Mirrors

The prologue chapter to nDreams’s upcoming ‘cinematic action adventure game’, Reach, is an absolute banger. It kicks off with some fluid parkour action as you learn to leap over boxes and clamber up walls inside a volumous warehouse. Then it gives you a magical bow and asks you to take out multiple armed enemies all whilst a helicopter spits missiles and machine gun fire at you from overhead.

It’s exhilarating stuff and the high adrenaline climax to the level features a full speed sprint through exploding buildings and across roof tops. To me it felt like a heady mix of Blood & Truth and Mirror’s Edge. But as soon as that section ends (with a lovely, unexpected twist, I might add) the game becomes something different, and it feels like it might be to its detriment.

Watch me play through 15 minutes of the Reach demo in this episode of VR Corner!Watch on YouTube

Before I get into that though, it’s worth pointing out that Reach is a brand new game from publisher nDreams’s new development studio nDreams Elevation. nDreams has previously release one of my favourite ever VR games, Synapse, along with Fracked, a short-lived action game that I also really enjoyed. This meant that I went into Reach with high expectations so perhaps, in hindsight, I was setting myself up for a little fall. Which I guess is appropriate seeing as there’s loads of climbing in Reach…

In terms of visuals, Reach starts off with an impressive vista that stretches across a mountainside littered with tall buildings and shack-like slums. We see cable cars trundling off towards some snow capped peaks in the distance, teasing an action epic that takes place across this busy landscape. But tease is the operative word here because that never actually happens. Or at least didn’t in the four chapter demo I played. The prologue does have some of this in there, but as soon as it ended I was skipped forward a level or two to find our protagonist, Rosa, trapped underground after a mysterious earthquake sent gravity on a weird one.

Time slows when you activate your grapple so, with a bit of practice, you can chain together pulls so you can fly between green grapple points without touching the ground.

This section features some really cool, Uncharted-style moments of perilous climbing, and a few fun moments where you can play with floating props, but it was clear that the pace established in the first chapter was slowing down slightly. Visually, it was interesting but never highly polished. Collapsed buildings gave way beneath me and crumbling roads dropped cars on my head, but they were all fairly simple models, with basic flat textures. That’s not to say that non-photo realistic graphics look bad – Synapse had about three colours and minimal textures, but it was still super stylish. Reach however just looks fine.

After this section, Rosa ends up in an underground city, built by a race of ‘Living Statues’, and it’s here where the pace really falls off a cliff. Upon reaching a level called The Workshop, I brought one of these Living Statues back to life. He was a jaunty, bearded chap called Atlas and he proceeded to exposition at me for about fifteen minutes, inbetween teaching me about some new, magical kit that he’d gifted me. This included an, admittedly, very cool Captain America style shield that you can use to hit enemies or lodge into specific sections of walls in order to clamber up them, a pair of gauntlets that show your health and items on your wrist and a chest-mounted healing device powered by mushrooms.

Following this, things picked up a little and I encountered a fun puzzle section that combined climbing and bow shooting in order to unlock a door. It was a great showcase of Reach’s physicality – climbing is precise and responsive, movement is smooth and fluid and the archery feels nice and accurate. It was a very satisfying puzzle to solve, as was another later on that featured a huge rotating statue which utilised another new gadget, a sci-fi style grappling hook.

In my review of Synapse, I said it made everything you do in it feel effortlessly cool. In Reach you definitely still feel cool but everything, including jumping, takes a bit more effort to master.

These puzzle rooms added a much needed bit of variety into the underground city which, judging by the trailers only, seems to be where the bulk of this game is set. And that’s my main problem with Reach. Instead of being an action epic set above ground in a big city, over jagged mountain tops and on wobbly cable cars as the introduction suggested, the bulk of the game looks to takes place in a series of really quite bland and beige underground tunnels. Repetitive structures and barely furnished rooms give the game a generic, Xbox 360 era sci-fi shooter look to it, and none of this is helped by some really boring enemy encounters.

In the final level I played in the demo, which featured a few combat arenas and areas for stealthly takedowns, my foes were an assortment of cut-and-paste robot warriors. They sucked up arrows with minimal reactions to their impact and then just flipped and faded away once their health hit zero. Compared to way the human enemies in the prologue collapsed onto the floor, slammed into scenery or dramatically tumbled from windows, killing the robot enemies felt weightless and slow. Even with the added ability to fling myself around the level like a Poundland Spider-man with my new grapple hook power, I soon became bored by the grind.

Bouncing the shield around was a lot of fun, but fighting these robots was not.

Here’s hoping that later levels in Reach can bring back the excitement that I felt during the prologue because, by the end of my hour long demo, I was already tiring of the underground location and the enemies within. I still enjoyed my time with the game, don’t get me wrong, but after playing through the thrilling opening and the nail-biting anti-gravity climbing section, the rest of the demo felt like an anti-climax that plodded along. I’m slightly worried that it might retain that pace right up until the ending.

With October 16th listed on Steam, and with the game releasing on Quest 3/3s and PlayStation VR2, at least it won’t be long until we Reach its release date and find out.

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