Gaming With Touch
If you’ve already got a Rift, adding Touch is going to massively enhance your VR experience. You’ll be upgrading from seated, controller-based gameplay to standing or even roomscale experiences where your hands are now part of the game. Using highly tracked motion controllers makes the virtual world more intuitive and more immersive.
The company has said that the reason they didn’t release Touch when the Rift first launched is primarily because they were waiting for content to mature. Indeed, the company is launching Touch with an impressive lineup of 53 titles, with a few more high profile games coming later in 2017. 22 of those 53 were games we already saw on SteamVR, leaving 31 brand new titles for the Touch launch. We haven’t been able to play everything yet, but we’ve already found some early standouts.
Super Hot VR
This Oculus exclusive uses a unique slow motion mechanic which will make you feel like Neo from The Matrix. In Super Hot, time only moves when you do. If you stand still, everything is frozen. As you begin to move, your enemies do too.
The game starts a bit bland, but quickly ratchets up to awesomeness as you’re dodging incoming bullets that are whizzing by your head while trying to fire back. The game becomes a fascinating dance of acting and pausing to assess the situation, then acting again. Despite all the action, it almost plays like a puzzle game at times as you figure out just how you should approach each fight scene. You will feel like a bad-ass in no time, and you might try to move in stop and start motions for a few minutes after returning to the real world…
Quill
Quill, which every Touch owner will get for free, is nothing short of spectacular. I thought initially that there would be a lot of overlap between Oculus Medium and Quill (both art-focused in-house projects from Oculus), but Quill does seem to firmly own its own style—Medium is to clay as Quill is to sketching. Quill also feels like a substantial artist’s tool, even more so than Medium, with powerful layer system, brush styles and opacities, exporting, and capturing functionality.
Sketching is an extremely accessible medium, and that’s recreated in Quill. But just like the same piece of paper and pencil can make a stick figure or a detailed human body, in the right hands, Quill can do amazing things. One of the pre-loaded scenes is jaw-dropping in it’s style, skill, and complexity. It might be the first VR art masterpiece.
Robo Recall
Robo Recall is another Touch exclusive that will launch for free in 2017. Although we’ve only had a chance to play a demo version (not available to the public), we absolutely can’t wait to get our hands on the full thing. The combination of crisp, UE4 powered graphics with rich visual and audio design makes this game a blast. There’s awesome weapons to wield—which feel especially great with Touch’s ergonomics—and tons of action to make for yourself amidst the highly interactive enemies.
Disclosure: Oculus provided Road to VR with a Touch for review.
