Figuring out movement in VR was one of the first major challenges for the platform. Traditional analog stick controls didn’t quite work with the first-person perspective games that make up the majority of the platform’s library. Teleportation has largely been adopted as the solution, acting as a suitable workaround to avoid motion sickness, but Vindicta from Game Cooks offers a different solution.
Vindicta is a first-person VR shooter wherein you fight through a series of levels to shut down an evil corporation and its robot army. What makes Vindicta different is in how it handles movement. Rather than point a cursor and teleport around, you shake your arms to dash in whatever direction you’re looking in.
For the first minute or two it felt… weird. Having only played VR games that either used the teleportation method or stuck to a fixed perspective, feeling that sensation of movement while my body remained still really threw me off. I felt like I should be moving, but I also couldn’t lest I risk breaking the game. It never approached motion sickness, but it was a very strange feeling.
It faded quickly enough once I started moving around more. Vindicta requires you to really get into the action. Just running into a room and standing still shooting at enemy robots won’t do you much good. You have lean, maybe even side-step a bit, to avoid enemy fire. Seems like the kind of game that requires you to be active while playing. One person I watched play really got the hang of it, avoiding gunfire by ducking and twisting his body almost constantly. He could even move and shoot simultaneously with ease. Given the odds he was facing late into the factory level, that particular approach seemed like crucial to survival.
I, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. I could shoot enemy robots just fine, but I couldn’t quite adjust to moving around so much so quickly. It was always run into room, see enemy robots, stop, and start firing, when I should have been more evasive. Adjusting to that sort of activity with so little VR experience is tough, but with enough time, I could see myself adapting to it.
Given the speed and intensity of the action, Vindicta’s alternative movement solution makes sense. Teleportation and the like wouldn’t be fast enough, nor would it encourage the player to move their body around. If nothing else, it seems like a good blueprint for creating more traditional first-person shooters as opposed to the stationary wave-based shooters that make up a large portion of the VR library.
Vindicta is available now on Steam in Early Access.
