everybody's going from tested welcome back to projections where this week I'm
gonna be reviewing the latest game from insomniac games it's the big triple a VR
tidal storm land waiting for this for so long now
insomniac has a lot experience in the VR space they previously made edge of
nowhere as well as the unspoken which is one of the first games make use of hand
presence and the oculus touch controllers when storm land is unique in
that it's one of the first big open-world
narrative-driven games for virtual reality now the idea behind storm line
is that you're a robot and you and other robots are on this alien planet in the
far future humans have explored the planet they've set up research base and
outposts but it's even after the humans have left there are no humans in the
game so you and the other fellow research robots contend with an
antagonist the mysterious tempest and it's really your job to kind of figure
out what happened rescue the other robots and explore the storm land it's
an open world game but it's not open world in the same way that a Zelda
breath of the wild would be or a Fallout game would be it's actually more akin to
a winwaker game so the way the world the map is laid out is that you start off on
the ground level of the storm lab you're on the planet's surface there is a main
hub of operations and you take essentially what's in like an elevator
space elevator that goes up into the atmosphere to reach the different three
or four different straw to the levels of the storm land and each of those become
the open world areas that you explore now each of these levels each of these
strata are made up by a series of islands it's not one continuous space
these islands are separated not by wire but by clouds and so getting around this
open world is really interesting there are two main types of locomotion that I
think they do really well in this game one there's traversing those between
those islands which is a combination of running around with free locomotion and
grappling or climbing on really any structure whether it's a rock or a tree
or a human outpost space if you can see it you can probably get there there's
also then the cloud surfing and that's how you get between the islands
themselves the game calls it slipstreaming this is a really
interesting locomotion mechanic for VR because once you jump off of an island
onto the clouds you basically put your hands out in a Superman pose and you
glide and surf on the clouds themselves it's really fun and even when you're
doing the surfing there are things to do you're evading some obstacles you're in
activate speed burst or you can unlock the ability to launch yourself hundreds
of meters into the air to land on one of those islands or on a tempest platform
where you complete your mission I found the game to be incredibly freeing and
very very comfortable I think it's one of the Stormlands biggest achievements
and that they get this open-world exploration locomotion right there are a
lot of locomotion settings in a comfort settings so that even though you're
using that thumb stick and using free locomotion to walk around you can change
your vignetting you can change distance of the HUD from your face and I found it
super comfortable almost no learning curve to get around the world so what is
there to do in the world of storm land and what do these missions and tale as
part of the exploration you're not only looking for loot like containers full of
weapons or health packs but you're also harvesting parts of the world as well
all of the fauna and foliage you can shoot your beam into these metallic
elements that then harvest alloy and different types of alloy then lets you
get redeemed for different parts that you can upgrade to or ammo or new
weapons or you can actually grab plans so you can study there are tons of
different plans and in that world and some of them you can grab and harvest as
well it's really fun to go around finding different trees grabbing the
fruit squeezing them and then harvesting them so that you can get the mana
essentially to upgrade your robot chassis so as you're finding loot and
collecting these resources in the world you get to upgrade your body and a
couple of different things that you get to develop in terms of your character
your robot your chassis itself has a bunch of different upgrade points so
once you collect enough of these Aon buds or mana
you go to an upgrade station and you can select points of your body where you can
upgrade things like the ability to collect more mana or new locomotion
mechanics like the ability to vote yourself off of the storm land off of
the clouds while your slipstreaming or doing things like a double trump or
increasing ammo capacity or retrieving health from enemies as you fight them
lots of different upgrades that so much so that you can't unlock them all with
one play session through the campaign you have to really play it over and over
again to explore all the different avenues for those upgrades also
upgradable are the weapons and there's a pretty good weapon selection here
there's our standard SMG there's a carbine shotgun sniper rifle grenade
launcher and minigun and each of these weapons have 5 tiers of upgrade ability
which you can discover in the world as you're progressing through the campaign
and your engagements or you can then unlock by buying the blueprints the
weapons themselves are incredibly animated they're gorgeous and they
handle really well there are two hands for most of the weapons
that's a stabilize your aim and the animation that happens when you grip
them with one hand or two hand is really cool as well as the ability to tear
weapons apart once you've used up the ammo the weapons themselves don't wear
