Hubris (2022), the VR shooter from Cyborn, is arguably among the most visually intense VR games out there. Now the studio is slimming it down the game to fit on PSVR 2 and the Quest platform, and it’s coming this week.
First launched on PC VR headsets in late 2022, Cyborn announced that its sci-fi shooter Hubris is launching on PSVR 2 and Quest 2/Pro on June 22nd.
When the studio first announced for PSVR 2, it said the port would bring along with it “enhanced graphics and gameplay,” including foveated rendering for sharper resolution, haptics and adaptive triggers for swimming and shooting, revamped reloading and aiming, new enemy variations, refined difficulty levels, and 3D audio.
Some of those things, namely shooting mechanics and enemy behavior, weren’t super polished when we reviewed the game on PC VR, putting it squarely in the realm of visually stunning, if not somewhat flawed. Granted, the game has seen a number of updates on PC since then, although this will likely be a first time playing the game for many, and released on the two most-popular VR platforms at the moment.
The studio says a Pico 4 port is also in the works, although we’re due to learn more about that soon.
You can wishlist the game on PSVR 2 here, and on Quest here. In the meantime, check out each platform’s trailer, each of which was captured in-headset.
Propagation VR (2020), the VR survival horror game for PC VR headsets, is getting a sequel called Propagation: Paradise Hotel, and it’s coming next week.
Update (April 27th, 2023): WanadevStudio announced Propagation: Paradise Hotel is coming on May 4th to Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets. You can now wishlist it on the Quest Store and Steam.
In Propagation: Paradise Hotel you are a solo adventurer taking on the role of Emily Diaz, who must explore the Paradise Hotel’s dark surroundings to find her lost twin sister Ashley. Use items, weapons, and tools as you progress through the story, which is filled with savage creatures thanks to a strange illness.
Check out the final gameplay trailer below:
Original Article (December 3rd, 2021): During Upload VR’s showcase, developer WanadevStudio unveiled the upcoming sequel, which promises to be an “intense VR survival horror adventure with thrilling storytelling, in which you will explore dark environments, make terrifying encounters and get your adrenaline pumping.”
WanadevStudio says the sequel will be a single-player adventure taking place in the Propagation universe, which will serve up a story that focuses on exploration, stealth, and action. And plenty of zombies and mutants.
Propagation VR launched for free on Steam back in September 2020, garnering it an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ user rating on the platform for its visceral zombie-shooting experience.
Wanadev estimates a late 2022 release on SteamVR headsets for Paradise Hotel (see update). The studio hasn’t mentioned whether the game is coming to other platforms besides SteamVR, however it has done so with its previous title Ragnarock(2021), a Viking-themed rhythm game launched for both SteamVR and Oculus Quest.
Meta-owned developer Downpour Interactive announced it’s pulling Quest 1 support for Onward, the hit team-based mil-sim shooter.
First launched on PC VR headsets in Early Access back in 2016, Onward managed to garner a hardcore following over the years thanks to its realistic squad-based gameplay and unrelentingly faithful reproduction of real-world weaponry.
In mid-2020, Downpour decidedly slimmed down Onward across the board with its Early Access launch on Quest—just a few months before Meta launched the more powerful Quest 2. Its launch on the original Quest was met with some pretty intense backlash from the PC VR-playing community at the time, as Downpour significantly reduced the Onward’s graphics in addition to limiting community-generated content.
Now the developer, which was acquired by Meta in 2021, says it’s slated to drop support for Quest 1 on July 31st, 2023. In the studio’s FAQ, Downpour says Onward will no longer be playable on Quest 1 in any capacity after the July cut-off date.
The studio isn’t offering any special refund scheme outside of Meta’s standard policy, which allows you to return a game with less than two hours of gameplay time, and within 14 days after purchase.
Onward however benefits from cross-buy, so owners can continue playing on Quest 1 through the Meta Store version, which requires a VR-ready PC to play, or on the still natively supported Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets.
In comes as no real surprise that some developers are pulling the plug on Quest 1 support only three years after the headset’s launch. Meta announced earlier this month it was set to deprecate first-party social features on the original 2019 Quest in March, which includes access to Parties and Meta Horizon Home. From now until 2024, Meta will only push critical bug fixes and security patches.
