Virtual Virtual Reality 2 First Impressions

I got a review copy of Virtual Virtual Reality 2 by Tender Claws and since I’ve played some time with it, let me tell you my first impressions on this game!

Virtual Virtual Reality 2

Virtual Virtual Reality 2 (VVR2) is the sequel of the acclaimed Virtual Virtual Reality, a game born for the Daydream platform (yes, when Daydream was a thing… I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago…) that became famous for its amazing mechanic of making you teleport to other worlds by making you wear a virtual reality headset inside the VR game. From this genius idea comes the name of the game, since you are in a virtual reality in virtual reality. Yo dawg.

VVR was a funny game, and its purpose was to imagine an absurd future in which we humans become assistants to AI entities, to mock this fear that many people have about our future. If you have never played it, this is its official description so that you understand what we are talking about.

Virtual Virtual Reality (VVR) is a narrative-driven comedy-adventure game about VR and AI with over 50 unique virtual reality environments to explore. Players find themselves in a near future where AI has transformed society, and humans are searching for purpose. Players are welcomed by an AI manager, Chaz, to Activitude, a virtual service where humans must assist AI clients –ranging from artichokes to boats –with increasingly curious tasks. Using dozens of virtual VR headsets to transport between different virtual realities, players go deeper into the inner workings of Activitude as the story unfolds –and ultimately must break free and reclaim their humanity before it’s too late. The tongue-in-cheek game has received widespread acclaim for its idiosyncratic humor and perceptive examinations of how VR and AI are shaping our society

Since now the big hype (and also the big fears) are towards the metaverse, the great team at Tender Claw has imagined a sequel of VVR all based on a metaverse where AI and humans can live together. This is how Tender Claws describes it:

Virtual Virtual Reality 2 (VVR2) is the latest project from Tender Claws and a highly-anticipated sequel to our 2017 VR game Virtual Virtual Reality (VVR). VVR2 takes place a few years following the reset of Activitude at the end of VVR, and it introduces players to the newest virtual network: the peaceful retirement metaverse of Scottsdale, where both humans and AIs have uploaded their consciousness for a digital afterlife. But suddenly, Scottsdale’s VC funding is pulled and the servers begin to shut down one by one. Without the ability to log off, players have no choice but to outrun the digital destruction –ultimately escaping the metaverse and finding a new home

As you can see, the story looks fun and absurd here too. But starts from a theme that is pretty interesting, that is what happens when you have built everything on a platform in the metaverse, and that platform disappears. Everything gets destroyed: digital identities, ownerships, NPCs. If in the future the metaverse will be an important part of our life, such destruction would feel like a catastrophe: something that has been very relevant for us, something we have lived in, also some characters we have created an affection with… everything would disappear in a moment. It’s a very fascinating theme, almost never mentioned in all the articles talking about the M-Word.

The idea of the game has born exactly examining one of these moments:

Development started two years ago as we set out to explore the life and death of a metaverse. Sources of inspiration include events such as the shut down of EA-Land (previously known as The Sims Online), and the very real sense of loss and heartache among the user community. VVR2 asks: how might our abandoned avatars live out the apocalypse?
[…]
This iteration focuses more on the tech hype cycle and the metaverse –what happens when VCs get tired of the metaverse and move on to the “next big thing?”

VVR2 is built on the same foundation of VVR, mixing fun, irony, adventure, and a deep plot. It generated a lot of hype when it was announced, because VVR had lots of fans, and people couldn’t wait to play a sequel. Today it has finally been released and I’m here to tell you what are my thoughts about it!

[WARNING: as always, my review will contain mild spoilers. I won’t spoil you the plot (like, at all), but I could reveal to you some details of the gameplay]

VVR 2 “First impressions”

This review will be pretty atypical for me, and that’s why I’m starting with this introductory chapter and not from the description of the gameplay. The reason is that… I have not enjoyed much the game, probably because it is not my piece of cake. Out of 10+ hours of gameplay, I played more or less 2 hours out of it, and then I decided it was enough. I decided to give it another go, and I spent another half an hour jumping between the various chapters to see more of the game, and then I decided to stop playing it definitely.

