Halo: Outpost Discovery is a weekend-long event coming to a few cities across the US this summer; it aims to bring fans closer to the world of Halo, while undoubtedly distancing them from the money in their back pockets. As a traveling Halo theme park, it just so happens to have a Halo-themed multiplayer VR attraction too.
Dubbed the ‘Outpost Discovery Training Grounds’, event-goers can team up in the 3v3 multiplayer shooter, giving you a free-roaming, wireless VR environment to run around while you shoot your plasma pistol and heal via the series’ shield generator.
The attraction was built in partnership with VRstudios, the studio known for their work on several of the games available at Dave & Buster’s VR arcades nation-wide including Star Trek: Dark Remnant and the large-scale LBE attraction Barking Irons Gunslinger.
In fact, the Halo VR Training Grounds appears to be similar to the Barking Irons Gunslinger attraction, which VRstudios describes as a mix between lasertag and dodgeball.
Although this is clearly an attraction intended for a limited run, it’s hard to get excited about what essentially makes for a small-scale lasertag match. We’ve seen worse implementations, but we’ve also seen better ones too.
Granted, this isn’t the first licensed Halo VR experience though, and at least looks more fun than the Halo: Recruit experience used to hype Windows VR headsets back in October 2017. That app (read our full hands-on here) was decidedly better polished in terms of graphical realism, giving you a more 1:1 understanding of the scale of Jackals, Elites, and other baddies from the Halo universe, although you shoot at an admittedly puny 2D lightgun-style waveshooter.
If you’re looking to get your head into the first officially licensed multiplayer Halo VR shooter, Halo: Outpost Discovery will be touring the following cities:
- July 5-7 – Orlando, Florida
- July 19-21 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- August 2-4 – Chicago, Illinois
- August 16-18 – Houston, Texas
- August 30-September 1 – Anaheim, California