Spatial Ops is a new multiplayer mixed reality shooter from Resolution Games, the studio behind Blaston, Demeo, and Ultimechs. It’s out now on SideQuest and you can play in the open beta for free starting today, however we got an advanced look during a trip to the developer’s Stockholm-based studio, which thankfully had a big enough area to host all-out 4v4 matches.
In short: Spatial Ops is bringing an arcade-level VR team shooter experience to consumers in sort of the same waySpace Pirate Arena did, albeit with way more players and a greater ability to configure play spaces. It also hopes to ignite a new eSport thanks to some familiar shooter mechanics that basically anyone can pick up just as easily as grabbing dual Tommy guns, or a rocket launcher and blasting away.
Ok, there are more technical bits to think about, but more importantly you probably want to know how we got on with Spatial Ops.
VR Arcade Action, Consumer Target
Spatial Ops made for some intense and fun battles—the sort of stupid fun that makes you forget you should be seriously previewing a never-before played game instead of getting on the ground and worming your way under a hail of gunfire and laughing like a madman all the way.
The game supports up to eight players using either Quest 2 or Quest Pro, although you can go it alone with bots if you’re lacking the requisite number of brains attached to headsets—at least one besides you for either a mano a mano duel, or a bot-hunting extravaganza. It’s an in-development project, so I’m sure we’ll see a more refinement as the team continues work, but the game already has all of the basic bits in place to make for one hell of a fun time.
Here’s a gander at the release trailer, which is actually very representative of the time we had in Stockholm:
What the trailer doesn’t show is that spawn points are placed on opposite sides of the arena, so teams will not only start there before the match begins, but also need to individually trundle back there to respawn—provided you didn’t manage to toss a healing vial at your feet for an extended run, that is.
You can pick those health packs up along with randomly selected guns at specific spawn points throughout the playing field. You’ll be able to arm yourself with Tommy guns, revolvers, shotguns, sniper rifles with working scopes, rocket launchers, grenades, and a riot shield that adds the only opportunity for armor in the game. Once a gun is empty, just toss it and head for the nearest weapon spawn point.
We played a ton of matches, which not only gave me a good feel for each weapon, but also for how tiring it can be to sprint around what to outsiders looks like an empty room. To us though, it was crammed with virtual crates and barriers to hide behind, which made for some natural choke points where the action really popped off.
Image courtesy Resolution Games
All of that can be configured in a level editor beforehand though, which gives you a lot of latitude to customize the playing field to the intended place space. As you’d imagine, tactics change according to the game mode you’re playing too. At launch, there are four modes available: Team Deathmatch, Domination, Capture the Flag, and Free-for-All.
We played on both Quest 2 and Quest Pro, although there’s some unexpected advantages to Quest 2 here thanks to its monochrome passthrough. Spatial Ops is a mixed reality game that necessarily fills a lot of the playing field with virtual imagery, so in this case passthrough really only gives you a clear idea of where not to go. Enemies and barriers ‘pop’ more on Quest 2, although you can’t deny how much more immersive the full-color passthrough of Quest Pro is, adding just a touch more realism to the whole thing.
Shooting a bot | Image courtesy Resolution Games
Since Meta hasn’t released concurrency for Quest, which means Quests can’t ‘see’ each other in a shared space, the game needs a common reference point to calibrate each user to the playing field. In our case, it was a pillar on the side of the room that every player had to carefully make sure was lined up just right. It’s crucial to get calibration correct, otherwise your perception of a player’s virtual position in the game and actual position on the field may be off, which would cause unwanted contact between players.
Here’s a good look at how that’s done:
The headline says ‘At-Home Play’, but that’s really only applicable if you have ready access to a big space. That’s a distinct barrier of entry alongside needing an adequate number of VR headset-owning friends for full effect.
We played in an area around 10×10m (33×33 feet), which was notably larger than the Quest 2’s guardian typically allows, hence the need for distribution on SideQuest and not the Quest Store proper. If you’re like me, you probably only have a space just big enough for room-scale VR stuff; in some ideal future, everyone I know has an MR-capable headset and we all meet up at the local indoor basketball court for a few matches. Online play is possible provided each user has enough space, although Spatial Ops is really a local multiplayer game in spirit.
In the end, Spatial Ops is opening up arcade-style gaming to the general public, which will be interesting to see unfold. Are there enough Quest 2 or Quest Pros out there for the game to make sense as an eSport? Will players find each other and auto-organize into local teams, matches and maybe even tourneys—like you might see with the obvious analogues of airsoft, paintball or laser tag? We’ll be waiting to see, but in the meantime you can nab Spatial Ops on SideQuest for free to try out for yourself.
