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A whole new (virtual) world.
By
IGN Staff
Despite having been released to consumers earlier this year, the Oculus Rift is still peeling off the cellophane, still unpacking itself from the box of expectation. Virtual Reality is in its infancy, and the Rift’s selection of games is modest.
However, there's still enough for a list of ten of the best games you can get on the Oculus Rift. In making the decision we considered how much fun the games are to play, their influence, and innovation.
The selection committee this time round included: Marty Silvia, Alysia Judge, Alanah Pearce, Joe Skrebels, Gav Murphy, and Dan Stapleton.
So without any ado to further, here they are in no particular order:
There’s a big red button sat in the middle of a control panel, and it’s a truth universally acknowledged that big red buttons are meant to be pressed - but there are some pretty heavy consequences. It's the gaming equivalent of that lass Pandora flipping the lid off her box.
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And what a tricky box it is. Switches flip out, draws with screwdrivers and hammers pop open, and hidden clues are revealed that are each pieces to puzzles that lead to over 25 apocalyptic endings. Your mission is to solve them all, and for that, you’re going to need to touch everything.
On PC and consoles, Minecraft is a game about doing what you want, building what you want, and playing how you want. With a vast blocky world as your playground, it’s a creative sandbox for you to bury yourself in.
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But in virtual reality this is taken to a whole new level. By removing that three-foot gap between your face and the PC screen and plunging your face directly into the landscape, Minecraft VR allows you to crane your neck and physically look up at the edifices you create. Creative and Survival modes have both made the leap, alongside co-operative and competitive multiplayer. It’s the Minecraft you love, but up close.
For all its cosmic wonder, economic ecosystems and breathlessly realistic space combat, in many ways Elite: Dangerous is simply a game about sitting in a cockpit and pushing lots of buttons. That’s precisely why Oculus is such a good fit - feeling situated in that ship, flicking your eyes from sub-system to sub-system and making changes on the fly.
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It comes alive in a dogfight. Tracking an enemy ship is far easier when you can just crane your neck to look through tempered glass at an opponent, close enough to re-enact that Top Gun scene where he flips the bird at a Russian. When the kill comes and you watch scorched wreckage tumble across a solar lens flared sky, there are few places you’d rather be than that cockpit, pushing all those buttons.
It’s a simple premise - hold down the left shift button with your left hand and the right shift with your right hand - then sit back and try not to let go. That would be easy to do were it not for the bees, giant spiders and frickin’ velociraptor that try to terrify you into letting go. If you think closing your eyes will help - think again!
One of the best bits about Don’t Let Go is the audio which is genuinely one of the most terrifying headphone experiences ever. We’ve not had a single Don’t Let Go session that hasn’t ended in the headset and headphones being flung off in horror.
Who would have known in 2009 that when Miley Cyrus crooned “Ain’t about how fast I get there / Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side / It’s the climb,” she was in fact prophesying a future where virtual reality would pave the way for Crytek’s first person rock climbing experience?
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The Climb turns acrophobia into a game. Combining the kind of lush vistas you’d see in shampoo adverts with the detail or pressing your nose an inch from a rock face, Crytek has perfectly replicated the sweaty-palm terror of dangling from a cliff. A fatigue system that sets in whenever you’re hanging with one arm can easily send you plummeting to your death, and in first person that’s a terrifying prospect indeed.
If you want to dive head-first into some action-packed space dogfighting, EVE Valkyrie is your go-to. You can pilot space fighters in other games, notably Elite Dangerous, but EVE will throw you directly into its great-looking 16-player furballs. The new carrier assault mode creates some especially tense battles to take down the enemy base, and even gives you the opportunity to do a Star Wars-style trench run.
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Once you’ve seen the difference it makes to be able to look up through the glass canopy and follow a target as it zips overhead and target missiles with your eyes, you’ll never be able to go back to playing a flight sim on a regular screen.
At first thought, VR is all about creating immersive, personal experiences that exist solely between the player and the technology. However, games like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes prove that VR also excels at bringing groups of people together for a new breed of multiplayer mayhem. One player wears a VR helmet and is positioned in front of an impossibly-complicated digital bomb.
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The rest of the VR-free players spend their time scouring over dozens of documents that hold the information needed to disarm the randomly-generated explosive. Keep Talking quickly turns into a tense, hilarious game of 21st-century telephone, and proves to be VR’s first legitimate party game.
House of the Dying Sun is still in Early Access, but it’s already an impressive space combat game that puts you both in command of a fleet and in the cockpit of any fighter you choose. It’ll work with or without VR, but it’s far more impressive when you’re right there in the cockpit.
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There’s a lot of depth to piloting these ships, since you can take advantage of Newtonian physics to pull of Battlestar Galactica-style maneuvers and upgrade your ships in a variety of ways. The low-detail untextured look reminds us of the old X-Wing games, and that’s a good thing.
Chronos is a challenging puzzle/action-adventure, and one of the richest experiences available on Oculus Rift yet. To survive, you need to excel at patient, calculated combat with major consequences littered between multi-faceted, Zelda-style puzzles, in a diverse, beautiful game that creatively spans across multiple dimensions. And while it could comfortably exist without VR,
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Chronos' use of scale in quests that have you shrink to the size of a toy and venture through a comparatively giant bookcase, or put you in a front-row seat to a giant cyclops fight, offers a new and confronting perspective that gives Chronos another edge.
There are two battles to wage once you enter a Dirt Rally race. One is between you and the track - a battle measured in ever-faster lap times and fought with tweaked toe-in angles as you play with either a gamepad or force-feedback wheel. The second is against the urge to look everywhere around you except the road.
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Dirt Rally is a fantastically authentic racing experience with lifelike physics and jaw-dropping graphics. A straightforward career mode and Rallycross multiplayer provides variety, while the HUD-less display provides depth and realism. A must-have for petrol heads.
So that’s our list of ten of the games we at IGN consider to be some of the best on Oculus right now. Let us know your personal favourites in the comments section below!