Back in May, I ordered an Oculus Rift Dev kit. I’ve been excited about it for a while and held out as long as I could, but the excitement finally got to me and forced a purchase. I haven’t done any actual development with it (a three-month Unity Pro trial just isn’t enough time), but I’ve been playing a few games and enjoying a few tech demos. I stopped using it for a few weeks because, honestly, I was a little disappointed. I couldn’t find any games that were fun to play, well implemented, and didn’t immediately make me nauseous. I’ve been keeping up with games that introduce support, however, and during my browsing of riftenabled.com, I stumbled on a Steam game that recently started an Oculus Rift beta: Lunar Flight.
My friends know I’ve been addicted to Kerbal Space Program for a while now, so when I saw Lunar Flight was a fancy lunar lander simulator, I was immediately interested. (The words “lunar” and “flight” also caught my attention.) I didn’t already own the game, so I decided to do some investigating. After watching a few YouTube videos of Oculus Rift gameplay, and seeing a few comments saying it was the best Oculus Rift game people have played – and more importantly that it caused no nausea – I decided to give it a try. I was not disappointed.
The forum comments were right: Lunar Flight has amazing Oculus Rift support. With the headset on, it’s like you’re in a virtual lander cockpit. You can even see your shoulders when looking left and right, or your feet when looking down. If you look down at your lap, you can even see hands holding an Xbox 360 controller, so the immersion was complete. As you look around the cockpit, there are several displays and buttons you can interact with. When you look at something you can interact with, a context arrow appears and points at that item. When you press the context button on the controller (Y), you press that button or toggle that screen – a simple and elegant solution to the myriad of controls around you.
The game looks fantastic, and looking out the cockpit gives you a nice view of the gray lunar landscape. It’s important that it looks good – you end up seeing a lot of it. But the attractive landscape is just the backdrop to the immersion you feel as you guide your lander from base to base, transporting cargo or surveying the area. There’s a display above you that shows (by default) your destination along your velocity vector. It feels fantastic when I get close to a landing pad and use that monitor to line up my landing, then glance down at my fuel meter, out the window to make sure nothing is getting too close, then back at that monitor to make any other adjustments. It’s hard to describe… It just feels right. I know I’m sitting in a dark room with a weird HMD on my face, but it feels like I’m sitting in a lunar lander controlling it’s decent, checking my thrust-to-weight ratios, checking my fuel, navigating from place to place… Because I am. It’s like nothing I’ve played before and finally makes the Oculus Rift seem like the amazing piece of technology that it is.
So after weeks of doing nothing with my fancy VR headset, I finally have a game I play nightly and enjoy immensely. Hopefully I’ll find more in the future, and I hope some developers out there are paying attention to the games that do VR right.