One of Oculus’ 30 titles coming to support their Touch motion controllers this year, Ripcoil from Sanzaru Games takes some heavy gameplay influences from the classic TRON disc battles but utilises motion controls to “Control your body and hands in a way that’s only possible with Touch.” Here are some gameplay snippets to give you an idea how it plays.
Although we still have no firm idea when we’re likely to see the Oculus Touch motion controllers launch, at E3 this year it feels very much as if Oculus are preparing for an imminent announcement. Back in March, Road to VR‘s Ben Lang met with the then head of Oculus Studios Jason Rubin who stated that “We will not launch it [Touch] until we feel we have that quality volume of games that justifies a launch, we’re not launching a dev kit.”
Ripcoil is a two player duelling title that puts opponents against eachother in a futuristic arena, requiring each player to score by throwing discs at their respective goals. The title uses Oculus Touch motion controls to let the player throw those discs is a seemingly naturalistic way, although it’s not clear from the short gameplay snippets released by Oculus just how nuanced those controls are. The players themselves are situated on floating motion platforms allowing them to block and catch an opponents throws before firing back their own salvo.
The gameplay is strongly reminiscent of the disc battles seen in cult classic Disney movie TRON (1982) and seemingly a running trend in VR development, with strong similarities between Ripcoil and CCP’s recently demo’d prototype Project Arena, shown at the company’s Fanfest event earlier in the year.
No firm release date for Ripcoil is yet available, but as stated above it seems as if Oculus are teeing up their launch lineup for when the Touch is released – so expect it to appear whenever that is announced.