Spatial Review

The world of VR is getting bigger every day, but the Quest will always have its limits. The problem with making a game for this device is that you lose out on some core features that are standard in other devices. What does this mean? For one it means less power, which means more limitations to what developers can do. Keeping all these factors in mind I went into Spatial looking for something fun and enjoyable to play while using the Oculus Quest.

This game was developed by Mark Schramm, who has worked on various VR titles including VirZoom Arcade, The Nest, Swords! , and Light Repair Team #4. He also won third place at the 2019 Unity Vision VR/AR Summit Game Jam with his team, Unwieldy Spectre, which is also coming to the Quest soon.

Spatial is available for $20 on the Oculus Store.

I have mixed feelings about Spatial, but ultimately I enjoyed my time with it. It was both frustrating and fun at the same time while having a unique VR experience. The game starts off with you being dropped into their world to explore while training yourself to become a master of teleportation. This is where I had one of my very first issues, because when teleporting around the area your vertical movement becomes inverted for some reason, so that means you will actually be looking downward when moving up in the map. I don’t understand why this happens or how they didn’t realize that people would want this feature changed. Some people don’t mind it but for me, I felt a little sick the entire time because of this issue.

There are three modes that you can choose from: Campaign, Challenges, and Quickplay. In campaign mode, you have to take on various challenges as you progress through each chapter to complete the game. You have to teleport from point A to B while trying to avoid hazards along your path. There is nothing really special about this mode besides being able to play through a story-like level with no strings attached. The first thing I noticed was how easy it was going through each map without much difficulty at all until the later levels. If you’re an expert gamer then you will breeze right through these levels in a day or two.

Challenges is where you will find all the trophies and achievements. You can choose to play alone or with another player in co-op mode which I highly recommend. You have four challenges that are not connected to each other at all, meaning you don’t have to finish one challenge before starting the next one. Those challenges are called Beaten Path, Leap of Faith, Teleporter Effectiveness, and Speedrun. These are basically mini-games that are more challenging than they sound because most of them require quick thinking skills to complete under a certain time limit or within a certain amount of tries. The trophy for completing these levels without dying is almost impossible since there isn’t an option to change anything about your character’s appearance or stats so it’s up to you on how well you do.

Lastly, is the Quickplay mode where you can choose from a list of maps that are available in the game. You can choose to play with or without another player on this mode which I find great for trying out new levels without having to play through the campaign first. This is more fun when playing with 2 – 3 people who are already familiar with each other since it’s basically like hide-n-seek mixed with tag, but it gets old pretty fast since it isn’t much available right now and your choices are always limited to teleporting around random places that don’t make sense until suddenly someone appears outta nowhere. To top that off, if two people teleport at once one person will always teleport to the other person at random which makes you lose your chance of winning.

This game has a lot of potential if they were able to fix their issues for example the inverted vertical movement, more maps, and some form of communication between players. From what I saw during my playthrough is that this game doesn’t have too much content so it’s really easy to complete but fun for playing with friends.

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