The interesting thing is that I haven’t loved Virtual Virtual Reality 1, either. I remember having played it while I was reviewing the Mirage Solo, and I abandoned the game after 40 minutes because I found it slow and frustrating. All people I have spoken with after that moment told me that the game is a masterpiece and that the best part was coming later, after the initial slow-ish moment.

Here I am in the same situation with VVR 2: after 2 hours, I have found the game slow and frustrating. Considering that the initial chapter was considered a masterpiece in the same conditions, I can guess that this second title is a masterpiece as well, but I can’t understand it. Probably the game needs more time than I have to get used to its controls; probably it’s just that it is not my kind of humor; probably it’s that I’m more someone that likes to shoot in VR whatever I find in front of me than someone that likes to do repetitive tasks while a story unfolds or things like that.

So read this “review” with a grain of salt, thinking that maybe I’m not the best one to review this kind of game. And for this reason, I have also chosen not to define it as a “review”, but just as “first impressions”. I decided to write this article anyway because I think that it could be valuable to offer a different point of view from the one of other journalists... something that could be interesting for the VR community and also for the people at Tender Claw that so know how to improve their games in the future.

That clarified, let’s see what are my thoughts on this game.

Gameplay

VVR2 is an adventure game. Your purpose is going around Scottsdale, solve some enigmas, kill the enemies that you find on your path, and make the story unfold while you proceed in rescuing the people from the to-be-destroyed metaverse. The game is divided into 20 chapters, for 10+ hours of gameplay.

You will play most of the game inside Chad, which is a big mech that you command operating a series of controls and levers with your hands. The mech can move around, jump, and also perform special operations with its two big arms. These arms can be equipped with special functions, that will be provided during the various levels so that you can perform different actions with them. I don’t want to spoil you much, but for instance, at a certain point, you can use your right arm to shoot at enemies. Moving and operating the mech has been one of the things that frustrated me the most, as I will tell you in the chapter about user experience.

While you are on the mech, you have to move to go to the various places that will make the story unfold. The movement won’t be linear, though. First of all, the game is never exactly clear about where you have to go, nor about what you have to do. You have some cues, like it may say “we have to go to the wellness center”, but you have no idea of where is this wellness center, also because there is no map. And the game doesn’t usually make your life easy: you may find yourself in some open space, and you have to move the mech around trying to see where is the place you are looking for, an operation that is made even more complicated by the fact that to gain on performances, the application doesn’t show you the objects that are too distant from you, so you see them popping up only when you are quite close to them.

Then, the game has many “platform” moments: it is not only that you have to find the destination, but also the road to go there, and how you can go follow it with your mech: sometimes there are some disconnected platforms and you have to jump between them to move on, for instance. Or the platform you are on must be cleared before the time runs by, and so you have to activate the superspeed to not fall down and die. Or you will have deadly obstacles to avoid by jumping or turning in another direction. Mixing this with the “find your path” requirement described above, you obtain the fact that most of the time I didn’t know exactly what was the road that I should follow, because even if I found an obstacle while going in a direction, I was not sure if it was something that I should overcome, or if it was there to stop me to prevent me from following a wrong direction. If you are into exploration, I guess you may love all of this. Personally, I found it frustrating, because every time I didn’t know exactly what I should do.

Sometimes you are also required to solve some small enigmas to exit a particular place. Usually, you have Gavin, the other character that is there with you, that gives you some cues on how you can win the situation. The game anyway never explains 100% of what you should do: the player must understand by himself what is the path to follow, how some things work, and how to clear the room he is in. It’s all a matter of exploration and experimentation. While I love enigmas, if everything is always slightly unclear I’m less excited because this makes the game slower and less enjoyable.

On your path you will also find some enemies: this is not an action game, so they won’t be that many, but they are not a few either. Enemies must be shot down, otherwise, they are going to kill you. Most of the enemies are pretty small and fast, something very different from the big slow mech you are in, but there are also some bosses. The weapons you have are fun to watch but quite ineffective to use, so killing enemies is never an easy task, and I got killed a lot of times, which has been one of the causes of my frustration.

You have a health bar, that repletes over time. If it reaches zero HP, either because you were shot too many times by some enemies, or because you fell down to death, you die. When you die, you respawn at the latest checkpoint. There’s no way to save otherwise. Checkpoints are pretty frequent in the game, and most of the time, when you respawn, you have to redo almost nothing (but there are exceptions).

