Better than any of the other shooting gallery style games in VR, Raw Data keeps you on the move. That’s tricky to achieve in VR, even with HTC Vive’s room scale experience, but it works well to help keep the game fast and frenetic.
Dropped into a futuristic looking lab in the heart of Eden Corp’s headquarters, your job is pretty simple: to plug in your hacking device and dump as much raw data as possible. Would that life were so simple, as it only takes a few seconds for a robot to wake from its slumber, walk out of a pod and start to try and get at you through the toughened glass that surrounds the computer console. Its thoroughly inhuman way of simply smashing itself against the glass until it shatters is quietly unsettling.
From there it’s all about holding out and clearing the waves of robots and flying drones that come at you as a whole wall opens up and you start to realise you’re in more of an arena. Initially, it’s just these dumb bots that slowly walk your way, but soon they start to come out of the pods on the walls with guns in hand, others can cloak and become near invisible, or there’s the much tougher final boss robot that fires missiles and concluded the short demo.
Depending on whether you pick Bishop the Gun Cleric or Saija the Cyber Ninja, you can have a very different experience. Bishop’s the most obvious one to go for, perhaps, with a pistol on either hip that you grab by squeezing in the Vive Controller’s grip buttons, before firing away, pistols akimbo. It’s tempting to stay at a distance, keeping relatively still and going for precision, but it turns out that aiming a gun in VR might be pretty intuitive – “Just point and shoot, right?” says every first timer in every action film ever – but actually hitting your targets can be quite tricky as you line up the sights.
You’re much better off taking a leaf out of Saija’s book and moving around the room much more, closing the distance and being able to blast away without care. It’s as simple as pressing the touchpad on the left controller – or right if you’re left handed – and pointing to where you want to go. You can only move around like this so much, as an energy meter drains and has to recharge over time, but you’re well advised to make use of it.
Moving around is practically a necessity for Saija, whose primary weapon is a badass laser sword that you have holstered on your back. Yeah, you want to get up close and personal and start slashing at enemies, but you can also bounce incoming laser beams back, throw the sword and have it home back to your hand, or fire a stream of shurikens from your free hand.
Then there’s the special abilities that are great for getting out of a tough spot. For example, Saija can either use telekinesis to pick enemies and fling them around, or there’s the Levitation Smash, with the odd sensation of moving up into the air and then smashing down and causing tons of damage all around you.
The best thing is that this can all be played through online co-op, perhaps with one of you rushing around and slicing away and the other going for covering fire. With enemies coming at you from all angles, it feels like the game was really designed with co-op in mind, not to mention the full on room scale VR of Vive. Certainly, the more melee-focussed Saija benefits from having Bishop knocking drones out of the sky.
This was just a small slice of what promises to be a much larger game. The version of the game in Steam Early Access already goes a fair way beyond this, with a third character – Boss, the street merc – new enemies and a couple of new missions. There’s plans to keep building it out over the next year, with more characters, more weapons and a campaign that strings together twelve missions and plenty more beyond that.
HTC are clearly quite enthusiastic about this game – they’re hosting game nights at Meltdown eSports bars in London, Cologne and Paris for the next three Wednesdays, with prizes that include a HTC Vive up for grabs for the highest scores across Europe – and I’m also excited by where VR shooters are heading once more. Creating a shooting gallery is a fairly straightforward entry point into VR, but getting the players to zip from place to place around the world and actively get closer to the enemies is something that’s just a little bit special.
Severn2j
I picked this up awhile ago, when it was much earlier in development and even then, it was a lot of fun (if a little stressful).. It seems to have come a long way since then, so I may have to drop in again.
Also, I appreciate the reviews of VR games (on all platforms), a lot of gaming sites seem to be ignoring them, perhaps they’re waiting for a bigger install base (which is less likely to happen if they don’t write about it), so thanks for that..