Today I have been able to try in preview Radial-G: Proteus, a racing game for the Oculus Quest. This name is surely not new for you, since Radial-G: Racing Revolved has been one of the first games for the Oculus Rift CV1. Now, Tammeka Games is back at it, and with the help of the publisher Things3D is releasing a refresh of this game for the popular Oculus Quest. But… how is it? Let me tell you my impressions after my hands-on with the game (but notice: I have tried a preview of the game, the final released version may differ from it).
Gameplay
Radial-G: Proteus is a racing game. But you don’t race driving a F1 or NASCAR car, but a spaceship. The game is all set in the outer space, and you have to race on some tubular 3D tracks. Notice that you don’t race inside the “tube”, but on its outer surface, usually against 2-5 opponents.
The cool stuff of this setting is that the racing becomes a 3D one: you don’t just race going forward, but you can also move laterally along the cylindrical surface of the track, hoping to find some power-ups or some speed boosts. The tracks of course are not linear, but they are all twisted in 3D, and to make things more interesting, there are some moments when the track makes you switch gravity, so you are racing on the floor and some instants after, you find yourself on the ceiling. There are also parts of the track where there are jumps, that you have to take being careful of not falling of the track and get lost in the outer space. As you can see, it is a pretty crazy racing game.
Along the track you may find some green boosters that will increase your speed and some infamous moving red walls that will stop you. Of course you will have to go on all the green ones and avoid the red obstacles. But that won’t always be easy, consider that many red walls move horizontally and so you will have to be careful in dodging them.
The purpose of the game is winning the race, of course. There are different kind of races that add variation to the game: in one you have to win a mini-tournament of 3 races, in another one you have just one very short lap and you have to be the fastest of your group, in another one there are weapons and you can shoot your opponents (and avoid their attacks), and so on. This is cool because it tries to keep the challenge fresh at every level.
But honestly, the game feels pretty monotonous the same. I liked a lot racing on these tubular tracks in the outer space, also because sometimes you really reach crazy speeds in this game. It is pretty cool. But the game seems more or less always the same at every level (yeah, more or less like in all racing games) and this is in my opinion its biggest limit. You have always to run, search green arrows and avoid red barriers and that’s it. Maybe more variation to the actual gameplay would be welcome. Also the tracks appear more or less similar one to the other… different settings and graphical styles would have been better.
The gameplay may be frustrating at times, especially because sometimes a red barrier or a jump happens when you can’t see them in time, but most of the time, I was ok with its difficulty.
Radial-G: Proteus offers different kinds of play modes: the user can play in carreer mode, or he can just play a fast race. The more he wins single player campaigns, the more he unlocks new cool ships. The game also has global leaderboards and achievements to encourage players to come back every day.
Graphics
Radial-G: Proteus doesn’t feature realistic graphics. Tammeka chose a graphical style that seems taken from a comic or an anime. This lets them offer graphics that can run easily on a low-power device like the Oculus Quest.
I have not been amazed by the graphics of this game. I’m not saying they are bad, but I think they could have been refined a little more... they appear a bit rough.
Audio
The soundtracks of this game are pretty cool and they put me in the right mood to play the game.
Input
The game features two input modes. I’ve always stick to the standard one, that just requires you to press the index trigger of the right hand to throttle and to steer by using the thumbstick on your left hand. The A button lets you activate the nitro to boost a bit, while the B button is used in the combat levels to shoot with your current weapon.
The input schema works quite well. The only critic is that I found myself pressing the index trigger 100% of my time, and that made my index finger a bit tired.
Comfort
This game makes you run in VR at insane speeds, and also rotate continuously, so you may think it is a vomit machine. Actually, I haven’t felt any nauseous while playing it, mostly because there was the cockpit of the spaceship that was always fixed in my visuals all around me (a fixed frame of reference is able to save you from motion sickness, in case you didn’t know). I guess that some very sensitive people may not play it, but if you have a bit of VR legs, you can play this game safely.
UX
UX is another thing I haven’t loved about the game. First of all, the game is not self-explanatory at all, but it doesn’t start an automatic tutorial when you begin playing it. This meant that at the beginning I had no idea I could use the A button to boost my ship, and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t win a single race. If you play this game, my suggestion is: watch the tutorial first.
Then I found the whole visual interface always too little, with the writings always using little fonts. The UI of the spaceship was hard to understand until I read the tutorial as well. I think the game should improve a lot on this side.
Final impressions
I enjoyed my time playing the preview of Radial-G: Proteus. I especially loved the craze of running at high speeds on twisted tubular paths in the outer space while listening to music. That was pretty cool. But I think the game should add more variation to its gameplay to look less monotonous on the long run. Also the UX and the graphics should be improved.
If you are interested in racing games, I advise you to give it a look. It will launch in the Oculus Store on December, 17th!