Disclosure: Resolution Games assisted with travel & lodging expenses to an event where information for this article was gathered.
SoulAssembly announced it’s getting ready to release the long-awaited COD Zombies-inspired co-op shooter, called Drop Dead: The Cabin, which is now slated to release on Quest in February 2023.
The studio released a new developer update video during UploadVR’s Winter Showcase yesterday, showing off some of the game’s features, such as remixed pickups, different enemies, and how to survive ‘The Cabin’ by keeping lights and communications on by collecting fuel cells.
Check out the video below, which also includes a fresh look at gameplay:
The objective is not only to fend off waves of zombies, but also to keep the fuel flowing as you await extraction. With plenty of chaos at hand, it looks like you’ll need a friend with good aim by your side as Drop Dead’s cast of different zomboids rip down your defenses and lurch into the confines of the house.
While Drop Dead: The Cabin is set to launch on Quest sometime in February 2023, the studio actively hosting closed beta testing, which is accessible by joining the game’s Discord (invite link). It appears the current round of closed beta testing is already full, which notably requires users to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to participate.
Another round is expected to open sometime in January however, so make sure to keep your eyes peeled on the Discord channel for more info.
Hubris should be what we’ve all been waiting for, a visually well-realized VR native that transports you to otherworldly biomes, replete with shooting, jumping, climbing, swimming, and even some basic crafting mechanics. On paper it certainly checks many of the sci-fi shooting and adventuring blocks, but look past the flashy visuals and apparent feature set and you’re left with a fairly mediocre VR shooter that just isn’t clever enough out of the gate to be truly engaging.
Available On: Steam, coming to PSVR 2 & Quest 2 in 2023 Release Date: December 7th, 2022 Price: $40 Developer: Cyborn B.V. Reviewed On: Quest 2 via Link
Gameplay
You’re a recruit belonging to the Order of Objectivity—basically a space marine who happens to have crash-landed on a hostile world which is in the midst of being terraformed. Large terraforming towers loom in the distance above the rocky, desolate world. The only wildlife comprises of squids and a few giant bugs, and most of them aren’t friendly. You job is to kill everything, scrounge everything for weapon upgrades, and experience the majesty of probably one of the best-looking PC VR games currently available.
Exterminating the local fauna isn’t difficult—one shot and they splatter into goo. The same is almost always true for the corpo-baddies who repel from dropships to infest the inner bowels of the terraforming towers and fuel refineries. On medium difficulty, one or two well-placed shots can kill most dudes outright, save one rare tank type you meet in the final quarter of the game which may take two or three magazines from either the pistol or submachine gun.
Image courtesy Cyborn B.V.
For some reason these faceless goons don’t like the Order or its badass super soldier, Cyana, but then again, I can’t blame them. I’m a faceless goon too, albeit one with a gun and an inventory large enough to porter several junkheaps of metal scraps and other fiddly bits to a shredder which gives me the base unit of each found item: metal, fiber, plastic, and cyan: the game’s unobtainium.
Scrounging and crafting is a pretty satisfying experience, and the quick inventory system of reaching over your shoulder for either health or junk items works surprisingly well—right shoulder for health, left for junk. The flatscreen inventory, pulled up by tapping your wristwatch, is a little less effective in default mode since you can only grab one specific item at a time before it auto-closes and you have to reopen it again, but you can change that in the settings. Here’s a look at a juicer you’ll find at some point in the game which lets you craft health potions with fruit you collect:
Just plop in the required bit into any crafting machine, and you’ve got your potion, food, or gun overhaul at the ready.
The most important bit is undoubtedly how Hubris performs as a shooter, and it’s not great. Reloading and cycling through your three weapons (pistol, shotgun, submachine gun) is an intuitive and well thought out affair, although actually aiming and shooting the weapons is sadly lacking in refinement.
Both the pistol and submachine gun are very difficult to get a good sight picture, which forces you to shoot by intuition alone. You’ll typically need to correct your aim on the fly, which wouldn’t be so much of an issue if you had a few spare mags on hand. This ends up making you spray precious bullets when they might be better used with more accurate shots.
