I have just finished playing Red Matter 2, the much-awaited sequel of Red Matter, one of my favorite games for Quest. The studio behind it, Vertical Robot, launched it by claiming that it would have set a new standard for graphics on Quest. Excited by the first images and videos, I wanted to try it immediately… and after having completed it, here you are writing the review for you. Is it as cool as expected? Discover it with me!
[WARNING: as usual with my articles, this review contains mild spoilers, but I promise you I won’t ruin the most important surprises]
Story
This is how Vertical Robot describes the story of Red Matter 2, which starts exactly where the first game ended:
After breaking free from the simulation that held your own mind hostage, your first priority is to escape the Atlantic Union’s base. However, you unexpectedly discover a distress signal belonging to an old friend. Determined to come to his rescue, you will travel to the farthest reaches of the solar system to find him. During your journey you will unveil Volgravia’s darkest secrets and confront the unstoppable Red Matter.
If they believe this is the best spoiler-free version, I won’t tell you more. Let me just add a bit more context on the “Atlantic Union”. The game basically takes to the future (and to space) the confrontation between NATO and URSS of the cold war, with the Atlantic Union being the NATO and Volgravia being the URSS. During the whole game, you are confronted with posters, writings, and products that remind a lot of Soviet Russia (e.g. Volgravia’s soldiers use a star as an emblem, people call each other “komrade”, and things like that). This adds very interesting lore to the game, and I think the authors of the game made a great job, both in the previous episode and this one, in giving you the right “soviet” mood in the environments you explore. The writings in the game are also in what may seem Cyrillic, but actually, nothing is truly written in Russian: I asked a colleague of mine and he confirmed to me that the writings are not in real Russian, but in something that seems Russian enough to seem believable to us Westerners.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Red Matter 2 is in a sense similar to the one of the first episode. You can play this game even if you have not played the first one, but of course, if you did, you have an advantage, because you understand better the story and also are more prepared on how to solve the enigmas.
Red Matter 2 is mostly a puzzle game. You navigate through different environments and have to solve some puzzles to be able to go from the current environment to the next one, usually finding a way to unlock some door. Once you are in the next environment, you have to solve other conundrums until you find the way forward to the next one. Rinse and repeat. It is an articulate collection of escape rooms. The good thing is that these environments are fully enclosed and never too big: you can usually access 2-3 rooms per time, and you are so pretty sure that the solution to what you are looking for is there. This makes the game more straightforward because even in the harshest times, you know that the solution to the enigmas is close to you, and you don’t have to return to the beginning of the game to find what you are looking for. The game is very linear in this, and I appreciated it a lot because otherwise, I think I would have gotten crazy.
The puzzles may be of different types: sometimes you have just to explore well the environment and find a tool you need or a hidden passage to somewhere else (e.g. an air vent); sometimes you have to understand the right order you have to perform some operations; other times you have to find a secret code to open a safe by using cues around you which reveal the numbers, or you have to hack some machinery performing some small enigmas similar to the ones of Alyx, or you have to remote control some drones to make them perform actions you can’t perform yourself. There is a lot of variation in how the various puzzles must be solved. This is something that impressed me about the game: I wonder how much time has been spent on the game design. It is not one of those games where once you have seen two or three puzzles, then you can solve all of them in the same way. Every time you have to think about how to escape the current room, knowing that the solution will be different than the one in the previous room. And most of the time you have not even a clear idea of what you have to do: you must examine everything you can in your environment, read the letters scattered around, analyze every object you can take in your hand, and then think and experiment a lot. Only by working like this, you can understand how to solve the current puzzle.
Regarding the difficulties of the enigmas, I would say that most of them hit the perfect spot (not too easy, not too difficult), but 3-4 of them are really hard. The game doesn’t help you at all, even if you are stuck somewhere and this means that you can get stuck forever. So, for instance, I remember being blocked in a room with a safe to open, with around me a presentation and a list of cities with their coordinates, and I really had no idea on how to go on. I started taking all the numbers I could see around me and making weird conjectures about what could be the combination of the safe, failing miserably.
I have probably spent more than 1 hour there. This was very frustrating to me. Once I found the solution to these hard enigmas, I was always like “why haven’t I thought about it before!” and I felt very satisfied for solving that puzzle without any kind of help. But while I was solving it, I found the situation very unpleasant: staying 1-hour standing and sweating inside the headset while locked in the same virtual room was annoying. Plus my frustration made me enter into full “Monkey-island” rage, and so I started trying everything I could to make things work, even trying to put a banana in a video recording device, because “you never know, maybe that is the solution”. Anyway, no, bananas are never the solution in this game, because this is not Monkey Island: puzzle solutions are always very logical in Red Matter 2, so don’t repeat my same error.
