Sprint Vector: first impressions review from the Oculus Free Weekend

Oculus is continuing its great initiative of free weekends and this weekend it is possible to play for free Sprint Vector. Sprint Vector is a racing game by Survios that when has been launched, received a lot of praise from the journalists, so I was really willing to give it a try. Now that I’ve been able to try it shortly for free, actually, I’m a bit disappointed. Let me tell you why.

Sprint Vector is a bit like Mario Kart, but without karts: you are a futuristic skater and you have to skate to the victory on every track that you play. You have to skate fast, but you have also to jump, collect power-ups and fire at opponents. Your only goal is winning: there are no other rules to follow. The idea is surely very nice, with Virtual Reality giving the game that sense of the immersion in the adrenaline of the race that we all know and that we all love.

And the realization of this idea, from a technical standpoint, it is very good. Some things that I liked have been:

• The graphics: very neat and with a fluo futuristic style that is very peculiar to this game;

• The big number of available tracks, everyone with a difficulty level (so, if you are a beginner, you have to start with easier tracks);
• The possibility to play in single player against AI bots, in multiplayer with your friends, in multiplayer with other people of the world. You are not forced to play in multiplayer only. I love this kind of freedom;

• The UI, that is a good mix of 2D and 3D elements;
• The tutorial: once you start, you have a tutorial explaining you every kind of action inside the game. The tutorial explains every action inside the game with a video and then lets you try immediately what you have just learned. This way you get to know very easily every possible movement inside the game. They have made an excellent tutorial;
• The idea: as I’ve told you, the idea of racing in VR in a futuristic way is surely interesting and adrenaline;
• The fitness: to skate you have basically to run in place, so the game can help you to stay fit inside virtual reality. Who has said that gaming makes people fat?
• The locomotion mechanic: you move in the game by make a physical movement in the real world and this completely avoids the motion sickness effect. I had absolutely no sickness while playing this game. Amazing!

You have surely got that we are talking about a high-quality game. So, why the hell have I told you that I’m disappointed?

Well, the reasons are mainly three.

The first one is that the game is damn tiring: to skate you have to swing your arms fast (the motion of the rest of the body doesn’t count). And the faster you swing, the faster you run in the game. This means that since I’m a competitive guy, I started swinging my arms like hell and in few minutes I started sweating and feeling arms strain. I can’t imagine myself playing two hours a day to this game… it’s ok to make some physical movement in VR, but this is too much. Furthermore, I think that the movement of just swinging the arms is unnatural and this doesn’t help physical health. Mabe a run-in-place movement would have been better: it is more natural and less tiresome. Or they could have given you a basic speed and sometimes you could have a big boost with the hands, so not to move your arms every second.

The second one is that the game mechanics are damn complicated: there are FOUR tutorials (basic, intermediate, advanced, power-ups) to teach you all the movements and actions you can perform inside the game. First of all, this is boring, because before starting playing, I had to spend something like 20 minutes doing tutorials (and I have just done two out of four!). Then it shows you how the game has too many actions. You can: skate, jump, turn, brake, fly in the air, climb, super-climb, fire, slide, etc… And all these actions have an associated gesture and/or a button press. It was very common for me, while playing, to say: “ok, now I have to jump: what the hell was the gesture??” and then I started pressing random buttons on the controllers because I couldn’t recall what was the one of the jump action. To get used to the controlling schema you need time. This is not a game that you open and then in 5 minutes, you can already start having fun. You need hours to master the controls. IMHO they should have selected maybe 3 actions: skate, jump, fire and make all the game around those ones. A short tutorial and then you could go on playing!

The third one is that even the maps are a bit complicated: I played the first introductory race against the AI bots 3 times and I always arrived in the last position. After the first seconds where I immediately got the lead, there was the first jump and things started becoming messy, with various possible different paths and a lot of obstacles in the way. Couldn’t the first track be more simple and linear? I finished that map at last position all the 3 times, continuously getting lost and confused about what to do. I also tried a multiplayer game against Max and other worldwide players and we performed in a disastrous way. We were in the last positions and then we got to a point in the track when there was a lava river that we had to surpass by jumping on rock platforms (do you remember arcade platform games? Something like that). This required a lot of control skills that were absolutely not suitable for beginners like us and so we got frustrated in being struck at that place. In the end, we aborted the game. So, until you get very skilled with the controls, the game is just a bunch of frustration.

The fourth reason (I know, I said that there were only three, but I lied) is that it has some bugs. During the multiplayer game, at a certain point, the game got crazy and started saying that I was outside the map boundaries and so I couldn’t play anymore, not even using the UI controls to return to the lobby. Thank you ALT+F4. Then, during one of the matches against the bots, I jumped and I was skyrocketed into the outer space, and I couldn’t go back playing either.

Now you get my point of view: the game is original, well made and funny. It’s an awesome VR game. But it is complicated, so it needs a lot of time to become good at it and so have fun. And it is also very tiring. If you have a lot of time to spend on learning a game and you need an excuse to get fit, then you may surely love it and I advise you to buy it. If you, instead, like me, already go to the gym and have very little free time so you want a game that takes you straight into the action, go for another game.

In any case, exploit this Oculus Rift free weekend and see if this game fits your needs by actually playing it!

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(Header image by Survios)