Large tracking volumes, like the type afforded by Steam VR’s Lighthouse system, are a godsend for fans of virtual reality. But what about when you reach the edge of the wall? Where do you go then? Neat Corporation, an indie game and tool development studio, are using portals to address just that, and the results look like a blast.
Budget Cuts, a game that has you spying deep in the heart of an office undergoing budget cuts, may seem like the bastard lovechild of both the Portal and Hitman series, but the built-for-VR game’s main mechanic—its unique portal system—is cleverly sidestepping one of the problems with current room-scale tracking systems.
Although there are several ways to create what we’ll call ‘world-scale’ in-game locomotion, like Hover Junker‘s use of floating hovercraft or the direct teleport function seen in Cloudhead Game’s Blink system, portals – or more specifically portal guns, offer the user a fast-paced, nausea-free way of getting around a virtual world with the added benefit of getting a live preview of exactly where you’re going before you go there.
Valve’s Chet Faliszek tweets “[i]f you ever heard me talk about an amazing stealth game on the HTC Vive, this is it – Budget Cuts!”
Budget Cuts is currently a finalist for ‘Best Game’ in Unity’s 2016 Vision Summit VR/AR Awards in Hollywood February 10-11.
Still considered a “very early build,” the game slated to ‘come soon’ to HTC Vive and the Steam platform. The devs have clear interest in Oculus Touch support, but currently lack the necessary Touch developer kit to get started.
Budget Cuts is a stealth-action virtual reality game in development for the HTC Vive. The polished experience has the player avoiding humanoid robots and attacking from the shadows with throwing knives and crossbows. The game’s portaling locomotion system is a lesson for VR developers.
Budget Cuts impressed me with its polish and playability when I stepped inside using the HTC Vive Pre at Valve’s SteamVR Developer Showcase. Developed by a tiny indie team at Neat Corporation, the game is one of the first we’ve seen in VR to focus on stealth gameplay, and it delivers.
Locomotion That’s Intertwined with Gameplay and Lore
The slice of Budget Cuts that I played has players infiltrating an office environment to find an approve their own job application (presumably for deeper infiltration of the company). Navigating through the office space requires quite a bit of movement, and the developers have come up with a slick and functional method of locomotion that not only ties into gameplay, but is also thematically in place within the game.
Navigation is done with a portalling/blinking system, which essentially means you choose where you want to go and you appear there. We’ve seen systems like this before, and they work quite well to allow players to cross large virtual distances without any motion sickness. But without any context, portaling/blinking navigation can seem out of place. Budget Cuts instead makes sense of the system by making it part of the gameplay and the game lore.
It works like this: the player holds two futuristic-looking multi-tools which can be used to grab objects and store inventory items inside of them. The multi-tools can also turn into a teleportation gun by clicking on the thumb-pad of the Vive Pre controller. From here, the player can shoot the portal gun which lobs a blue ball into the world. This ball will bounce off of surfaces until it hits the ground. Once planted, the multi-tool shows a small circular window of the new location on a floating display which can be articulated using your hands. When you want to teleport to the location, you squeeze the side buttons on the Vive controller and the window into the new location envelops you, suddenly transporting you to the new space.
This system is quick and seamless, and smartly ties into the gameplay, grounding it within the world and making it seem sensible rather than out of place. For instance, at certain points in the game you’ll be blocked by a locked door. If, however, you’re able to find a vent which you can fire your portal ball through, then you’ll be able to teleport to the other side even though you couldn’t fit yourself through the vent.
The portal preview window is also useful; you’ll be trying to avoid patrolling robots, and looking through the window to make sure the coast is clear, before actually teleporting, is a must for remaining undetected. In the game you’ll find yourself lobbing the portal ball around corners and then holding the window up to look in every direction before jumping through.
Budget Cuts makes its locomotion mechanic not only part of the gameplay, but also gives it thematic context within the game world. Access to this ability comes thanks to fictional company Trans Corp, which “develops and refines space-time technology to perfection,” and is equipping spies with their tech to infiltrate competitors. This makes it fit in the mind of the player much more readily. Not only that, but the game and locomotion design could work on VR systems of many scales, not just room-scale (and we’ll likely see the game come to Oculus Touch before long).
VR developers starting in on new projects should take a page from Budget Cuts and think first about how players will navigate around their world and choose the locomotion system that can fit into that game’s setting and intended gameplay.
Throwing Knives That You Actually Throw
On occasion in Budget Cuts, you’ll spot a robot with its back turned to you through the portal preview window, and that’s where the game’s excellent throwing mechanics come into play. With the motion tracked Vive controllers, new gameplay opportunities are all around, including actually physically throwing a throwing knife at enemies rather than doing so with the press of a button or pull of a trigger. And let me tell you, landing a long range hit with a throwing knife is supremely satisfying, much more so than if I were ‘throwing’ with a button and ‘aiming’ with a reticle.
As I started my way into the Budget Cuts demo, I quickly found a supply closet which quite conveniently had two boxes of throwing knives sitting on a shelf. At first I didn’t actually know how the throwing mechanic worked, but I reached out to pick up a knife using the trigger on the Vive controller, then whipped my arm toward a wall and let go. The knife sliced through the air and stuck satisfyingly into the wall with a metallic thud. It worked exactly as I hoped, a testament to the intuitive controls afforded by VR motion input.
I gathered the knives up into my inventory (which is housed inside of your multi-tool and splays out nicely in front of you for easy selection with the press of a button), and set off looking for robots to kill. Robot guards patrol the office environment and will shoot you dead quite quickly if you’re spotted, forcing you to stay out of sight. The Vive’s headtracking makes it possible to physically peek around corners which is incredibly helpful in remaining hidden while carefully looking to see if the coast is clear.
At one point I teleported to the right side of an open doorway and peeked my head around only to see a robot just about to turn in my direction. I whipped my head quickly back behind the wall as a sense of adrenaline overcame me. I reached to my side to grab a mug off of a nearby shelf and tossed it through the door. The robot went to investigate and passed by the door, exposing its back to the sharp blade of my throwing knife, delivered with an expert (and oh-so-satisfying) toss. I launched the portal ball over to the bot’s corpse and first checked my surroundings through the portal window to make sure there weren’t any other enemies before portaling over to retrieve the knife from the robot’s back.
Later in the level I’d have to find a key hidden in some drawers which I could use to disable the anti-spy laser protection covering a vent. Once disabled, I removed the vent cover and fired my portal through to get to the next area. I also found a crossbow attachment for my multi-tool which allowed for more accurate robot extermination than the throwing knives.
I’m looking forward to playing more Budget Cuts and very curious to know how the experience will get deeper as players move beyond the polished bout of sneaking and robot killing which I got to experience in my brief time with the game.
Disclosure: Valve covered airfare and lodging for one writer to attend the SteamVR Developer Showcase.
You only need 10 minutes with a keyboard and mouse set-up to find out that moving around in VR is completely different from anything else in gaming. Here we take a look at some of the techniques developers are using to put you into VR, not only so you can feel like you’re somewhere else, but so you won’t be nauseous when you start exploring.
Unfortunate to say, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for locomotion in VR games—at least not the kind we’re used to when playing games on monitors or TVs. While clever hardware solutions like the omni-directional treadmill Virtuix Omni, or entire VR parks like The VOID do an excellent job of approximating endlessly walkable terrain, VR developers are thinking about the average user—the person with some room, a headset, and controller(s)—and they want that user to be able to explore expansive spaces in virtual reality comfortably.
Developers have been experimenting with just how to do this, and there’s now a number of different virtual reality locomotion techniques that provide comfortable experiences.