It’s interesting to notice that while you will be driving a mech most of the time, actually you always exist also as a separate entity. You are not the mech. And in fact, at the beginning of the game, you can just walk around Scottsdale on your own feet. And even when you enter the mech, you can always leave the controls and start doing stuff inside its cockpit, which is big like a small kitchen room. For instance, when you undergo certain attacks, there are fires popping up inside the mech and you have to use a fire extinguisher to put them out. There are also other characters staying there with you, and you can interact with them inside the mech armor.

It wouldn’t be a Tender Claw’s game if it weren’t about humor and storytelling. The story is absurd and fun, and throughout the game, you will unfold what is happening to Scottsdale and how you can rescue its inhabitants. There are many dialogues with many puns and jokes, and the developers claim to have written more than 600 pages of script inside the game! Humour is anyway another topic where this game didn’t suit my tastes: while I appreciated the dialogues being always fun and absurd, I never truly laughed. I appreciated many fun references to the metaverse, and the current experiences available for it (I’m quite sure Scottsdale “Plaza” takes its name from the eponymous location in Horizon Worlds)… I loved the tongue-in-cheek style, but I think it never reaches high peaks of fun. I have had much more fun with “Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual“, for instance.

All the many dialogues are great if you enjoy the story, but they also contribute to making the game very slow to follow.

Virtual Virtual Reality 2 is also very trippy: sometimes you hear a soothing voice telling you something that you should do (e.g. “surrender”), or you see some other words popping out close to your wrist in a weird way. Since Scottsdale is vanishing, there are many elements that glitch in the environment you have in front of you. And there are also total nonsense moments, like when I found myself playing an absurd version of Beat Saber (yeah, I caught the irony on that, too). Sometimes the game feels a bit like an acid trip.

Input and User Experience

Let’s go to the main thing that made me very frustrated about this game, and that is the user experience and the mech controls. As I told you before, you are a separate character and you control the mech like if you had to do it in real life, that is grabbing levers and operating them. While this should make the game more realistic, and also more in line with its absurd world, I think it has been a poor choice.

Look for a moment what are the controls of the mech:

You have a lever for the throttle, two handles to jump, two handles to rotate the mech (one for the left and one for the right direction), and two levers to operate the mech arms. You CAN NOT operate all of this together because you have to physically grab an item to operate it. So if you are rotating the mech on the right or on the left, you can’t operate the arms at the same time, because your hands will be busy on the other handles. Good luck in moving and aiming at enemies that move fast all around you. If you are rotating, you can not accelerate/decelerate. When you are following a curve path during one of the platform moments, good luck in coordinating turning the mech while jumping and changing the speed. You have to continuously leave one handle and take another to perform other actions, to then take another one, and so on.

This offers a bad user experience because we are used to moving and rotating at the same time in all games… being able to just do one action at a time is weird. And if this was a game where movement was not an important part, this could also be ok… but as I’ve told you before, Virtual Virtual Reality 2 is full of platform moments, where you have to run, steer, and jump, and without proper coordination, you are going to fall down cliffs 100 times in a row in the game.

The handles on the top that are used to rotate the mech also forced me to keep my arms up like a gorilla for more than one hour, until I discovered I could grab them, bring them down, and just use the trigger button to rotate the mech, which is much more comfortable.

And there is even more: my brain is used to moving with thumbsticks in VR, so sometimes when I wanted to make the mech walk or rotate, I accidentally pushed the stick of my controllers. The problem is that the game considers the thumbstick movements as a movement of my character inside the mech… so whenever it happened, actually I found myself moving away from the mech controls on the cockpit, maybe even during a battle, and you can imagine how I died fast in these situations.

I don’t know why the controls have been designed this way: they are very frustrating to use. It would have been much easier to do that while you are on a control seat of the mech, your controllers directly move the mech like when you are on foot, and then there was a button to make you stand up from the chair to move your real character. There is a first-person mode of the mech, that gives you a first-person view from the “eyes” of the mech, and it just makes you rotate your mech by rotating your head, which is much better for fighting the enemies, but it’s not enough.