Red Matter 2 is very similar to Red Matter 1 for what concerns environment explorations and enigmas solutions but tries adding variation by introducing two new types of game modes: combat and platform. This means that sometimes you have something else to do than just solve puzzles. Sometimes you have to find your way to go forward by jumping on different platforms. You have a jetpack, and you can control it with the thumbstick of your controllers. The jetpack has limited fuel for each jump, so you can only perform jumps of a certain height and then control the airborne. This means that sometimes you have to find the right path to follow to arrive at your destination: for instance, if you have to perform a very long jump, it is better that before that, you jump to a platform in a higher position so that you can arrive at the destination just using airborne control. Platform moments were fun to me: usually, they were never too long, and it was interesting analyzing the environment and try to understand how to arrive at the destination by jumping on the correct platforms. Dying by falling down was never too punishing, either, because I respawned from the previous stable position. In the end, I was mastering the jetpack in a great way, and I could go everywhere using it. It was satisfying.
The other mode, combat, was instead good in theory but quite bad in practice. After you pass half of the game, you are given a gun, and with it, you have to fight various drones that try to kill you to protect the base you are in. Some of these drones are humanoid, others are small flying spheres. There are also security turrets that fire at you if they see you. The good thing about these combat moments is that they add other variations to the game: shooting moments always add adrenaline to the experience, and this creates good emotional moments to the otherwise slow game. Also, in Red Matter 1, I was pretty sure that wherever I could go, there was no danger for me, while in Red Matter 2, I started being alert to drones that may kill me, and this created additional tension that made the game more entertaining. But the problem is that the combat is super frustrating. The gun you have is terrible, and aiming with it is more impossible than “Mission Impossible”, so you end up being like the stormtroopers in Star Wars: you shoot 50 bullets and have zero hits on the enemies.
Plus, the gun has to constantly be reloaded, so the game mode is that you shoot a few bullets, then hide behind something (a wall, a cage, etc…) and recharge the gun, then you step forward and shoot a few bullets, then hide again. Rinse and repeat, for various minutes. All the combat moments are like that, also because the bots are so dull that rarely chase you, so it is basically like two teams in two trenches shooting each other with terrible aim. To make this even more complicated, the humanoid bots must be hit at certain specific points of their body… good luck doing that with the stormtrooper gun. In the end, I hated the combat: it was so repetitive and dull. It added frustration to the whole game.
I have found also the game a bit “slow” in some of its developments. I can’t even describe this sensation, but it is like many things could have developed in a faster way. One example of this is the ending, where before arriving at the final knowledge, you have to pass through a lot of rooms in which nothing happens, and you just read a lot of information and solve some lightweight puzzles. In my opinion, that part could have been trimmed down.
What the game is very good at doing, as I’ve said in the beginning, is creating the lore. You have a colleague, Beta, guiding you via radio, telling you what to do, and with which you develop a human relationship. All the environments can be explored, and almost all objects can be analyzed with the tool you have on the left hand. There are many letters scattered around, and through them, you learn more about Volgravia, and the destiny of your friends while you go forward in the game. There is inherent humor in some of the objects you analyze, and there are some easter eggs, like when you find the play box of the “Vertical Robot” game, a clear reference to the developers of the application. And also there is the AI of the first game that spends the whole time mocking you and trolling you.
Also, as Ben Lang of Road To VR said, it’s impressive that almost all objects can be touched, grabbed, launched, or at least analyzed. The world around you is very interactive and very alive. There is impressive attention to details. Again, I don’t know how much time they took to create so much interactivity, but my big kudos goes to them for the results obtained. Being in such an interactive world is so immersive.
The game autosaves at specific frequent checkpoints and you can’t save the game yourself. In total, to complete it, I needed something like 12 hours.
Visuals
Vertical Robot promised us a game that could set a new standard for visuals on Quest, and I can say they have somewhat delivered on that. Continuing the already excellent work made with Red Matter 1, they kept re-writing the rendering pipeline of Unreal Engine and obtained results unthinkably before. In this game you find transparent glasses, reflections, particle effects, a real-time flashlight… that are exactly all the things that we developers can’t usually use on Quest. Vertical Robot added all of them together, instead. It is impressive, especially because the environments are so full of reflections, and no one of us is used to reflections on Quest.
Sometimes it seems that the artists fell too much in love with what they created, so the environments are too full of lights, and too many things have a glossy touch. This sometimes made things a bit unrealistic, because actually, most objects that I have around me are not glossy. Nonetheless, it’s very cool to see. The graphical quality is over the roof in this game. And if you mix it with the attention to detail described before, you obtain an explosive mix that made all the environments incredibly beautiful. Sometimes I just enjoyed being on a vehicle and admiring the surroundings, something that rarely happens on Quest.
Some people went on to say that this level of graphics is comparable with PCVR games. I honestly don’t think so. Since my work is creating content for Quest, I spotted how things are working. All these graphical effects are all tricks, probably implemented into shaders. Impressive tricks, but still tricks. The proof of it is that when I cast a laser ray and I see its reflection on a glass surface, my brain detects that the reflection is somewhat off, it is not 100% realistic.