Roomscale Locomotion
So far there’s nothing better than dancing with your own two feet, and Valve’s Steam VR platform takes this to heart in the soon-to-release HTC Vive.
Creating a large-scale tracking volume means you’ll be able to walk right up to in-game characters, look under desks, hide behind mounds of treasure – truly experiencing virtual scenery like never before. Provided you aren’t tangling yourself up, you’ll definitely be surprised at the level of immersion you can achieve.
Both Oculus and Sony offer large-scale tracking volumes, but are emphasizing a balance in standing and seated gameplay for now. Our multiple experiences with both Rift and PlayStation VR have been a positive one, and we hope to see more opportunities to engage in more standup gameplay.
A good cockpit makes a world of difference, because there’s something innately comforting about having a solid feature in your foreground while you screech around corners in Project Cars, or blow up enemy wraiths in EVE: Valkyrie.
A vehicle not only adds a weightiness to your movements (which ought to be restricted by a physics engine), but also allows you to assume your natural sitting position, making for an easier 1-to-1 match-up that your brain really wants when its turning in directions it’s not actually going.
This is a boon for both developers currently making racing/flight/space sims, but also the players who will automatically step in needing nothing more than a chair and their smattering of peripheral goodies.
Roomscale Vehicles
Vehicles are nice. We like them. But when you have a room big enough for a boat, why not … have a boat?
StressLevelZero’s upcoming title Hover Junkers is a ‘VR only’ post-apocalyptic shooter that lets you hunt down your friends online using the game’s junk-encrusted hover boats. Although these sorts of ‘roomscale vehicles’ are still underused in current VR games, they not only address a problem, but actively use it as an integral game mechanic.
The game comes out first for HTC Vive in April and in Q3/Q4 for Oculus Rift, and we’re hoping other devs follow suit.
All three major headsets (HTC Vive, Ouclus Rift, PSVR) suffer a similar problem regardless of how much tracking volume they provide: when you hit the wall in the real world, you’re going to need a way of getting past it in the virtual.
Teleportation is a novel way of addressing a number of things that induce nausea in VR, like the dreaded ‘yaw stick poison’ – or when you use the right stick of your controller to turn your POV.
Virtual spaces like AltspaceVR, Cloudhead’s Blink, Epic Games’ FPS Bullet Train, Convrge and many more use teleportation to excellent effect, often including either a line-of-sight cursor or a ghostly outline that can be controlled by the player. Newly revealed title Budget Cuts directly uses teleportation as a gameplay mechanic with their unique portal system.
The more I think about virtual reality, the more I start to address the reasons that I’m attracted to it in the first place. Having full interaction with a virtual environment—including virtual people—has been my goal since childhood, and we’re inching closer to a day when immersive fiction will be a reality. But while we’re bridging the gap between now and the future, where a ‘perfect hardware solution’ supposedly exists, we need to find a way for the casual, non-gaming new comer to strap on a VR headset and immediately say ‘hey. I get that!’
It’s a growing multi-faceted industry Road to VR will be following for years to come, no doubt, but while I want that holodeck brand of perfect immersive fiction, we’re actually due for something that isn’t too far off.
The first wave of games and experiences built for upcoming consumer headsets will be defined by unpredictably variable room sizes, errant babies/kitties/coffee tables, minimal force-feedback from virtual stimulus; in short, any intruder on the infinite terrain of the virtual. And although we’re fundamentally limited in how we can interact in the space by these design bottlenecks – which represent a painful reminder that we still mostly inhabit the real world – these confines are helping to create some of the most interesting content ever.
Valve wants you to move your shit, but GabeN isn’t your mom. You can throw it on the couch for now.
The more we see games like Hover Junkers– a first-person shooter that pushes right up to the boundaries of what’s possible with its room-scale vehicles, or Budget Cuts – a stealth assassin game that leverages teleportation in a way that nearly evades the entire issue of limited play space – the more we’ll begin to define games not by the grandiosity they portray in gameplay trailers, but by how they make us feel when we play them. Like a first kiss, we’ll remember these moments for the rest of our lives.
But these are first-person room-scale games targeting the HTC Vive, a system that has hand controllers and ample space for virtual interaction. They depend on your direct influence to affect a change. Oculus and Sony however are stressing mostly seated play for now, possibly in a bid to slowly educate the user away from a lifetime of sitting squarely on their arse. Whether this is true or not, the companies have taken this approach and are developing for it. And this is a great place for seated, episodic narratives to grow.
battle aboard room-sized hover boats in ‘Hover Junkers’
Most recently I felt like a real American badass playing Negotiator VR for DK2, a first-person narrative-based title still in the works from 4PM Games, and the interesting bit was my butt was firmly in a chair.
Don’t get me wrong, the downloadable tech demo is short and still pretty rough around the edges, so by no means do I conflate it to greatness based on either criteria. Negotiator however has hit the nail on the head with an incredibly useful game mechanic that we may be seeing a lot more of in the future of seated gameplay, one that could potentially start its own sub-genre of low-effort, cinematic action-adventure games.
In Negotiator, you don’t play as a negotiator-for-hire. Not exactly. Rather you play near a negotiator-for-hire, stepping into his shoes for only the briefest of moments before you jump into the place of a sniper across the map, or an assault team member storming the airplane. It’s not a new concept to 3D gaming in the least, but it is for VR, and that’s seriously fucking interesting.
Negotiator has what I clumsily call the ‘FIFA on-rails perspective teleportation’ (FORPT – I made that up). FORPT offers you two mechanics that you’re familiar with:
Player switching from FIFA to drive a ball forward
Perspective teleportation
I realize I didn’t need to number these
In a game like Negotiator, you aren’t so much a man as you are the man’s mission, requiring little explanation outside of a short introduction of FORPT to the VR newcomer.
Similarly, the cinematic tech demo Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbitputs you in the archetype of the Saturday morning cartoon, where you race down a lonesome road to fight the bad guys. While the demo doesn’t introduce anything outside of a few well-scripted action sequences, the concept is the same. You aren’t a person, you’re an observer moving in an out of a rich, immersive story.
Oculus Story Studio’s ‘Henry’
Whether you can affect an outcome in the narrative, or just go along for the ride is clearly up to the developers, but I propose that both passive and active cinematic experiences are ripe for the picking, and that we should be experiencing full episodes of content like Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit and Negotiator on the regular.
Creating the mental space for VR narratives is in essence what Oculus Story Studio has been trying to spark in the VR community using Henry, and their most recent project Dear Angelica, to argue the case for cinematic narratives in VR.The idea that narrative-based VR experiences can be entertaining—even without your own personality thrust into the mix—is so potent, so directly attainable at this very moment that it’s sending chills down my spine just thinking about it.
We have our bottlenecks in VR and we need to enjoy them—all of them—while they last. But I’m ready to sit down and see what comes next.
The judges at Vision Summit 2016 sorted through nearly 250 applicants to find the top three VR/AR creations spanning a number of categories. The award ceremony represents the best out of these three competing games, experiences, or 360 videos.
The Vision Summit VR/AR Awards ceremony was hosted by Nonny de la Peña, a pioneer of immersive journalism known for several hard-hitting projects like Project Syria and Hunger in Los Angeles.
And the winners are:
Vision Inspire Award
I Expect You to Die by Schell Games
Made for Oculus Rift, ‘I Expect You to Die‘ is a virtual reality (VR) puzzle game that lets you step into the world of an elite secret agent to attempt to survive a series of deadly situations. The goal is to complete the mission using brain power, cunning and a top secret device that gives you the power of telekinesis.
The Vision Aspire Award recognizes the ‘very best submission’ taking into account thematic cohesion, immersion, technical merit and production quality.
