Hitman Go: VR Edition is Square Enix experimenting with virtual reality

New games keep coming out for virtual reality, and sometimes those releases are actually quite old.

Hitman Go: VR Edition is one of the latest releases for Oculus Rift and Gear VR headsets, and you can download it now from the Oculus Store for $10 (or $8 for the Gear VR version). I booted it up and found that Hitman Go is still the same great game I played on my tablet back in 2014. And while it’s familiar, it benefits in a small way from its transition to the virtual realm.

This is publisher Square Enix’s first push into a VR market that could reach $40 billion in revenues by 2020, according to some analysts, and Hitman Go is a low-risk port that should enable the publisher to get an understanding of the space.

Check out the game in action below:

Hitman Go: VR Edition has exactly the same gameplay as the original. It’s a simplified, board-game take on the franchise’s assassination action where you move your Agent 47 character around a path to complete certain objectives without getting spotted. It was fun two years ago, and that hasn’t changed, even if you won’t find anything new.

I don’t think this title needed a VR port, but getting the chance to sit in a simulated space with a digital board game doesn’t take away from the experience, either. Instead, you may find that it’s a bit easier to get an understanding of the world without having to move your camera around by pinching and zooming or using the left stick and shoulder buttons for the console version.

In Hitman Go: VR Edition, I could understand the layout of the board without having to really adjust anything except for where my head was looking. As I learned with Lucky’s Tale and a few other early VR games, adjusting your gaze like this is completely natural as opposed to fidgeting with a controller.

Hitman is more proof that digital board games are incredible in VR. I’ve previously compared the Rift launch head-to-head arena battler Airmech: Command to a living tabletop experience, and I think this is a potentially enormous genre. But Hitman is only more proof that it works. The title is not a next step toward exploring what developers can do with this sort of interaction.

Either way, it’s exciting that a huge publisher like Square Enix is experimenting with all of this, and I hope they find a reason to continue making VR games.