down but if you find you know SMG on the ground and has no animal you can tear it
apart you get its alloy or you get the ammo refilled to the current weapons
that you have holstered on your body I thought there could be a little bit more
variety in terms of the weapon design they're just basically different skins
when you go from a level 1 SMG to a level 5 SMG but I thought there might be
opportunities for them to vary them in terms of maybe ammo capacity or
upgradable damage or more variety and firing rate or accuracy or cooldown to
make it a little bit more like a Borderlands style a variety and
variability in the weapons that you find in the world
well the interaction design not only with the weapons but also with the world
that's where I think the game really shines the two-handed grips the aiming
down the scope tearing the weapons apart all that feels great and it's not easy
in VR for developers to get that stuff to feel right if when you walk up to a
crate and you see a handle and you put your a robot hand on it the way it
latches on and then way you can turn these handles and tear
apart containers to find new weapons all that just feels natural there's no
button pressing to unlock these things to open canisters it's made for VR and
it feels like it takes advantage of hand presence and your physical body presence
in VR to the combat with enemies I found also to be really fun and also took
advantage of the freedom to climb vault and hover almost everywhere that allows
for fun exploration and the ability to approach these enemy encounters from any
vantage point so you might turn on your scanner as you land on the island see a
group of enemies on a base or on a platform and you can attack them
literally from any direction so many times I would find myself climbing up a
platform and hiding on the underside of the platform seeing the highlighted
enemies and then crawling us to where they're not looking when they're
following their roots and then ambushing them or jumping in you know guns blazing
much like a robot Rambo I mentioned earlier there is a scanner review you
stopped the temple of your head and it activates this augmented HUD which
highlights in the world the resources and the fruit that you can harvest the
alloy as well as the enemies that you see them as these bright outlines behind
platforms behind mountain behind fauna and I thought that made the combat a
little bit too easy I wish there was a design ability or the enemy's ability to
disrupt your scanner view because having it turned on for most of the game and
you can have it on for the game there's no cooldown for any of that just let me
run through the game know where every enemy was and never feel surprised by
any of the the combat encounters they I have the enemies isn't particularly
smart or tactical they go along their predetermined routes and they can
overwhelm you with firepower or their shields but I found it too easy at times
to come in with guns blazing with two shotguns out and with the ability if I
turned on the ability to steal health from them as I'm firing with them I
could go through almost any encounter without thinking too much about it
almost wish the enemies had the ability to nerf
you to tone down your abilities whether that's ability to climb anywhere or your
scanning ability to make it more difficult or a little more challenging
most of the challenge in the combat came from running out of ammo which is you
know fine as a game design decision for balance but I think they could have gone
a little bit further I've read that insomniac had previously designed the
game so that you couldn't climb every single obstacle or every single object
in the world there were just these color-coded objects that were designated
as the ones you could actually climb and and I'm happy that they did enable the
ability for you to climb and Colne and grapple onto anything I think that makes
traveling around the world a lot more fun but I also think that makes the
combat a little bit too almost too open in a way and that the enemies aren't
smart enough to adapt to that and they and you're a little bit overpowered in
these engagements I felt like the encounters would be thrilling you know
just in the sheer amount of action and explosions the animations again look
incredible and the effects look great but it's never hugely rewarding the same
way that like a rec room quest would be so difficult that I would have to play
it you know a dozen times and really really plan out every single enemy and
encounter and firefight to make it feel like I really earned that victory when
you're not in combat you do have a lot of time to really explore the world and
appreciate the gorgeous world building they did here I mean the production
design on storm Land is incredible the animations with the NPC robot to
encounter there's a lot of dialogue a lot of personality in those robots it's
so cool even looking at your own body and moving around this is some of the
best animation and best production design best graphics of almost any VR
game I've played the scope and scale the world I think is sufficiently massive I
think do you think there could be you know more islands to explore in this
world but there is plenty of stuff to discover there are these remnants of the
human presence in that planet on the storm land that you do uncover things
that don't often make sense I almost give it a little
bit of a of a Twilight Zone or a lost vibe to it not all of this is explained
at least in the campaign the game is a little bit of a system hog
there are higher system requirements then on other VR games and it's best
played right now on the rift s not just the standard oculus rift I can't wait to
see how this looks though over oculus link on the higher resolution of the
