The Makings Of A Brilliant Virtual Reality RTS

It’s funny how much more important defending your base is when you’re standing in the middle of it. Cosmic Trip for the HTC Vive uses virtual reality to deliver a intimate perspective on real-time strategy.

Constructing buildings, harvesting resources, deploying units and defending territory are central elements of real-time strategy. Cosmic Trip has all of that, only instead of gazing down on the action from above, the player is in the thick of it.

Robots swarm about, gathering crystals, repairing buildings and defending territory. Building and creating troops are multi-step actions requiring the insertion of batteries and data discs. And when the enemy arrives, the player’s manipulation tool doubles as a spinning disc projectile weapon that feels like it’s straight out of a Ratchet & Clank game.

Instead of sitting and clicking, the player stands and turns and shifts from location to location. It’s enough to make a traditional real-time strategy player get pretty winded, as demonstrated in the video above. I don’t stand much. I’m getting better.

An early access game, Cosmic Trip still needs a lot of work. It only has one basic wave-based game mode, most of the buildings and bots are marked as “coming soon” and there are elements mentioned in the game that just aren’t there, like capturing towers.

Developer Funktronic Labs is using early access to try and build a player base of real-time strategy game fans to help shape what the virtual reality version of the genre will ultimately become. The full real-time strategy game mode will be released soon. Hopefully by then standing for long periods won’t make me die.