Best VR Experience
Thunderbird: The Legend Begins by Innervision Games
‘Thunderbird: The Legend Begins‘ is the first chapter in an epic cinematic series designed exclusively for Virtual Reality. Embark on an interactive journey to discover the hidden secrets of an ancient legend shrouded in mystery. This puzzle-based adventure features advanced interactive game mechanics and stunning visuals to create a deeply immersive and compelling experience.
Best AR Experience
Eleanor of Ayer by Gelly Bomb Games
‘Eleanor of Ayer‘ is a augmented reality, multiple ending mystery puzzle game that follows the murder case of Shovi, the vocalist of the fictional rock band LUNACY. Before his last breath, Shovi leaves a dying message reading “Wa”, leaving the band’s drummer Walrus to become a suspect. Customers of the cafe may request a tablet from the waiter and use it to solve various puzzles that will reveal the true murderer.
Technical Achievement Award
Modbox by Alientrap
‘Modbox‘ is a physics sandbox game where you completely set and control your environment. You create your own Holodeck to play with, and to share with others.
With a focus on real-world applications for architecture, education, industry, etc, this award was given to the project with the highest quality, complexity, and originality.
Artistic Achievement Award
TECHNOLUSTby IRIS VR Inc
‘TECHNOLUST’ is a Virtual Reality Adventure set in a near-future Cyberpunk world. The world and style of TECHNOLUST are inspired by 1980’s and 90’s Cyberpunk fiction like Blade Runner, Neuromancer and Robocop. Join the resistance and help bring down the oppressive corporations… or just hang out at home and watch a movie with your artificial intelligence. Go to the arcade and experience new worlds or hack into secure networks and fight to set the truth free. As in the real world, the choice is yours.
This award was presented to the project which created “the most striking artistic VR/AR experience.”
Best Game
Budget Cutsby Neat Corporation
‘Budget Cuts‘ is a VR stealth game, putting you in the shoes of a spy at a company undergoing budget cuts.
Best Film/Interactive Story
Apollo 11 VR by Immersive VR Education
‘Apollo 11 Vr Experience‘: On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. You can now experience this event by becoming Neil Armstrong and boarding the Saturn V Rocket which is still to this day the most powerful machine ever created by humans.
Best Live-Action Experience
U2 Song for Someone – Vrse by Chris Milk, U2, Apple, Universal Music Gropu, Vrse Inc., and Vrse.Works
Chris Milk and U2 came together to create a revolutionary new visual interpretation ofU2’s “Song For Someone.” Milk takes singers from across the world and joins them together to create this reimagining of the music video.
Road to VR wants to congratulate both the participants and winners of this year’s Vision Summit VR/AR Awards. We’ll be bringing you more coverage of Unity’s Vision Summit throughout the day as we interview developers and demo some of the best games to come to virtual reality.
Budget Cuts is a first-person stealth game that’s one of the more fun and engaging room-scale HTC Vive experiences that I’ve played. You’re an aspiring spy trying to infiltrate a robot-protected building in order to approve your job application. Part of the intention behind this game was to push the limits of physical action that was incorporated into the game play with sneaking around, looking around corners, and peaking over obstacles. There’s also a very unique teleportation method where you can look through the lens of a Portal-like window that you can sweep around an area in order to preview your next teleportation destination. I had a chance to catch up with Neat Corporation’sJenny Nordenborg and Joachim Holmér at Unity’s AR/VR Vision Summit to talk about their design goals with Budget Cuts, some of their favorite stories and reactions to the game, and some of their future plans. Budget Cuts is expected to be finished sometime later this year.
The HTC Vive Pre is now in the hands of press and developers around the world and although hands-on impressions with Vive games are now fairly common, what’s the SteamVR interface, where you spend your time between games, like to use and what can it do?
As an immersive computing platform, virtual reality requires you to wear hardware in order to experience it. In day to day use, this means that any actions which require a user to remove said hardware presents both an inconvenience and an immersion breaking problem. So, once you’re in VR, you’d ideally like to stay there until you’re good and ready to come out again.
For the forthcoming launch of the HTC Vive Consumer Edition, Steam will be the primary target platform for most VR games and experiences – specifically Valve’s immersive branch SteamVR. SteamVR incorporates an evolution of the content portal’s ‘Big Picture’ mode, one specifically designed for VR. Once your headset is on, a floating window presents you with the familiar Steam interface and, using the SteamVR controllers, you can interact by pointing and selecting.
In this video captured by Frank He using his HTC Vive Pre system, he demonstrates how SteamVR allows (mostly) fluid transitions between the Steam user interface and the launching of and switching between VR games and applications. It’s the kind of fluid, seamless experience console gamers have come to expect, with both Xbox One and PS4 allowing any title to be paused mid-game whilst the user performance an action in the OS. SteamVR also allows some basic customisation of your experience too – with UI colours and your 360 VR ‘background’ selectable and changeable. Note that tweaking of the SteamVR’s Chaperone system grids are also allowed.
What’s more, SteamVR allows in VR browsing even when in the midst of playing a game. Need tips on how to complete particular level? No problem, bring up the virtual web browser and head to reddit to check for tips. The browser allows the selection and copying / pasting of text all controlled with the HTC Vive’s wands.
It all works rather well, bar some stutters and pauses here and there, and offers users a hopefully nausea-free way to pop in and out of virtual reality games whilst keeping an eye on the real world on the web.
Samsung’s Gear VR has of course been sporting an all-VR interface and shell for some time, in the form of Oculus home. It’s expected that an expanded version of Oculus Home will form the basis for the primary user experience for those using the consumer Oculus Rift when it ships to consumers this month.
The HTC Vive Consumer Edition went up for pre-order on February 29th, is on sale now and is due to ship from April 5th.
Note: The games featured in the video are VR Unicorns’ Selfie Tennis and Neat Coporation’s Budget Cuts.
Budget Cuts, a first-person stealth assassin game from Neat Corporation, isn’t out just yet, but HTC Vive owners can now dive into the formerly press-only demo.
Budget Cuts wasone of the first VR games to weave a portal locomotion technique directly into its gameplay. That said, people have been going crazy over the demo thus far, which takes you through a full level filled with enemy robot sentries that you have to dodge around using your teleportation gun. A single slice of your throwing knife is all you need to put your enemies down, that, and a good sense of direction as you infiltrate the mega corporation undergoing—you guessed it—drastic budget cuts.
YouTubers, streamers, and the media have all had their hands on Budget Cuts, and if you pre-ordered a Vive (or have access to either Vive dev kit) you’ll be able to play the demo starting today, of course free of charge.
Joachim Holmér, founder of Neat Corp, maintains that the full game is slated for the end of this year and that they’re “…aiming to be about as long as Portal 1 [in game length].” While the team has an Oculus Touch dev kit in their possession, there hasn’t been an official word on whether the game is making a jump to the Rift or not.
It’s been more than a year and a half since I first stepped into Budget Cuts, an instantly promising VR title from indie developer Neat Corporation with a novel and efficient locomotion system that blends perfectly with the game’s throwing-knife stealth action gameplay. Though the studio has been largely silent since then, they’ve assured me that the game is being actively developed (“like, a lot”) and headed toward an early 2018 launch.
If you’ve never played the free Budget Cuts demo, you have no excuse not to fire up your headset and give it a go. I haven’t heard of a single person who has played the demo and come out of it not genuinely impressed and ready for more.
Sadly, the taste of the demo is the last we’ve seen basically since it launched more than a year ago, with the studio offering no new updates into the state of the game’s development, not even so much as a screenshot.
