While we were hoping to bring you a full Virtual Virtual Reality 2 review today, the game unfortunately has a range of technical issues that have prevented us from finishing it. We’re going to delay our full review and recommend that anyone interested in buying the game waits to hear more about what the developers plan to do to fix things.
Virtual Virtual Reality 2 is, frankly, a one-of-a-kind VR game. This unassuming cartoonish adventure actually pushes the boundaries of VR game design in very interesting ways. Unfortunately the game just isn’t ready for prime time, despite releasing today.
Throughout hours of playtime I consistently ran into issues that at best detracted from the experience and at worst halted forward progress. In many cases I found that Virtual Virtual Reality 2 would get itself into a stuck state where I had to reload to my most recent save in order to reset things well enough that the game could continue.
Issues ranged from character dialog overlapping or becoming muted, important instructions being read quietly or not at all, various scripting problems where key events in the game wouldn’t trigger, and several environmental glitches that blocked objectives from being completed or caused me to skip large sections of the game while missing important objectives required to continue.
On top of those issues, the game also tended to crash if the headset (Quest 2 in this case) was suspended, resetting me to a prior checkpoint each time I wanted to return to it.
This is all a shame because, just like its predecessor, Virtual Virtual Reality 2 is clearly something quite special. Its inventive design sees players (and companions) living inside of a cartoonish mech that itself exists in a much larger world. You can seamlessly switch perspectives between the tiny person in the mech and the mech itself, which shifts your scale as you watch the mech’s arms become ‘your’ arms.
When you’re back inside the mech you can even open up a hatch on the shoulder to step outside on the balcony, revealing the giant world around you. The changes in scale are so seamless that it’s actually difficult to tell if there’s some trickery involved, or if you really are a tiny character navigating a mech around a much larger world.
Beyond this innovative framework, Virtual Virtual Reality 2 also takes risks with VR locomotion that many developers purposefully avoid (and seemingly with quite a bit of success). We’ll cover that more in-depth in our full review.
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It’s abnormal for us (and we don’t intend to make it a habit) to delay a review so that a broken game can be fixed. But we didn’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Virtual Virtual Reality 2 is impressively ambitious and wildly creative; its underlying design is clearly competent, even if it hasn’t seen nearly enough quality assurance before launch.
Developer Tender Claws says it plans to issue a patch in two weeks to clear up some of the issues we’ve reported, at which point we’ll resume our playthrough and render a final verdict.