Vertical Robot implemented all the possible tricks to make the environment seems as if there were real-time lights with real effects, but the truth is that there are none, because Quest and real-time lights do not pose well together. If you want proof of it: the game has no shadows because computing them would have been too expensive for the device. So, these graphics can’t compare with a real PCVR game, in my opinion, because on a PC game I can have real-time lights. Also, the environments are close and small, so the Quest doesn’t have to render too many elements at the same time, while on PC I can also have more open spaces. So for me, the comparison with PCVR graphics doesn’t hold well.
But anyway, the graphical level is still amazing and impressive for a mobile headset. The amount of work put on it must have been huge. Big kudos to the team. I think that everyone with a Quest 2 headset should see with his eyes how this game looks amazing.
Audio
The quality of the visuals is over the roof, and the quality of the audio is at the same level. Every audio effect has been carefully studied, the voices of the characters are well dubbed, and the music changes in the various environments depending on how you should feel. The music is able to convey sadness, anger, or anxiety. And when there are drones to fight, a piece of action music starts, and it ends when they are all dead, so the music also helps you in understanding when you have to stay alert. The sound design is majestic, and I think it adds a lot to the experience because it helps you in putting in the right mood in every moment.
Input and Interactions
The game controls are as follows.
You can move using the thumbstick of the two controllers:
- With the left one, you can walk in various directions, using your arm to define which is the forward direction
- With the right one, you can rotate, activate the jetpacks, or crouch
Then you can interact with the index trigger:
- With the right controller, to grab objects or shoot
- With the left controller, to grab objects, analyze them, or use a spotlight
The selection of the action, in particular, happens with a small interface you have on the controllers and using the X/Y and A/B button you can cycle through the different action modes that are available on every controller. Most of the time, this interface is fine, but in some particular moments it can become a bit tricky: I remember once I started being attacked by drones, and I had to activate the grab tool on my left hand to take cover, but the adrenaline of the moment made me get confused, so I found myself with the analysis tool, unable to use it to hold the cover object, and I died.
The analysis tool is particularly interesting because you use it to translate the texts written in pseudo-Russian and get information on whatever element you have around you. When you are in that mode, you can also extract one small tool from your left hand and use it to hack computers.
As for the other controls, you can use the right grip button to facilitate the recharge of your gun.
It’s interesting that in the game you don’t use directly your hands to interact with objects: in your hands, there is a multitool (one per hand), which allows all the above interactions (including grabbing, which happens through the iron fingers of the tool). This multitool has exactly the shape of a VR controller (of the Touch controller, to be exact), and this is meant to make your interactions very immersive because the object you interact with in real and virtual life is the same. This is another idea that in my opinion works well on paper, but not in practice. I know that other journalists loved this solution (and I myself find it very interesting), but actually, grabbing objects via a proxy and not directly using my fingers made me feel more disconnected from them, so I was not a big fan of this solution.
Immersion
Immersion is where this game truly shines: the environment is great, the music is great, and the mood is perfectly set by the environment and also by the sad story. The immersion was so strong that when the game ended, I was left for at least one hour with the same feeling that the finale was intended to convey to me. I felt so bonded with the story and with the world around me. Vertical Robot made an amazing job regarding that.
Comfort
I think I felt a bit of nausea on a few occasions, but for the rest of the time, the game was quite comfortable. Notwithstanding the fact there are jumps, vehicles, etc… things have been conceived well so unless you are very sensible, you shouldn’t feel nauseous. Plus, the game gives you so many customization options (change locomotion type, change hand, add blinders, etc…) that you can truly find the solution that works best for you. This is also a good thing for accessibility: people for instance can play the whole game by standing seated. I was pleasantly surprised by all of this.
Price and availability
Red Matter 2 can be found on Meta Quest 2 Store, Rift Store, and Steam for $29.99/€29.99
Final opinion
Let me put this straight: I liked Red Matter 2, but I liked the first one a bit more. I can’t tell you exactly why… probably because the first was so new, while here many things felt a bit like a continuation of the first one. The story of the first one was more mysterious and had a better ending, too. Its gameplay was also less frustrating.
But overall, I can’t say that this is not a great game. The graphics are superb (the best in class), the audio is amazing, and the game is entertaining most of the time. Yes, there are some frustrating moments, but is anyway a game that can put you in a believable virtual world, and live an emotional rollercoaster there. Plus most of the puzzles are also quite smart and I enjoyed them, especially because there were a ton of different variations of them. The level of details of this game is amazing, and for sure a lot of effort has been put into making it: the fact that almost all elements are interactable is a sign of it. I also appreciated that Vertical Robot didn’t make exactly a clone of the first one, but it improved many aspects of the game and also added new interactions (like shooting).
At the end of the day, I can only recommend you to buy it and try it. I think it’s a game that all Quest 2 owners should at least try. And if you remain stuck somewhere…well, ask me, and I’ll give you a small hint! 😉
Giveaway!
Before you go… there is a small gift for you! Thanks to my friends at Vertical Robot, I can host a giveaway for a free key of Red Matter 2! Enroll here and cross your fingers!
a Rafflecopter giveaway(Header image by Vertical Robot)