After hearing recently from a few folks in the VR community who were wondering whether the game was still in the works, I reached out to get a pulse on Neat Corporation and make sure the development team hadn’t got lost in VR somewhere along the way. Much to my relief, the studio says they’ve been head down, hard at work on Budget Cuts, and confirmed the game is on track for an early 2018 release.
“We’re spending minimal time on PR in order to focus on development of the game, seeing as we are such a small team. This understandably leads to people wondering about the status. Just rest assured, we are working on the game, like, a lot,” Neat Corporation developer Marko Permanto told me.
Without any major VR hardware releases on the radar for this year, 2018 is shaping up to be a time for content to shine. We’ve rounded up a list of 20-something VR games launching in 2018 that we’re excited about, covering all three major VR systems: PSVR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Ace Combat 7
Platform: PSVR (2018)
While Bandai Namco’s Ace Combat 7 is advertising “exclusive VR features” instead of straight VR support (meaning the campaign isn’t playable in VR), we’re still excited to strap into either Osean or Erusean jets as the two fictional superpowers duke it out in the skies. Who knows, maybe it’ll be wildly awesome?
ARK Park is a multiplayer adventure game based on the world of ARK:Survival Evolved (2017). While it may have been delayed by the China-based Snail Games from the previously slated late 2017 release, the mix of dinosaur-themed factual and fictional elements has certainly tickled our curiosity. Also: you can ride a dinosaur.
The world needs more fighting babies. To provide this insatiable need for post-natal, pre-toddler carnage, the immensely capable VR studio Kite & Lightning are developing a VR melee party brawler that puts ridiculously dressed infants into kart-based Smash Bros-style combat. We haven’t had a hands-on yet, but the studio has promised a 2018 release, so we’re sure to get one soon enough.
Brass Tactics
Platform: Oculus (February 28, 2018)
This VR multiplayer/singleplayer real-time strategy game comes from Hidden Path Entertainment, the minds behind Defense Grid 2: Enhanced VR Edition (2016) and Age of Empires II: HD Edition (2013).Who hasn’t dreamt about bringing their favorite tabletop game to life, and ordering armies of miniature soldiers to ultimate victory?
This online 2-player co-op strategic shooter will force you to take cover as you make your way across a war-torn fictional Eastern European city. While you won’t get the free-wheeling locomotion options like many shooters, instead giving you a sort of ‘on-rails’ point-to-point automatic movement, the strength and amount of enemies will make you think twice before selecting a cover position for fear or getting shot to bits by a machine gun-welding baddies.
Budget Cuts
Platform: Steam, Viveport (2018)
Already offering a wildly successful demo the ninja assassin-style Budget Cuts puts heavy emphasis on stealth combat. Set to release sometime in 2018, indie studio Neat Corporation surely picked up some important pointers when they were invited to collaborate with Valve last year—the results of which we can’t wait to see. Seriously. Play the demo now if you haven’t already.
Echo Combat
Platform: Oculus (2018)
As if Ready at Dawn’s singleplayer adventure Lone Echo (2017) and free multiplayer sports game Echo Arena (2017) weren’t cool enough, the studio is also bringing out a combat-focused, zero-G game in 2018. Demos aren’t in the wild yet, but if it’s coming from the studio that produced Road to VR’s Best Rift Game of 2017, we’ll be mashing F5 on Oculus’ blog in anticipation of seeing and hearing more.
Firewall: Zero Hours VR
Platform: PSVR (2018)
Revealed at PSX 2017 recently, Firewall Zero Hour is a team-based, tactical multiplayer FPS coming exclusively to PSVR this year. The game is said to support both DualShock and PS Aim, although the developers haven’t made mention of PS Move controllers yet. Either way, this attack/defend shooter looks to fuse VR with some classic assault-style games like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.
Golem
Platform: PSVR (2018)
Originally teased at PSX 2015 with a slated release for an October 2016, High Wire Games’Golem is finally coming to PSVR. In Golem, you play as an adventurous kid who has been seriously injured. You are stuck at home in your bed, dreaming of exploring the outside world. The minds behind the game are ex-Bungie staffers, including Halo composer Marty O’Donnell.
Although it’s been a while since we played, and things have surely changed, check out 6 minutes of gameplay here.
Marvel Powers United VR
Platform: Oculus (2018)
Created by Oculus and Sanzaru Games (behind titles like VR Sports Challenge and Ripcoil), there’s plenty of ways to battle in this Marvel-themed arena brawler. Turn into the Hulk, Rocket Raccoon, Captain Marvel, Deadpool, and many more as you battle enemies in online multiplayer arena battles that let you wield real super powers.
From Disruptive Games comes a multiplayer action-packed hero shooter that transforms you into a titan, letting you use your massive size and firepower to compete with others in a quest to become a god. The game is said to come with free locomotion, destructible environments, and put heavy emphasis on strategic gameplay.
Moss
Platform: PSVR (February 2018)
A charming third-person action-adventure puzzle game from Polyarc, Moss gives you control of the small but fierce mouse named Quill. With a tiny sword in hand, you vanquish pint-sized enemies as you solve large puzzles. There’s a free demo available already on the second PSVR demo disc, so there’s no reason not to fall in love with little Quill already.
The result of a successful Kickstarter in 2015, Pixel Ripped has been in development well before consumer headsets released. Heavy on nostalgia, the game tosses you into the world of 1989 as Nicola. Going ‘one level deeper’ into the virtual world, you incarnate a heroine named Dot who is on a quest to return the magical rock that contains the soul of Dot’s world, Adventureland, which has been stolen by the Cyblin Master. Cyblin has other plans though as he tries to break into the Nicola’s ‘real’ world.
Space Junkies
Platform: Oculus, Steam (Spring 2018)
From Ubisoft Montpelier, Space Junkies is an upcoming zero-G multiplayer shooter that puts straight into team-based or deathmatch-style combat. Yes, there are light sabers, but the focus is ultimately on the game’s impressive assortment of guns. Visuals are really polished, and from what we’ve played, so is the overall deathmatch concept.
Sprint Vector is a racing game that has integrated a unique locomotion arm-swinging locomotion style that moves you forward through a Mario Kart-style race course. Hailing from Raw Data developer Survios, we had a lot of fun in trying out the fast-paced, nausea-free racer.
From Playful Corp comes another third-person platformer, albeit less boisterous and family-oriented than the studio’s last VR game, Lucky’s Tale (2016). With some puzzles thrown in for good measure, you guide a mysterious traveler on her way through a subterranean landscape. She soon discovers advanced alien technology, is stalked by an ominous beast lurking in the shadows, and finally has a very close encounter with a giant being of unknown origin.
The Inpatient
Platform: PSVR (2018)
Originally expected for Q4 2017 release, Supermassive Games standalone prequel to Until Dawn: Rush of Blood (2016) has been delayed until 2018. When we first demoed the psychological horror game, the level of realism was remarkable thanks to some very well-tuned facial motion capture. We can’t wait to see more soon.
From Ubisoft Montreal and Elijah Wood’s studio Spectrevision, Transference is a physiological thriller that blends movie and reality in what promises to be a disquieting experience. Popping into the memories of people suffering from PTSD and reliving their nightmare-fuel pasts sounds pretty disquieting to me.
Vacation Simulator
Platform: PSVR, Oculus, Steam (2018)
Announced at this year’s Game Awards, Owlchemy Labs’ Vacation Simulator is following in the footsteps of its breakout multi-platform success Job Simulator (2016). While it’s unsure if the tongue-in-check simulator style will find the same level of launch day success its spiritual predecessor, we’ll be there ready to play to see if it tickles our collective funny bones.
Windlands 2
Platform: PSVR, Oculus, Steam (2018)
Windlands (2016), the high-flying exploration game from Psytec Games, is getting a sequel this year that’s looking to alter its predecessor’s formula with the addition of co-op adventuring as well as combat. Combat has altered the zen-like nature of the game somewhat, which could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. Multiplayer adventuring is a net positive though, so we can’t wait to see what Windlands 2 will serve up.
While Valve is still mum on its three games originally confirmed back in February 2017, Dan O’Brien, Vive general manager for the Americas, revealed to The Rolling Stone that Valve was still “very committed” to the promise of delivering its three VR games. Valve has produced The Lab (2016) and plenty of content for the SteamVR Home space. We’re itching to see any game with the level of fit and finish we see in both productions.
Blood And Truth
Platform: PSVR (TBA)
Sony’s London Studio first released Blood and Truth’s spiritual predecessor with the first PSVR demo disk; London Heist. The demo’s Guy Ritchie-style Cockney crime theme is an awesome backdrop to the demo’s shooting sequences, so the thought of having a full game where you’re essentially an action hero looking for revenge, well, it sounds pretty badass.
It’s been over two years since Stockholm-based Neat Corporation released the initial prototype for Budget Cuts, an upcoming stealth-action game that throws you into a robot-filled office space and arms you with various throwing weapons and a novel portal-based teleporting device, letting you sneakily stalk the corridors like a knife-wielding Nightcrawler. Now that the game has an official release date and price, Neat Corp let us in for the first official taste of the game at this year’s GDC before it heads out to HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in May.
Like many people with a Vive in early 2016, I’ve played the Budget Cuts prototype a bunch. Not only is it still free to download on Steam and showcases an impressive level of polish, it introduced a novel locomotion mechanic that instantly made sense in the context of the world – a teleportation gun that not only lets you traverse the sprawling office building, but also acts as a way to effectively preview your destination by giving you a portal window to your destination. Shooting the teleportation gun and using the portal to check if the coast was clear to accurately position yourself behind your target before zapping over to your new location really added to the game’s mystique and excitement.
Image courtesy Neat Corp
In that sense, not a lot of the fundamentals have changed from the prototype I played years prior to the Budget Cuts I saw today at GDC, the second level of the game proper. The portal system still works magnificently. Tactically avoiding baddies and popping up behind them is still massively fun. Predictably, there are some notable bits that Neat Corp has scaled back in certain areas and expanded in others in efforts to make the estimated 7 hours of the gameplay more engaging.
The robots are scarier by a few percentage points than the big-headed goofs that skittered around on high alert in the prototype. They’re lankier, more imposing, and they don’t die immediately like before, instead requiring an accurate hit to a vital point to fully dispatch, something that only required a single haphazard toss of a knife before. The guardian bots also carry shiny revolvers (you can’t use them yourself) fitted with a laser beam so you know when you’ve got a bullet coming your way. And even on ‘Standard’ difficulty, I did die a few times. Thankfully when I died cowering and screaming, I was reloaded to an automatic checkpoint for another immediate go. The game, I was told, will also come with easy and hard modes which will tune the robots’ hit points, attention, and accuracy.
There’s friendly non-combatant worker drones too, although I didn’t quite understand their purpose other than target practice and a few interesting bits of dialogue. Yes, I felt a moral twinge when I stabbed the docile pacifist-bots.
Weapons have also slightly changed too. While the throwing knives are still there, you can also toss scissors and darts that you find lying around the office too. The crossbow pistol is gone, as I was told “guns aren’t fun.” In the close quarters of Budget Cuts, I tend to agree. Without the crossbow, my focus centered around perfecting my throwing form since I wasn’t using the game’s optional aim-assist. I wasn’t great at throwing, but it seemed like I was getting better near the end of the 30-minute demo. Aim-assist wasn’t implemented in the build at GDC, but it should be in available at launch in May.
The latest demo has also made some changes in terms of lighting. Much of the level was either entirely dark, or entirely light, which I later discovered was because you had the ability to switch lights on and off in certain sections of the level, something you could use to your tactical advantage.
To my utter delight, there wasn’t an incessant voice telling you where to go or what to do either, as you’re mostly left alone to figure out the way forward (as far as I know). While there’s a fair bit of signs to read, narrative elements played out via a voice and paper instruction delivered via periodically placed fax machines, requiring you to dial a number taken from your handy-dandy pager. There are also found objects hidden away in desk drawers (all of them open!) that might hold a few more storyline tidbits too.
From the demo, I never really got a sense of what sort of puzzles would lay ahead, as most of my interactions involved finding security key cards to get through locked doors. This was admittedly an early level though, so I suspect there’s more varied gameplay in the full release.
I also didn’t get a chance to see one of the game’s bosses or get a greater sense of the narrative behind it all. This, I was told, was intentional. Keeping the game well under wraps during its entire development, Neat Corp wasn’t ready to give away anything substantive yet.
While Budget Cuts is visually cartoonish, sporting the sort of low-ish poly look of games like Job Simulator (2016), a cohesive color palette and fine attention to lighting really helps transport you into the game; it just creeps up on you. Emerging from the darkness, I felt like I really was in the shadows waiting to strike (or die), and as a result, I completely bought into the adrenaline rush. If the full release of Budget Cuts can deliver this for the entire 7 hours of estimated gameplay, well, we might just have another VR-native hit on our hands.
Two years in the making, Budget Cuts has remained almost completely off the radar after briefly surfacing back in 2016, but this week at GDC 2018 the game has reemerged with fresh details, including a May 31st release date, which, for this promising title, still manages to feel like an eternity away.
Update (5/9/18):Budget Cuts was set to launch on May 16th, but has not been pushed back by two weeks, with a new release date of May 31st, according to a post from developer Neat Corporation. The original article has been updated with this information.
The studio cites “unforeseen obstacles in the development of Budget Cuts,” and says “we want to release Budget Cuts in a state that we’re proud of and know will be enjoyable throughout the entire game (without killing our devs in the process).”
Original Article (3/19/18), Updated: Budget Cutsimpressed us back in 2016 when it demonstrated smart and innovative VR game mechanics back before any consumer VR headsets had even hit the market. Today, many VR developers are still struggling to come to grips with VR game design, but developer Neat Corp has been busy toiling away, in stealth (if you will), turning Budget Cuts into something that’s still promising, even as VR game design has advanced a good two years since the last time we saw the game. We went hands on with the latest build of Budget Cuts at GDC 2018.
Neat Corp tells us that Budget Cuts will launch on May 31st priced at $30. Promising seven or so hours of content, the game will be released for both HTC Vive (SteamVR) and Oculus Rift (Oculus Home).
Image courtesy Neat Corp
Neat Corp developer Linnéa Harrison tells us that the game will support full room-scale locomotion, and, while the studio plans to encourage Rift users to use three Sensor configurations for greater immersion, the game will support typical two Sensor front-facing setups as well. When it comes to locomotion, Harrison and team said that the game’s teleporting movement is here to stay, as it’s intertwined with both gameplay and story and slapping smooth movement into the game simply wouldn’t work with the game’s underlying design.
The team told us that players can expect stealth, action, puzzles, and bosses. They also said that a number of new mechanics have been introduced since the release of the game’s demo back in 2016, which support varying modes of gameplay, giving players choice in how they want to experience the game. Indeed, they said the game can in theory be played 100% stealth, for those patient and cunning enough to go completely unseen. Also at one point in the new build I opened an office cabinet and found a single cookie inside, so there’s curiously placed cookies too.
Budget Cuts (2018) is a room-scale VR stealth game from indie studio Neat Corporation. Launching on May 31st on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, we took the time to show you just what this objectively fantastic game looks like from the very beginning.
Banter from office drones is a near-constant in Budget Cuts, as the docile bots are designed to replace your human colleagues. It’s the military-grade security bots you have to watch out for, using your teleporation gun to sneakily zip around the vast office complex and dispatch the gun-totting robots before they get a chance to shoot you first.
For more info, check out our full review of Budget Cuts, which we gave a solid [9.2/10] for its killer VR game mechanics, its engaging story, and the adrenaline-soaked feeling that comes part and parcel with hiding under a desk, hoping to fly under the radar of the see-all, kill-all robotic enemies.
Budget Cuts, a first-person stealth VR game, has been eagerly awaited since Stockholm-based indie studio Neat Corporation first released a free demo in 2016. The demo, which quickly became a breakout success in the early days of consumer VR, demonstrated a unique portal-teleportation mechanic, that, when married with the ability to throw knives at robot guards, spelled an instant hit—at least from a basic gameplay perspective. Two years later, the full release of Budget Cuts lands this Thursday, May 31st TBD and hopefully will definitely been worth the wait (see updated below).
Developer: Neat Corportation Available On: Steam (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift) Reviewed On: HTC Vive, Tested on Oculus Rift Release Date: TBD
Update (05/30/18): Neat Corp announced via a Reddit post that the long-awaited ‘Budget Cuts’ is being delayed until further notice.
In my playthrough, the bugs I encountered weren’t grave enough to consider the game unreviewable, or even remotely unplayable, and I firmly stick by the score given below. In retrospect I may have just been lucky to have seen acceptable frame rates on my admittedly higher-spec test rig and HTC Vive, and didn’t encounter anything besides minor bugs, something Neat Corp said would be ironed out for launch, then scheduled for May 31st. We did note bad optimization on Rift, but went ahead with the review on Vive anyway, giving the studio the benefit of the doubt that the press version wasn’t ready for Rift users in the first place, citing the lack of 180-degree sensor support on the press build on Steam.
The studio says they’ll be taking the time to improve framerate until it’s “consistent and acceptable.” The launch is delayed until further notice.
Gameplay
Cubicles, fluorescent lighting, copy machines that don’t work: offices can be a depressing place, but what’s even more depressing is when you find yourself in a boring, cookie-cutter job that’s slowly being automated away. But like Neo’s impetus to escape The Matrix, you soon find yourself receiving a strange phone call telling you to get the hell out of there, lest you wish to meet the same fate as your other human colleagues: reported to Human Resources to never be seen, or heard from again.
The Morpheus to your Matrix is Winta, a helpful voice on the other end of the fax machine who sends you instructions, clues, and guides you along your way as you uncover the truth behind the megalomaniac Texan owner ‘Rex’ and his obsession with squeezing the most out of his business. Humans, I learn, simply aren’t apart of the equation anymore, as an army of docile drones fill the workplace with canned banter like “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!” and “Don’t you just hate Mondays?”
Image courtesy Neat Corp
These aren’t the droids you’re worried about (or looking for), because in Rex’s palpable paranoia, which is constantly broadcasted over the office-wide loudspeaker, he’s peppered the office with military-grade security bots that tote revolvers, along with a keen sense of awareness when you’re in their line of sight. Thankfully, Winta has provided you with a number of “letter openers” (read: sharp throwing knives) and a translocator gun that lets you teleport around the sprawling office space like Nightcrawler, popping in and out of existence as you navigate the giant building’s many corridors and ventilation shafts. A preview portal lets you check if the coast is clear before committing to the jump, but the portal can be seen by anyone who looks your way.
Image captured by Road to VR
Other tools at your disposal: two gripping devices that take the place of your hands, and a magnifying glass-shaped viewer that lets you read the most essential bits of Winta’s messages, a nice touch to simplify the hand-written faxes, but not vital to the task at hand.
A quick pause before I get into the meat of the review. I have to say this: I loved the original Budget Cuts demo, and only wanted more of it, narrative be damned. But even then, Neat Corp has proven that it has storytelling chops too. I found myself exploring the facility, rifling through notes and learning about my colleagues that have disappeared before me, and laughing at the whole game’s quirky humor and tactful voiceovers. I didn’t need a fun and engaging story to enjoy ganking bots with my less-than-expert knife throws, but after playing, I can say this: expect more of Budget Cuts down the line, because there’s a big story to be told here, and I think I only scratched the surface in my nine hours of total gameplay. Now, back to the meaty bits:
I’m not ashamed to admit that in the beginning I had some trouble getting used to the way you change tools and access inventory, which hold five items of your choosing. While it took a little time to gain the muscle-button memory, Budget Cuts makes it clear that this isn’t a fast-paced, run-and-gun attack. You aren’t given an overly easy way to move and dispatch enemies because Budget Cuts is hard—and satisfyingly so.
Image captured by Road to VR
If you find yourself wishing for a silenced pistol, then you’re not playing the game right. There are no power-ups, no health boosts, no shields, and a single shot from a robot will send you back to your automatic save point. After multiple fails on a single level, it became clear to me that patience is more than virtue in Budget Cuts, it’s a necessity.
The game takes every violent situation, and makes it into a big moving puzzle; robots have standard patrol paths, and they usually stand between you and your objective; get a key card, door code, collect an item important to the narrative. Once you figure out the patrol path, you can swoop in and administer your three inches of steel, or you can challenge yourself by playing all the way through as a pacifist. That’s right, from head-to-toe, you can enforce your own Hindu code on Budget Cuts and complete the game without ever decommissioning a single robot. Ventilation shafts are plentiful, and only the quickest and most proficient teleporters can make it out alive.
The preview portal, which lets you look around corners before actually teleporting, presents its own dangers, as robots can see and shoot you through it. It’s an essential tool for figuring out where to go, and where your enemies are.
Image courtesy Neat Corp
Level design is typically multilayered, offering a number of ways to complete an objective, be it a through the three foot-tall ventilation shafts, or by ducking for cover behind the many cubicles. Neat Corp has also made it near impossible to cheat by limiting your view when you either teleport, or pop your head through doors or walls. The anti-cheat system forces you to adapt to the game’s environment, making you duck in ventilation shafts, and bend down to peer through grates. I’ll cover more of that in the Immersion section, but suffice it to say that I loved how the game forces you to be present, and not take the easy way out.
Core game mechanics aside, what remains is really more than the sum of its parts. Adrenaline rushes of a missed knife throw (causing the target to spin around and point a gun in your direction), the act of sneaking around and planning your next move, following breadcrumb trails to a missing key—it all works so well together, making Budget Cuts one of the smartest VR games to date.
Image courtesy Neat Corp
That said, I did experience some frustration with a few puzzles. If you have a hard time listening to instructions, Winta can’t help you, and she isn’t piped into your ear at all times—a good thing in my opinion.
Sometimes learning a new game mechanic, like unscrewing a grate with a screwdriver, can leave some logical gaps that may drive you crazy looking for the right solution. Fine attention to detail is a must with Budget Cuts, because once the office is splattered with robot blood and you’re still looking for that final key code, only your wits will save you.
Immersion
Budget Cuts is cartoony, but graphics aren’t really the most important thing when it comes to immersion. When everything works correctly, and there’s a sense of danger lurking around every corner, then you may find yourself cowering under a virtual desk for cover. You wouldn’t hide, or scream, or fumble through your inventory if you didn’t think you were in real danger.