Granted, reloading is easy—just hold the empty weapon up to your head and wait the 10-15 seconds for the haptic buzz to stop. Ideally, this sort of intentionally slow reloading is supposed to force the user into a more tactical shooting stance since you can’t quickly reload, but at times this made me think too tactically. After all, if I can’t trust my own aim, I’m not going head-first into a firefight for fear of being set back to the last auto-save point in a jiff.
That 10-15 seconds in a firefight naturally forces you to make better use of cover, which is all well and good. But because there’s no incentive to rush into a firefight with less than each gun’s magazine can hold—variable on whether you have the pistol, shotgun, or machine gun—what tends to happen is this: you scoot back to a choke point and wait for the AI to stupidly file in one-by-one until a whole area is cleared of baddies. It’s efficient, but not very fun. If gun models were just a little more refined…
The array of enemies isn’t terrible once you get to the last quarter of the game, where things really pick up in difficulty and the diversity of all of the skills you learn finally come together. Still, the game’s AI is fairly dumb in how it moves about, but is strangely always accurate in its shots. Of the two types of soldiers, the one you’ll see 99 percent of the time is the standard idiot who vaporizes with one or two blasts.
There are some flying enemies too. There is one type of drone you’ll regularly come across, which requires about 10 bullets from the pistol or 24 from the submachine gun, and one type of magnetic mine that will follow you around until either you or it dies first.
All of them are bullet sponges with no discernible weak points, save the shielded mine which can either be disabled with a spare battery orb, or by shooting it from above or below. Maybe a headshot is enough to kill a soldier? I’m still not sure since aiming is basically constant guesswork. It’s shame, because if your GPU can chug at least as well as my aging Nvidia GTX 1080, the visual experience of the game is pretty impressive (more on that in Immersion).
There was some glitchiness, although we’ve been told by Cyborn that the final release version will fix some areas with notable framerate drops. In the six hours it took me to beat on medium difficulty I never experienced a game-breaking bug though, which is a big step up from what we saw in the demo that was available back in the summer.
Immersion
On one hand, you have visually poppy scenes that draw you in, and a world that practically feels alive; that’s no small feat. I simply don’t want to understate how good Hubris looks. However, extreme polish in this one specific aspect of the game seems to highlight other parts that seem intent on detracting from the overall experience.
My placid colleague, chipper as ever despite the rotting stench of death | Image courtesy Cyborn B.V.
One of my least favorite gaming tropes is on full display in Hubris: the helpful robot who tells you everything you need to know and where to go. In short, you can forget figuring anything out for yourself for most of the game, as you’re effectively robbed of nearly every instance of discovery in Hubris until you get to, again, the last quarter of the game. You’re led by the hand to each objective, and everything (everything) is summarized ad infinitum by one of the most unintentionally condescending characters.
Lucia-bot is always “helpful” | Image captured by Road to VR
The dreaded helper-bot in question is actually supposed to be piloted by my flesh and blood commander, Lucia, who delivers lines more akin to a kindergarten teacher gently chiding me into cleaning up my blocks before laying down for a nap than, say, a battle-hardened space marine. Across the board, voice acting doesn’t feel well-directed, resulting in it actively hurting the seriousness the game works to build. If there were only some explanation for her weirdly mismatched tone, like an emotion chip gone awry or maybe I’m just a dumb toddler grown in a vat who needs constant reassurance. Nope. It’s just a weird thing about Hubris I guess.
The narrative isn’t much more than your standard sci-fi fare, which is absolutely fine, but I can’t help but think how much better Hubris would be (middling gunplay included!) if I just had a second to look around and breathe in the atmosphere without constantly being annoyed to death.
Comfort
Hubris includes a number of locomotion situations beyond your standard single-plane shooter. It requires you to jump (using the ‘A’ button), climb, swim by moving both arms, run around and strafe, and drive around in a vehicle at some point too.
Most of this is done in such a way that it’s comfortable to the user, although there are a few standout scenes when I personally didn’t want to have eyes in my head, notably when dropships fly overhead and the camera shakes so much it gave me the wobbles. Getting in the way of another character during their scripted movement will also move you without your consent, which can be jarring the first time it happens.
As you’d imagine, you’ll need full range of motion for both arms to climb and swim, so make sure to either have an adequate chair to sit in or stand up for the entirety of the game.
‘Hubris’ Comfort Settings – December 7th, 2022
Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese
