Rezzil Player 22 Review: Learn Sports, Stay Fit In VR!

Today Rezzil has just launched on the Oculus Quest Store “Player 22”, a VR experience meant to make people stay fit at home with training sessions inspired by the ones that professional sports athletes follow. How is it good? Discover it in today’s review!

Player 22

Rezzil is a company that works on training professional athletes using Virtual Reality. I know its people since a while and I have always appreciated their work, but I could only see it through videos since their applications were meant for the professional market and usually required external props or hardware (e.g. Vive Trackers). But now it has also decided to enter the consumer market with an application called Player 22, whose purpose is teaching some basic skills of various sports to everyone. The vision is to take the training of the professional athletes into the home of every VR user so that to offer high-quality fitness sessions, that can not only make the player sweat but also improve some of his/her performances (e.g. reaction time, vision, etc…)

Player 22 has just launched today, but thanks to my friend Adam Dickinson, one of the cofounders of Rezzil, I’ve been able to test the application for some weeks, and I can tell you that it is pretty interesting. Let me explain to you why.

Gameplay

Once you open Rezzil, you are shown the main menu that asks you what you want to do, and in particular, it lets you choose if starting a new training session or a new gaming session. I can say that the difference between the two is very blurred since both are meant to teach you some sport skills through gamification. Gaming sessions are a bit more game-y, and training sessions are more meant as real training, but they are pretty similar in the end.

I have been able to try three different training modes:

• Headers. It is a mode all about learning how to properly use your head to hit the ball in football (soccer). A ball is launched towards you, and you have to hit it with your head to make it enter into some circular targets that are some meters in front of you. In the beginning, it is pretty easy, but the more you go on, the more the levels become complicated and challenging (for instance, the ball starts being colored, and it can enter only in targets with its same colors; the targets get smaller and smaller; and so on);

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• Hoops vision. It is a training inspired by basketball, that makes you do some cardio while also increasing your gaming vision. There is a musical soundtrack, and you see some small circles coming towards you from a front rail and you have to touch them with the basketball you have in your hands. It’s a bit a rhythm game like Synth Riders. Sometimes you see a colored player in the periphery of your vision and you have to touch the targets that come towards you that have the same color;

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• Reaction Wall. This game mode is meant to improve your reaction times. You have a grid of lights in front of you, and only one is lit at a time, and you have to touch it: when you touch it, that lights turns off and another random one turns on, and you have to touch it. And you go on like this, trying to always touch the lit light, trying to be very fast in touching the light as soon as it turns on.

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The only available game at the time is:

• Blockz. This is a game inspired by tennis: you have a racket in your hand, and some flying robots shoot balls at you. You have to hit the balls with the racket to make them destroy some big blocks that you have 10m in front of you.

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As you can see, every training or gaming session is heavily inspired by a different sport and can act as a training session for that sport. This is one of the features I have appreciated the most of Player 22: I love sport and having the possibility of playing some sports I like inside virtual reality, or even just perform a training session inspired by a real sport, makes me pretty excited. I prefer to play a game inspired by soccer than one without a sports theme, even if the gameplay of the two games is similar.

What is confusing, in my opinion, is that all these game modes in Player 22 are very different one from the other. For instance, Headers acts as real training for headers in soccer: the tutorial teaches you what pose you should have to hit a ball with your head, and what movements you should perform to hit it in the best way possible. I found it overly cool, because as a football fan (I’m still happy for Italy winning at Euro 2020!) I loved that the game taught me how professional players hit the ball with their heads. I felt a bit like a pro. But Hoops Vision instead is a game that while it is theoretically inspired by basketball, in reality, basket is just used to give the mood to the game… the game is just about circles that go towards you and you have to touch them in time… and while this is a very good cardio session, if instead of the basketball you had in your hands a potato, it would have been the same game. The movement you perform are useful, but you are not learning some skills strongly related to basketball. Reaction Wall is very generic, it is not inspired by any sport at all. What I am saying is that Headers is very specific in teaching you a sport, while Hoops Vision and Reaction Wall seems more suited for standard fitness sessions, and this difference is a bit weird.

The differences are present also in how the games are provided: Headers is a game made with challenging levels, that make you become always more skilled in using your head. It has a learning path you have to follow. Hoops Vision and Reaction Wall don’t have levels instead, but you can customize your training session by setting a duration and some modifiers to customize your training (e.g. the first error you make is game over). I found this weird as well: I would have preferred more coherence in how the training modes have been designed.

