Built as part of an in-house game jam, Ninja Theory’s debut VR title DEXED is a beautiful on-rails shooter that pulls inspiration from the Sega Saturn classic Panzer Dragoon and a dash of cult shooter Ikaruga.
It’s interesting to see older, classic game concepts and mechanics brought up to date inside an entirely new medium such as VR. For Ninja Theory’s developers, clearly in touch with their retro gaming past, Sega Saturn classic Panzer Dragoon‘s core ‘look to target’ system, was liberally pilfered for their latest title DEXED. Although, to this old time gamer, there’s a also more than a hint of cult shooter Ikaruga here too.
Ninja Theory, developers of the forthcoming (and very pretty) brawler Hellblade, held an internal game jam to promote creative thinking and to perhaps find the next killer concept for a new game. Teams of developers at the studio had one month each to build something that they thought would make a game they thought was cool. Of all the concepts that came forth from the Jam, DEXED was the one it was felt showed the most promise.
The title, out today for HTC Vive, has you flying through various fantastical dream-like landscapes holding two controller, each one instilled with it’s own opposing type of projectiles – one ice, one fire. Perhaps predictably then, in order to defeat enemies in your dream world, you need to blast enemies with the corresponding opposing projectile – ice beats fire, and so on. Enemy targeting is handled by the aforementioned ‘look to lock’ mechanism, and if you’ve played Rez you’ll know that the aim is to target as many (or as many points of) an enemy as possible before unleashing multiple auto-targeting salvos. The ice vs fire (red / blue) twist is where I make parallels with Ikaruga whose central premise was that your ship switched states to tackle different coloured enemies.
If this title has appeared somewhat out of the blue, Ninja Theory agree. “Where has this come from?!? You may ask,” they said via press release, well quite. Once the initial game jam was complete and the DEXED team had been chosen as winners, they were given a further two months to refine the title ready for release – and thus Ninja Theory’s debut VR title was born. Today see’s the title for the HTC Vive via Steam for £6.99/$9.99/€9.99.