Reach is one of the coolest VR games I’ve played in a long time. Chasing the high of classic cinematic action games like Tomb Raider or Uncharted, I had a blast climbing ledges, jumping between buildings, and popping enemies while dual-wielding pistols in NDreams’ latest. With dynamic movement and a surprisingly accurate sense of full-body awareness, I can’t wait to see more from this one, even if I got a little dizzy jumping as I platformed my way through the first level.
VR games often need to tow a delicate balance. Moving in a 3D space with stick-based movement is a surefire way to cause motion sickness for a lot of players, so a majority of VR games are designed in a way that takes both point-and-teleport-based movement and stick-based movement into account. But after a demo that featured a lot of running, jumping, and platforming, I’m pleased to say that I didn’t feel that creeping, bottom-of-the-stomach sensation I sometimes feel in VR.
A majority of the demo I played focused on platforming; I scaled up walls and grabbed onto ledges like in The Climb or Horizon: Call of the Mountain. Combined with sprinting, jumping, and even jumping between holds while climbing, the movement here felt surprisingly smooth and dynamic. Before long, I felt like an acrobatic action star pulling off the kinds of stunts only Tom Cruise could accomplish. Multiple times in my demo, I nearly bungled a jump but managed to snag a ledge in the nick of time, swinging in in a way that felt far more real and natural than I could’ve imagined in VR.
Moreso than any kind of cool action setpiece or stealth encounter, this kind of little detail – snagging a ledge just in time, saving myself from falling to certain doom – helps break free from the often on-rails feeling VR games can have. In sections where I wasn’t so lucky and wound up replaying a few times, I found myself skipping jumps and getting from point A to B in new ways each time. I love finding ways to maximize the tools in my toolkit to improve my movement in any game I play, but that kind of drive is rarely satisfied in VR. Reach answered that question in spades.
Exploring Reach’s first level wasn’t all running and climbing, though. I wound up in a handful of shootouts with generic militia guys as I made my way to rescue some hostages. There’s a bow with unlimited ammo strapped to your shoulder. With just a reach over your shoulder, you can snipe away at enemies from a safe distance before climbing, jumping, or running to where you need to go. While the section I saw didn’t really focus on stealth, I did run guns-blazing into what was probably supposed to be a stealth segment set in an office space.
There seemed to be some kind of enemy alert system, though by the time I realized what that little bubble above my targets’ heads meant, the arrow destined for my last enemy’s chest cavity had whistled off my bowstring. After that, there were a few more shootouts, though they didn’t task me with navigating an enclosed space in quite the same way. Instead, they took the shape of more traditional shooting gallery-style encounters like you’d find in plenty of other VR games with guns. Bad guys popped out of shutters and stood on balconies, with conveniently placed pistols littering the level for me to grab and unload.
These were considerably less fun and interesting than that stealth segment. As anyone who’s spent even a little time in VR will tell you, plenty of VR games make their bones in these shooting galleries – they have for nearly a decade at this point. So going from a more open, interactive design to a handful of moments I’d already seen before in a handful of other VR shooters was pretty disappointing. But after I cleared them, I went right back to platforming, exploring the very ledges my victims fell off of.
After one last shootout, things escalated. A helicopter started firing at me as I clambered my way to safety after a truck barreled through and propped open a gate, letting me scurry up a high wall. This little extra jolt of danger and tension, with walls exploding and ceilings collapsing behind me as the helicopter closed in on my location set off a last-ditch moment of platforming madness.
Blazing through Reach’s first level was the most fun I’ve had in VR in months, capped off with a charming way to end a demo like this. I can’t wait to see the rest of what NDreams cooks up when it eventually releases sometime later this year on Meta Quest 3, PlayStation VR2, and SteamVR.