I would also have preferred a bit more guidance on how to perform my training: considering that there are many training modes… what should I do? Use a different one every day? Start with one as a warmup and then go to another one? What is the right mix? In the end, I created my own training session, using Hoops Vision as a cardio warmup, then some Reaction Wall to improve my reflexes and in the end some Headers to play a bit of soccer. But I don’t know if it is the correct approach. This would also be helpful to improve the safety of the player: I noticed that if I start directly with a Headers session my neck can hurt, since it makes me move my head in a fast way. I have so learned to perform a warmup by myself. It would be good if the game could offer it itself.

What I can say is that instead, individually, all the training sessions are very good. The Blockz game never truly clicked with me, but I’ve enjoyed all the training sessions. Every one of them has a long tutorial (maybe a bit too long) that teaches everything you should know about the game and also that teaches you what are the correct movements to perform. For Headers, it taught me the correct body pose I should have not only for the game, but also for real football matches. After I performed the tutorial once, I had no need to run it again, so it is ok even if it is a bit long. Then I enjoyed the training: I love about Headers that it always challenges me: every level adds a new difficulty, and I have to improve my skills to win it. Plus I love feeling like a professional soccer player that is training on the field. Hoops Vision has cool songs and makes me move following the rhythm, and I feel it as a very nice warmup or cardio session. Reaction Wall forces me to be very reactive and it is improving a lot my reflexes. The modifiers on the last two games make them even more challenging, so I like for instance to add sometimes the color modifier to the reaction wall so that I can only use my left hand for blue lights and my right one for red lights so that I can also improve my left-right coordination. It is a smart way to increase the replayability of the game, since you can create training sessions that are always different thanks to the different modifiers you can activate.

Personally speaking, I would have probably preferred more sessions like the Headers one, devoted to other sports like Basketball, American Football, etc… It’s good to feel that you are learning a sport like a professional player even if you stay at home, to see your progress while you go from one level to the next more difficult one, and become always more skilled. It’s amazing, so I would have loved to have more training modes like that.

I hoped that the game could also correct me if I was doing something wrong during the game itself, but this is not happening. I mean, for instance, that the game notices that my posture is not the right one while I am hitting the ball with my head, and warns me that I have to change the posture. I know that developing such an AI system would be pretty hard and expensive, so I don’t blame the developers for the lack of this feature.

I also like a lot that the various training sessions are very short, usually in the range of 1-3 minutes. Since I’m always busy, I can’t play games for a long time (unless it is for a review): with Rezzil, I can just reserve 10 minutes a day to improve my overall skills and I can easily fit the session into my work schedule. That’s amazing. The short time is also useful because the training this game offers is pretty intense, so you wouldn’t be able to play it more than that without taking a break.

The game also exploits gamification a lot: it collects some statistics on your performances and shows them to you at the end of each session, also highlighting if you are improving with regards to your past performances. For instance, in Reaction Wall it shows your shortest and longest reaction time, while in Headers it shows your accuracy in hitting the ball, or in Hoops Vision the longest streak of circles that you have correctly hit. This encourages you to improve always more. The Headers game doesn’t let you play a level if you haven’t got at least a silver score in the previous one, forcing you to always challenge yourself. There are also global leaderboards to entice people to return playing the game to be the first in the rankings of the game levels. During the beta stage, I have also managed to be in the first place in some Headers level, and that made me incredibly proud (but I think it won’t happen again now that the game is open to the big audience). The game also offers various Oculus Achievements, and this is another good thing to keep the players engaged. Gamification always works (we also use it in our HitMotion game), so the choice of using it has been very smart.

The game has still some bugs here: e.g. Hoops Vision sometimes doesn’t detect that I’m touching some circles. But while the bugs can be fixed easily in future updates, the big issue of this game is actually the lack of haptics. It’s difficult to perform a header if you actually can’t feel the ball with your head. It’s hard to use a racket if you can’t feel the force you are applying to the ball. This is a problem that we all that make VR fitness games are facing, and I can’t blame at all Rezzil developers for that. But it is anyway a problem you have to consider in a game like this: the lack of haptics makes it sometimes weird, and sometimes less effective as training for a real sport.

Multimedia elements

Rezzil is a training application, so it doesn’t need any kind of fancy graphics. The graphical elements are well made and polished and have good quality. They are good because they give you the setting for your training: for instance, in Headers they make you feel inside a football field, in Hoops Vision, they make you feel a bit in a street basketball court, and so on. For that purpose, they do their job pretty well. The interfaces are also well designed, and the game has a clear mood and branding. I would say that all the visual elements don’t put you in awe, because this is not the purpose of this game, but they are well made and coherent.

