Stormland, the upcoming single player adventure from Insomniac Games and Oculus, came to PAX West this past weekend where the public got a chance to go hands-on with the open world game for the first time.
The demo, presented by Dutch YouTubers Cas and Chary, takes you through a number of mission styles as part of the tutorial. Basic missions include collecting alloy to build android upgrades, building your first weapon, collecting fruit for energy, and shooting down the patches of flying drones, and even a few land-based robots that threaten you as you hop from island to island.
The game’s locomotion scheme includes smooth-forward walking, climbing, gliding, and gliding out over cloudy ‘slip streams’, which accelerate you from one rocky outcrop to another. Everything in the game appears to be climbable, making it an exercise in getting a good vertical vantage point not only so you can complete missions like finding high-up positioning beacons, but also so you scope out the area and glide from spot to spot.
The environment appears to be partially destructible, with fallen enemies and exploded barrels offering up their own resources which are automatically collected once you get near them. We haven’t seen much of the crafting system yet, although Insomniac has maintained it’s a fairly important part of the game.
Stormland seems to offer both single-handed and two-handed weapon grip styles, and also provides a hand-held shield. We only get to see two real weapon types before the demo ends with a pretty nasty-looking android, the optional single/two-handed SMG and an explosive grenade, all of which can be holstered to your body.
The Stormland PAX demo certainly looks like the highly polished, open world experience we were hoping for, which is slated to release exclusively on Oculus Rift at some point in 2019.