oculus quest and I think it does work with a little bit of patching with
revive if you have a steam VR system and want to try it on that - I'm really
curious how this looks like on a valve index I haven't just haven't had the
opportunity to play it on that yet the campaign is a little bit shorter than I
expected it's about three and a half hours it really feels like a long
tutorial that gets you acclimated to the rules of the world and combat as you
elevate on the strata in the storm land I kind of wish it was longer you know I
felt like by the end of it I was asking myself is this it is that the campaign
but then at when you finish the campaign you unlock then what's called the
cycling world the game actually has this rogue light element in that you're going
through parts of this campaign over and over again and they reset it every week
the same four layers of the storm land get reset on Tuesdays all the strata
will have the same kind of flavor and visual design but the placement of the
islands will be different and the missions will be mixed up also reset
will be your upgrade so you do start back at zero every time you have your
experience and you get a chance to complete and get to the end of the the
terminus in your play session then when it resets all the enemies will be a
little bit more difficult and you'll have elevated to the next level
the end of the these instances is called the terminus it's this top level and I
found that to be almost a little bit and climactic as well there's no giant big
boss battle and you get glimpses of the tempest military on that level I wish
they explored further from drop ships and other aerial structures I really
wanted to be able to get to but just a little more decor than explorable
environments I do think there's a little bit of missed opportunity in the
campaign for more Borderlands style loot variability and weapons shops to make
those repeated play sessions more hi Singh I want to be able to not just
get the level 5 shotgun and level 5 carbine which I know that might go to
weapons but fine you know some obscure weapon or some some obscure variant that
took me several play sessions to find that that becomes my favorite weapon of
the game I never ended up finding the weapons being the reason on replaying
storm land it's really just getting more difficult enemies now you can complete
storm land and campaign by yourself that's an entire game is playable just
as a solo adventure but I found the most fun playing storm land an in multiplayer
and played with Jeremy through the campaign and also through an instance
one week of the cycling world and originally insomniac had talked about
three player multiplayer but I think toning it down to two players feels
right and feels balanced because even with just two players the game and the
dig up again feeling almost a little bit too easy to get through never really
felt that it was more challenging with two players or that we got increased
number of combat encounters things I do think would have made being - playing
with two players a little more fun and AI again wasn't challenging enough to
really push the limits of of co-op assaults there's great spatial audio in
the game so when you have your another person that you're playing with and you
can just drop into their middle of their game session you can get a great sense
of where they are and you can do coordinated attacks that's still fun or
you can divvy up the exploration you know many times Jeremy I would drop into
a strata and send go on opposite paths and we can be able to communicate and
it's really easy to bring up the multiplayer menu and click warp and
teleport immediately to where the other player is to join in and on one of their
bits of action you can even do that while they're in the slipstream which is
quite fun
oh god that's enemies fun going through storm land playing the campaign like I
said one week of that cycling world and it really proves the case that VR can be
suitable for an open-world game design you know you can have interesting
locomotion mechanics that lets you traverse the world quickly and also with
the amount of detail where you feel like you are interacting with a real space
that was some of the best part about storming was climbing up to the top of a
mountain and just enjoying the Vista and seeing how far you can look I see that
ship over there maybe I'm trying to vault and climb out of that ship that
stuff was awesome and I really appreciate the fine tuning of the
interaction models and insomnia I've had to do to make it feel right as well make
you feel like you really aren't embodying this ultra cool powerful robot
with weapons holster and your back and your hips with objects that you can grab
in the world and interact with that isn't easy to get right in VR I think
they spent so much of their time getting that part right the thing I feel like
I'm missing in storm Land is depth the game the campaign at least is a little
bit short and I think they're banking on the replayability in the future which at
this point we're just a little bit unsure of you know the game at week one
you're gonna get eight hours of solid gameplay but at the end of week 10 I
don't know people gonna be playing this over and over again the same way that
people are still making the way through Asgard's wrath 40-hour single-player
narrative so line is out now and I think will be really interesting once the
oculus link comes out to see how that looks on the quests and if you google
around you can find ways to play it and steam VR as well but thanks for watching
projections this week and let us know what you think about store manager
playing it on your system and we back next time with more coverage see you
that you