Robo Recall is easily one of the most exciting VR experience coming in 2017, but its roots actually trace back to a relatively simple tech demo from 2015.
Fans of the Rift will remember when developer Epic Games took to the stage of the Oculus Connect 2 keynote that year to announce a tech demo for the then-unreleased Oculus Touch controllers, called Bullet Train. The demo was a first glimpse into what Touch could do for VR shooters and served as the foundation for Epic’s first larger VR game, Robo Recall. In this new dev diary, the first in a new series, focuses on the upcoming game. We can see the developer talk in more detail about how the two are linked, something Nick Whiting, Technical Director at Epic Games, alluded to in our interview from October.
Members of the Epic team are on-hand here to discuss how Robo Recall builds upon what the studio learned in Bullet Train. Teleporting, for example, is no longer assigned to specific spots in a level, but instead allows you to move to any position, much like other modern VR shooters.
Most importantly, though, you’re getting lots of new footage of the game here. There’s no two ways about it; Robo Recall is looking gorgeous, no doubt thanks to the intimate knowledge the developer has with its popular development toolkit, Unreal Engine. In the game, you’re tasked with taking down hordes of malfunctioning robots and encouraged to get inventive with creative kills, not too dissimilar to Epic’s own Bulletstorm, only with a much more comic-book, cartoonish style. We cam away very impressed from our time with the game at OC3 last year.
Bullet Train, meanwhile, can now be downloaded on Rift for free. Epic will also release Robo Recall for free, exclusively on Oculus Rift with Touch, and it’s easy to see why: this is as good an advertisement you’ll see for the engine as you’ll see.
There isn’t much longer to go until Robo Recall hits; it’s due in Q1 2017 and we’re already a month through that window. Expect a few more entries in this diary series before it launches.
