Facebook’s Oculus is offering a Black Friday game bundle on the Rift’s VR app store. The pack contains 7 major games for $99.99 – Lone Echo, Onward, Superhot VR, The Climb, Arizona Sunshine, GORN, and Eleven: Table Tennis VR.
At their regular prices the games would total to $209.93, thus this pack saves $109.94 (%52). The deal is one day only, ending at midnight tonight Pacific Standard Time.
Onward and Arizona Sunshine are on sale separately at 40% off and 50% off, but the other games are not. While this certainly isn’t a budget oriented deal, we think these games are some of the best that VR gaming currently has to offer. All seven would make excellent additions to your library.
Lone Echo [8.5/10]
Lone Echo is a roughly five hour voice acted story driven VR game. It was created by The Order 1886 developers Ready At Dawn, funded by Oculus. You play as a service android under the command of Captain Olivia Rhodes. When a catastrophe strikes, you and Olivia must work together to try and repair the station. We were highly impressed with the game when we reviewed it, giving it 8.5/10 and concluding:
Lone Echo is a landmark achievement in three key areas of the VR experience: locomotion, UI, and interaction. The winning blend of intuitive movement, discovery-based gameplay and character-driven storytelling create a compelling sense of presence that few VR games could hope to match, while the considered pacing gives it a fresh identity. I hate to mark it down on such a trivial aspect as length, but the package simply feels incomplete, rounding off in the second act and depriving you of both the narrative and mechanical evolutions I was expecting to encounter in the third. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that I expect its sequel to be one of VR’s very best.
Onward
Onward is a realistic multiplayer military shooter which feels like playing Insurgency in VR. Remarkably, it entered early access when it had just one developer. Since then, it has become one of the most popular multiplayer games in VR.
Check out our interview with the developer or player’s field guide for more information on Onward.
Superhot VR [9/10]
Superhot VR is a unique shooter experience where the faster you move, the faster time moves. If you keep completely still, time will freeze. It is a perfect blend of mental and physical challenge, and perhaps one of the best VR games ever made.
When we reviewed the game, we gave it 9/10, concluding:
SUPERHOT VR is a pure, distilled, injection of unadulterated adrenaline that will get your blood pumping just as quickly as time stops in the game itself. With every movement you make, time creeps forward ever so slightly, and everything from the level design to the way it feels to dodge a series of bullets in slow-motion is orchestrated to reinforce the core ideals of the experience. From start to finish it plays out like a fantasy ripped from the screen of every action movie; an indulgent cacophony of visual and gameplay excitement.
The Climb [8/10]
Still today, The Climb has some of the best graphics you can see in a realtime VR game. The game remarkably launched for the Rift using an Xbox controller, before the Touch controllers released, but received a large update on the launch of the controllers to add full support. Even with an xbox controller we were impressed, giving it an 8/10 saying:
There may be some control issues holding it back but, in the end, The Climb creates a world in which the mechanics are so satisfying, the visuals are so beautiful, and the sense of accomplishment is so real that you just want to continue doing what the game enables you to do so perfectly: keep climbing.
Arizona Sunshine [8.5/10]
Arizona Sunshine is a zombie FPS with a full voice acted singleplayer campaign and co-op multiplayer. When we reviewed the game, we gave it 8.5/10, concluding:
Vertigo Games proved that even in the most saturated genre we’ve seen for VR games this year — shooters with zombies — there was still room for something fresh. Arizona Sunshine combines the narrative power of a fully-featured 4+ hour campaign mode, with the intensity of a wave-based horde mode, and then adds multiplayer to both experiences. The protagonist’s witty humor make it worth recommending on his charming personality alone, with enough depth and variety to keep people coming back for several hours. By doing so many things so well, Arizona Sunshine quickly rose to the top of the pack as the best overall zombie shooter we’ve seen yet in VR.
GORN
GORN is a comically over the top cartoon gladiator simulator which many consider to have the best melee mechanics in VR. As the game isn’t out of early access yet we haven’t formally reviewed it, but in our preview we stated:
If there were ever a VR game to convince even the strictest of VR pacifists to chop someone’s head off, it’s this. I dare you to not smile just a little as you hit a man so hard his eyeballs fall out. This plays like a hyperbolic anticipation of everything VR will one day come under fire for; an in-the-face parody of the inevitability of it all. I can picture the Fox News complaints about young children ripping people’s arms off in VR already, but here’s a game that makes actually doing that joyously silly before anyone’s really made it thrillingly empowering. I can’t help but admire the developer’s angle here.
Eleven: Table Tennis VR
Eleven is seemingly the most simple game in this bundle, but to many it will provide the most hours of fun. Eleven represents the mastery of virtual table tennis, a sport so ideally suited for VR that VR companies often use it as an example of what the medium can do when giving interviews to news outlets.
While we haven’t formally reviewed Eleven yet, as of this article it sits on a 4.75 star rating on the Oculus Store and 95% on Steam.
