Early in development, Throttle Powah is a promising looking multiplayer racer with a VR locomotion mechanic which seems entirely unique and more than a little insane.
It’s refreshing to watch the still young virtual reality development community flourish, not least thanks to creators that are willing to throw caution to the wind and create things we’ve never seen before. Thanks to VR motion controllers, we’re seeing innovative ways to move around synthetic worlds on an almost weekly basis. But there’s been none recently that have made me smile more than Throttle Powah.
The game’s at an extremely early stage in development, but its core mechanic is in place. In short, your in-game avatar possesses two powered unicycles for arms and its with these you speed your way around the physics defying ‘tracks’. Tilt your virtual arms to steer and launch yourself into the air by lowering your arms and perhaps add a little sideways flick to freestyle some stunts while you’re at it.
The developer’s Steam and Facebook pages state an early version of the title is available for download right now, however it seems to be currently AWOL from Itch.IO as of now. However, it is stated that the game has now received a Greenlight from the Steam community and that a new version of the game will appear in the next few days.
Clearly Throttle Powah is at a pre-alpha stage right now, with little to no structured gameplay in place, but the central gameplay mechanic seems like solid, original and genuinely fun idea and, frankly, I wanted to share with Road to VR readers. The game seems to channel the essence of Geoff Crammond’s 8/16 bit classic Stunt Car Racer with perhaps a dash of the cult SNES classic Uniracers and Tony Hawks thrown in for good measure.
Follow along with Throttle Powah‘s development at their Steam page here, or via their Facebook page here.