The Oculus Rift VR headset is officially out this week, and there are a bunch of games to play on it. One of the most well-known is the outer-space dogfighting game EVE: Valkyrie, which is about as impressive a technical showpiece for virtual reality as I’ve seen.
Here’s a video of me playing a round (and actually doing pretty well!):
What It Is: Valkyrie casts you as a clone pilot who controls space fighters through a VR apparatus. As you play, Katee “Starbuck” Sackhoff will occasionally give you directives or yell at you for making mistakes. So, basically true to life. There are only a few maps and only a few modes, and there’s no real “story” mode. The meat of the game is in deathmatch, which you can play solo or with teammates, against bots or against other players. I play with a flight stick and throttle, but you can also just play with a regular controller.
I’ll be posting a series of short videos like this one to give an idea of how these VR games work. For more thoughts on the Oculus Rift itself, check out my full write-up.
Comments
8 responses to “VR Game At A Glance: Space Dogfighting In EVE: Valkyrie”
Must not impulse buy…
Can’t really impulse buy anymore, next available shipping is July 2016
impulse order?
I’m confused by the Store for EVE: Valkyrie, I was on the beta and have a DK2, the order page says you have to have a CV1 now to be able to order or play??
you can buy it on the home store for 59.99 it plays with DK2 apparently
The oculus store currently works (and works FLAWLESSLY) with the DK2, but there are constant warnings saying “Your device is unsupported”, so it will work for now, but expect that to change. They may drop support with a later update (though you should be good for a few months at least), just keep that in mind that anything you buy in that store, likely won’t work elsewhere, and Vive support in the Oculus marketplace isn’t guaranteed yet.
If you have Elite Dangerous in steam btw, you can just start Elite Dangerous, and it’ll start up the Rift DK2 HMD hook in, and it works smoothly (better than SteamVR I think, but whether thats SteamVR or the new 1.3 Async timewarp stuff, who knows).
I really want someone to make a decent Battlestar game, with a huge offline campaign. I’d buy whatever headset supported that…
Have the VR games got an option for Picture in Picture of say….yourself sitting there in your room so you can keep abreast of your local space?
Could be integrated into a hud easy enough.