculus who first asked Hidden Path to bring Defense Grid 2 to the Rift. Since that initial meeting, both companies have been working together to make the Enhanced VR Edition run as smoothly as possible when it comes out next year.
Final Approach
Above: You have to draw a path to the chopper’s landing pad.
Developer Phaser Lock’s Final Approach is sort of like a spiritual successor to the popular iPhone game Flight Control. In both games, you have to safely land incoming airplanes by drawing lines that guide them to the runways. But with Final Approach, multitasking is a bit harder when planes are flying near your head instead of on a flat screen. For the demo, I used Oculus Touch, but the game will also launch on HTC’s Vive headset and support its wand-like motion controllers.
To guide a plane, you have to poke it with your finger and then draw a line from the skies down through a series of glowing square gates near an airstrip. If you make the turns too sharp (like I did many times), the planes will just crash and explode. You also have to watch where you draw those lines because, like in Flight Control, the planes can accidentally collide with each other. But no one really dies in the game. Little green men safely parachuted to the ground whenever the careless air traffic controller (aka me) destroyed their vehicles.
I was moving my hands around so much that I felt like I was conducting an orchestra. It was very peaceful and meditative … until a plane covered in flames was suddenly charging at me. In certain situations, Final Approach will pull you down to ground level from your overworld view to complete different tasks. One of the characters told me I had to put out a fire, and the next thing I knew, I was standing in the tiny airport with a hose in my hand.
Above: That fire isn’t gonna put out itself.
Some of these emergency tasks are more complex. Phaser Lock chief technical officer John Nagle described one mission that has a multi-car accident on the road. From the overhead view, you have to use a crane helicopter to move the vehicles away. Then a rescue chopper flies in and lowers a cable. When you’re on the ground, you have to grab that cable and hook it to a basket that’s carrying the victims.
After that, you zoom back out and make sure they arrive safely at a hospital. Other levels have you fighting forest fires, clearing out the birds from runways with a foghorn, and sorting luggage at the airport.
It’s an unusual combination of activities, but the demo showed how much fun it is to play around with the Touch controllers, especially when it comes to doing things that would seem mundane in traditional games.