Audio is on the same line: it does its job. I have personally appreciated some of the custom pieces of music that have been created for the Hoops Vision game, they are pleasant to hear, and sometimes I have found myself singing them even after I have played (especially “OMW”).

Input

The various games require almost no input apart from moving your body. In Headers, you can use the triggers of your controllers to open a focus box, which is a rectangle in which you can frame the ball to follow it, but it is just a guide to help the players and it is not mandatory to use at all. Learning the controls in Player 22 is very easy after you have followed the tutorials of the various games.

Immersion

Like all fitness games, the sense of presence and immersion is given by the fact that you must be focused on the game. All Player 22 games require you to be very attentive to what is happening and be very reactive to the elements that come towards you. You can not get distracted, or you lose your level, so the game really sucks you in. That’s why I also found the training to be quite intense: not as intense as in our HitMotion or in Crazy Kung Fu, but intense enough to make me sweat. It’s good that the training sessions are just 1-3 minutes long because you absolutely need a pause after that time.

Comfort

Player 22 features no artificial locomotion, so it’s a game that can be comfortably played by everyone.

Expansions

The game already features some DLCs at launch and will add more DLCs in the future. DLCs are of two types:

• Game-oriented: these are DLCs that add new gaming modes, or add new levels (or songs) to existing gaming modes. For instance one future DLC will add a game besides the current Blockz, called Rayderz, for $5;
• Cutosmization-oriented: there are DLCs that doesn’t add anything to the training, but let you customize your game elements. You can so buy a new ball for Hoops Vision, you can buy Adidas merch to wear inside the game, and so on. This way you look cooler while you play. I think this feature will become more relevant if Player 22 will add multiplayer in the future (and personally, I think it is going to happen) so that the other players can see your customizations.

Some DLCs will be free, others paid. As in all similar games, DLCs are a nice way to make more money for the developers and to have always new content to play for the users. A win for everyone.

Price and Availability

Player 22 by Rezzil is available on the Official Quest Store for $15. You can buy it on this page.

This is the situation of the DLCs according to the company:

DLCs available at launch

• Headers Expansion Pack 1 – 2 more heading drills. 15 levels each $4.99
• Kit Pack 2 – More kit for your locker, environment skins and colours. $2.99
• Kit Pack 3 – More kit for your locker, environment skins and colours. $2.99
• Adidas Brand Pack – Official Adidas kit to use in heading drills. environment skins and colours. $3.99
• Rayderz Game – Throwing Game $4.99

DLCs available post-launch

• Hoops Expansion Pack 1 – 5 more songs for Reaction Hoops $4.99
• NFL Training Drill – Free Update
• NFL Expansion Pack 1 – $4.99

Final Impressions

The most relevant info that you can get from this review is that I’m actually using Player 22 at least 3 times every week, and not because I need to review it, but because I enjoy it, and it makes me move and stay fit even if I have a tight work schedule. It is a game that has engaged me, and this is something that doesn’t happen easily. One of the reasons is that it made me play soccer like a professional player, and I love soccer. There are many challenging levels in the Headers game, and I want to win them all, that’s why I’m always returning back. But also the other two game modes are nice, and they are good warmups for my soccer session. Headers is my little fitness guilty pleasure.

Rezzil claims that this game brings professional training at home, and this is true in part: for sure they are applying here some strategies they have learned while training pros, and for sure some games make you feel a bit like a pro, but I don’t feel having become a pro in anything after having used this application. I also think that the training it offers is a bit incoherent, considering that every training mode has its own structure that is different from the others. As I have said before, I would have preferred some more guidance in training: I would have loved that the game taught me how to mix the different training games, and also that corrected me for my wrong movements. I’m almost sure that how I hit the ball in the Headers game now is completely wrong, and the game should have warned me about it.

But as a fitness VR game, I think it is very good: it is engaging, it is fun, it is very well made, and it is intense. It also lets you train for just a little time every day, and this is good for busy people like me. And it doesn’t just make you sweat but also improves some basic skills of yours like coordination or reactivity. All of this in a setting that is heavily inspired by popular sports we all love. For these reasons, I personally liked Player 22, and I invite you all to check it out. Will you be able to beat me in the levels where I am the number one?

(Header image by Rezzil)