When you operate the mech, you can also change some properties of your arms and their current features by using the thumbstick of the related controller. Another button on the controllers is used to change the arm that you are currently using (it make you cycle through the different features). What I have appreciated of VVR2, in all this input mess, is that the game teaches you all the commands that are necessary to operate the mech, so the player is not left alone. Every time a new functionality is added to the mech arms, the game shows you what is the button to activate it and lets you make practice before letting you go on with the game.

I really hope the user experience will be fixed in a future update of the game because I think this alone could improve a lot the enjoyability of the game.

Multimedia elements (Graphics and Audio)

Speaking about the visuals, the game is pretty well made. Tender Claws has chosen a low poly cartoonish style so that the game can run easily on the Quest, and thanks to this, the game runs very smoothly. The graphical style features very bright colors and is coherent with the fun and the absurd nature of the game: I think that it contributes a lot to the story, it helps in making you feel in this crazy metaverse.

Audio is also very well made. Given the sheer amount of dialogues, I wonder how much time and money has been spent on dubbing! The only issue I noticed on this side is the fact that the voices are sometimes lower in volume than the music and this makes some dialogues difficult to hear.

Presence

If we remove the awkward controls, the game actually makes a great job of making you feel truly inside this crazy metaverse. The visuals, the audio, the many dialogues contribute to enhancing the sense of being really there. It’s always a cartoonish experience, but I think that when you can control it, it feels like a believable oniric trip.

Comfort and accessibility

The game is quite comfortable: notwithstanding the fact that the mech always moves, the fact that you have the cockpit always around you helps in not feeling nauseous. I have jumped, fallen down, run inside the mech, and never had any kind of virtual sickness sensation.

There are also some options to customize your game that help with accessibility. For instance, you can customize the controls in your hands, you can activate subtitles (that is great for deaf people, but also for non-native English speakers like me), you can play it also in a seated position, you can play in easy mode so that to be able to win it even if you are a VR newbie, and there is also an option to enhance comfort when you are moving in VR.

When you move on foot, you can also decide if activating smooth movement or teleportation. There are lots of configuration options for this game, and this is great for accessibility, that is something I always support.

Polishing

I’ve found a few bugs during my review, but no one of them hurt my gameplay. Anyway, the team assured me that they are going to be fixed in an update coming two weeks after the launch, so this is not something to worry about.

Availability and Price

Virtual Virtual Reality 2 is available starting from today on the Oculus Store for $30. On Monday, February 17th it will be released also on Steam for the same price.

Final opinion

In Virtual Virtual Reality 2, I could feel the very slow pace, and a constant sense of confusion because I never had a clear idea of what I had to do next; the movements were clunky and complicated, the people around me very weird, and the world around me was falling apart. Basically, VVR2 has exactly the same characteristics as my real life. Probably this is the reason why I have not appreciated it much… I just live this every day!

Jokes apart, the game doesn’t fit my tastes, and I think that in general has many things to improve, especially for what concerns the control scheme and everything related to input and interactions. The game also resulted a bit frustrating to me. I don’t know if it improves in the part that I have not played as I was told about the first one, but honestly, a game should be fun since the beginning, or it risks that impatient players refund it.

But if I go beyond this, I could perceive during my playing sessions that Virtual Virtual Reality 2 has been made by a studio that has a big knowledge of VR, and that wanted to make a long experience. I appreciated the multimedia elements, the idea behind the game, and the willingness of making a fun game. The game is very original and different from other things that you have tried in VR… sometimes it looks more like an acid trip than an adventure game. The story is very long and articulated, and it is based on the concept of the destruction of a metaverse platform, which is intriguing. But at the same time, it manages to treat it in a very tongue-in-cheek way. This is why I don’t want to leave you with a negative opinion of VVR2: Tender Claws has worked hard to do something original, and it should be praised for that. I don’t know if the game will be a success like the first one, but in any case, they didn’t go for the safe road of making a standard game, and this of course makes it less pop. I love when studios do this kind of risky and original things. I hope they’ll fix some of the issues I depicted in the update that will be out in 2 weeks, so maybe the good things of the game can shine more.

I have not loved the game, but if you enjoyed the first one, it is possible that you like this one as well. Since I was not a huge fan of the first title either, I suggest you read some other journalists’ reviews after mine, so that you can hear different points of view on the same game and take a more informative purchase decision.

(Header image by Tender Claws)