Image courtesy Neat Corp
Therein lies the problem with the current generation of PC VR. Budget Cuts is a fiercely room-scale game that requires you to duck, take cover, and crawl your way through the world. This is great when you don’t have to mind the ever-present cable attached to your computer, which can take you out of the experience somewhat.
As a teleportation-only game though, I thought I would feel less immersed, but teleportation works extremely well given the game’s premise and objectives. For the anti-teleportation crowd: this game needs it, and gives you a good reason to use it.
Now for the bad: level loading times may be enough for you to hate taking a bullet, because you’ll sit around at a loading screen for about 20-30 seconds upon restart, and even more at the beginning of a new level.
Optimization is also a pain point. On Vive, I saw max performance, which had brief moments of jitter in more object-dense areas; not unplayable in the slightest, but less than I would have expected. For whatever reason, Rift optimization was worse, leading to brief moments of visible stuttering. For reference, my test rig has an Intel Core i7-6700K, 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 1080. I would have liked some degree of control over the graphical quality of the game, as there are no graphics options at all.
Some other less than impressive bits: textures sometimes popped in an out, some areas loaded slowly, and robots sometimes collided with the game’s geometry to comical effect after death. None of this is game breaking, but I worry the lack of user-controlled graphic options may make Budget Cuts even more jittery on lower-spec systems, provided there aren’t any behind-the-scenes automatic graphic optimizations tailored to your specific setup. I admittedly had a pre-launch press build, which came along with two caveats. 1) the version lacked 180-degree snap-turning for front-facing sensor setups (but will come in the launch version), only offering 360-degree sensor support. 2) And the press build was “bound to have bugs that we won’t see in the release build,” I was told. That said, I suspect the problem with Rift optimization will be solved at launch, or at very least in the first updates.
Comfort
Teleportation is by far the most comfortable of artificial locomotion schemes, making Budget Cuts among the most comfortable games to play for all levels. Room-scale locomotion, like peeking around corners and hiding behind barriers, is basically the most natural way to make minor adjustments. Once implemented, snap-turning for 180-degree sensor setups comes as a close second in terms of user comfort.
It’s also a very physical game too, ideally requiring the full use of your arms and legs. Crouching down to avoid detection and hobbling through ventilation ducts means you’ll be getting a quad workout to boot. Although if you are unable or unwilling to stand, much of the game’s objects are reachable from the height of a chair, so while there isn’t a bespoke ‘seated mode’, users shouldn’t have a problem playing seated, provided they’re well away from desks (or wayward children), and either use the 180 snap-turn, or have a spinning computer chair. Seated players may also have to play more tactically, since crouching around peeking around corners while seated isn’t as easy.
Neat Corporation today announced that Budget Cuts, their upcoming VR stealth game, is being delayed until further notice, citing framerate stability and other bugs encountered in the game.
The studio announced the news via a Reddit post, saying that the long-awaited Budget Cuts still suffers optimization issues. The studio says they’ll be taking the time to improve the game’s stability and framerate until it’s “consistent and acceptable,” delaying Budget Cuts launch until further notice.
The latest delay comes after a two-week delay earlier this month, which Neat Corp says they thought would be enough to fix the outlying issues with the game.
With the review embargo up since May 28th, we’ve already had a chance to dive in, giving it a solid [9.2/10]. In my playthrough, the bugs I encountered weren’t grave enough to consider the game unreviewable, or even remotely unplayable. In retrospect, I may have just been lucky to have seen acceptable frame rates on my admittedly higher-spec test rig and HTC Vive, and didn’t encounter anything more than what I would consider minor bugs that weren’t gamebreaking in the least, something Neat Corp said would be ironed out for launch, then scheduled for May 31st.
We did note bad optimization on Rift, but went ahead with the review on Vive anyway, giving the studio the benefit of the doubt that the press version wasn’t ready for Rift users in the first place, citing the lack of 180-degree sensor support on the press build on Steam.
“So, when will the game release? The honest answer is that we don’t know, but it’s going to be as soon as the game is as performant and stable as it should be,” says Neat Corp’s Freya Holmer. “I’d like to say we’re releasing soon, but that meant 2.5 years last time we used that term, so I’m going to say “in 5 minutes” which should mean approximately 1-2 weeks. Will it take longer? Maybe, maybe not. It’s very hard to predict when the issues we’re facing have many unknown variables and moving parts, which is why we’re not ready with a specific release date. Maybe we’ll time it perfectly with E3, to make sure our game will be drowned out by all of the other announcements.”
On the docket of items to address: occlusion culling, audio performance, eliminating rare progression-blocking bugs, and fixing screen glitches when framerate drops on Oculus Native build.
“On behalf of the Budget Cuts team,” says Holmer “we’re truly sorry, and hope you’re all okay with waiting just a little bit more.”
While disheartening to hear, we stick by our review score, and look forward to the day when users can see for themselves why we rated Budget Cuts so highly; hopefully sooner rather than later.
Neat Corporation, the team behind Budget Cuts (2018), revealed today that they’re currently porting the VR stealth adventure to PSVR. Moreover, if everything goes well, it could be coming to Oculus Quest too.
right now we are working on a PSVR version of budget cuts – quest will require even more of a performance optimization but we will look into it once we are "done" with PSVR!
Budget Cuts puts you in the hum-drum world of an endless office complex. Just as you’re about to die of boredom, a fax comes through that warns you of impending doom. All of the humans in the office have been mysteriously replaced by worker drones, and it’s your job to get past the deadly security bots with only throwing knives and your trusty portal-style teleportation gun to figure out what happened.
While we genuinely liked the game, unfortunately it was plagued with performance issues early on which actually forced the team to reschedule launch well after reviews were already out in a bid to smooth over some of the game-breaking bugs that made their way to some reviewers.
That said, Neat Corp has plenty to do to get the physics-based stealth game in shape for the decreased graphical and CPU power of the PS4. Another hurdle to jump over will invariably be the PS Camera’s smaller, front-facing tracking volume that will no doubt require users to make heavy use of snap-turning locomotion in addition to the game’s native teleportation scheme.
Whatever the case may be, we’re hoping it does well enough to bring the game to Oculus Quest, because it’s clear a virtually unlimited tracking volume would be an insane addition to a game that gets you dodging, ducking, and cowering under virtual desks for your life.
Neat Corporation today announced at UploadVR’s E3 VR showcase that they’ve partnered with Fast Travel Games to create a sequel to their VR stealth game Budget Cuts (2018).
Called Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency, the game is said to arrive on SteamVR headsets sometime in 2019.
Here’s how Fast Travel Games describes Budget Cuts 2 on the game’s website:
TransCorp is about to optimize humanity out of existence, and you must find a way into the belly of the beast to stop their vicious budget cuts. Fight your way through a multitude of new environments and robotic enemies; find new tools and allies along the way. Put an end to the notion of ultimate efficiency before it puts an end to us.
Image courtesy Neat Corporation, Fast Travel Games
Fast Travel calls Budget Cuts 2 both “the conclusion” to the adventure started in Budget Cuts, but is also a self-contained game positioned to appeal to new player’s of the franchise.
In the trailer, linked above and below, it appears the franchise is making strides to leave the indoor office space which made up the totality of the first game, instead visiting larger and more open environments.
A new weapon can also be seen, a bow that lets you get in longer, more precise shots in comparison to the sharp-thing-throwing mechanic of the previous title.
The studios have also created a Steam page (link not yet live) so you can wishlist the game.
Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency brings a lot to the table in terms of variety and action, although it edits out some of what made the first an interesting exercise in exploration and intrigue. Adrenaline is still a key ingredient here, and levels a heaping dose of bow-shooting action on top of a slightly more demure exploration experience than the first, which makes it feel a little more generic of a game, but still a good example of a fun and well-realized entry into the stealth combat genre.
Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency Details:
Developer: Neat Corporation, Fast Travel Games Available On: Steam (Index, Vive, Rift), Oculus Store (Rift) Reviewed On: Rift, Vive Release Date: December 12th, 2019 Price: $30
Note: It’s impossible to talk about the sequel without at least mentioning the first in the series—I won’t spend much time recapping, but I’ll be mentioning it throughout for continuity’s sake. If you’re new to the series and are hoping to read a spoiler free look at number one, look no further than our review of the first Budget Cuts (2018).
Gameplay
The original Budget Cuts is very much about using your wits to find key cards, search for door codes, and follow clues left by your missing meat-bag colleagues, who’ve been mysteriously spirited away and replaced with a cast of quirky office drones. Here, you’re basically tasked with finding the thing, moving to the next thing, and sneaking around, all the while hoping to avoid (or kill) as many of the revolver-toting sentinels as possible—lest you catch a single bullet, effectively throwing you back to an earlier auto-save point. Tactically-placed fax machines connect you with Winda for objectives, which leaves you free to figure things out by reading and basically putting two and two together at your own pace. It was fresh, funny, and most importantly took to the medium with a spirit of innovation.
The second picks up where the first left off, however its tone and objectives are much more action-oriented, which effectively strips away much of the constant object-searching and key card-hunting from the first. All of that’s still there, albeit minimized in favor of forward-moving action, making the sequel somewhat of a different beast. At times, its can be a real thrill ride, although I found it lacking some of the first’s unique and celebrated spirit.
Image courtesy Neat Corporation, Fast Travel Games
Before playing, I was prepped to expect more of everything: more action, more weapons, more puzzles, and more intrigue. I didn’t get everything on my wishlist, but Budget Cuts 2 does manage to serve up enough of that in the five hours on standard difficulty to satiate. Still, I felt it could have gone a bit deeper, and offered a few more ‘wow’ moments with its new action-y outlook on life whilst retaining some of the cleverness of the first.
Whereas the first Budget Cuts focused mainly on sneaking through cramped, multilayered spaces, sometimes giving you a few different parallel routes to the same objective, the second in the series tends to be a bit more linear, as it feeds you less options as you traverse through levels.
Image courtesy Neat Corporation, Fast Travel Games
Like in the first, the real choice ultimately comes down to whether you want to engage in combat, or take the time to sneak around by checking if the coast is clear first via your portal gun preview window.
Mission Insolvency however has a lot more guards and a few new methods of killing them. It also has a greater variety in spaces, offering up everything from small offices filled with cubicles to large warehouses where you can let your new weapon sing. And at that point, it’s hard to care why you have a bow and arrow when you can gank a robot in the head from 30 meters away.
Image courtesy Neat Corporation, Fast Travel Games
All of this is well appreciated, although I would have liked to see a grander, more elaborate set of ways to accomplish each major task—different routes or different methods of solving an objective, which seems to have been sacrificed on the altar of efficient, uncomplicated action. In the end, it seems Budget Cuts 2 focuses more on providing a greater variety of tasks instead of a greater variety of how to accomplish them. You’re given new baddies, less (but more varied) door puzzles, a singular boss fight, a timed task, and a wave shooter-style interlude at the end—more variety than the first by a fair margin.
The biggest addition, which has forced the developers to offer those larger environments, is the bow and arrow—or rather the bow and ‘any sharp or explosive object you can find’. Introduction of the new weapon is admittedly a bit ham-handed; office drones apparently compete in archery competitions in their time off now? And there’s grenades now too? In a stealth combat game where being detected could get you ganked in an instant? No fear, even the loudest grenade won’t bring baddies running. AI has a very limited field of view, and almost no sense of hearing.
A quick aside: the reasoning for knives was at least plausible in the first, with Winda hacking the supply ordering system and switching out letter openers for throwing knives, however in the sequel you’ll find arrows littered everywhere for no more reason than as convenient fodder for your bow.
Flimsy reasoning aside, the bow works well enough, although it intentionally hobbles you by giving you a two-handed device in a game where your don’t actually have hands 100 percent of the time by default.
Image courtesy Neat Corporation, Fast Travel Games
The unique portaling locomotion scheme introduced in the first Budget Cuts works equally as well in the sequel, adding the bow into the mix does complicate things. Instead of zapping around with the portal gun in one hand whilst carrying a knife in the other, you have to be a little more pensive when you use the bow, and consequently requiring you to switch the tool head on your hands much more often. Until you get the muscle memory down, you may be struggling to quickly switch tools in the heat of battle, leading to many frustrating deaths.
Thankfully the bow eats all sorts of ammo, including arrows, throwing knives, and even scissors, so you should find a few ways to take down robots. That said, archery is still very much skill based, as the projectile is effected by gravity, making it necessary to practice so you can get a feel for how much it will drop (your sights do a good job of keeping you lined up laterally at very least).
One of the new items here is a radar tool, which lets you mark enemies and then see them through walls as they go on their rounds. While it was admittedly much more useful than the tool its supplanted, the looking glass that lets you reveal hidden text, it definitely could have played a bigger part in the game. I very rarely used it, and there were zero missions in which it became vital to success.
Image courtesy Neat Corporation, Fast Travel Games
So Budget Cuts 2 is basically a shooter now, right? Kind of, yeah. There’s a real scarcity of ammo, as it’s both doled out at few intervals and, unlike the first, now ammo self-destructs when you use it—so no more collecting your spent knives or arrows from a dead baddie. You can even knock out baddies now with hard objects, and pull the gun of their hands, giving you a precious moment to flee.
You’ll also have a new enemy type to contend with on top of revolver-clad sentinels and drones, which are now equipped with guns of their own. Curious little boxes labeled with TransCorp’s ‘TC’ logo are littered everywhere, which you soon find out is hiding a super badass inside—and enemy with a riot shield and helmet, protecting him from frontal assaults and from your muscle memory of executing clean head-shots.
Image courtesy Neat Corporation, Fast Travel Games
Budget Cuts 2 offers up its pros and cons in almost equal portions, however there’s still plenty of its core moments, like when you make a mad dash to safety from the red-eyed robotic monsters of the game.
In the end though, I really would have liked to see Budget Cuts 2 longer and more complex than number one, which would be more in-keeping with the spirit of innovation that brought the first to notoriety. It seems a tad shorter and, well, just different—and not in a way I’m entirely sure I personally gelled with. I really enjoyed almost every bit of the first game, save the final boss encounter. Without revealing too much, I was a little dismayed when the credits rolled after going through what was essentially ended on a ‘protect the thing’ style wave shooter—neither doing service to the stealth combat genre, nor particularly interesting from the standpoint of a modern VR game in general.
Here’s an open secret: one of my least favorite tropes in VR gaming is the ‘helpful narrator’, which invariably chimes in with hints and mission objectives at every turn. Winda has unfortunately become a constant companion in your ear, as the fax machines of old are now replaced with a wireless headphone. I really think it smacks of laziness on the part of the developers, as they undoubtedly did it to generate quicker, more pointed action instead of giving you more of those fun little post-it note hints, or napkin drawings found in an overlooked cupboard. Having a mission objectives list and a voice in your ear telling you where to go and what to do basically makes me feel more like one of the robots I’m tasked with killing, and removes some of the fun of exploration as a result.
That said, number two has a few more benefits that shouldn’t go unnoticed in the immersion department; notably the character animations when baddies die.
The first time you stick a sentinel in the leg, and they limp around helplessly like wild animals, it basically left me wondering if it would still pursue me, or pick up its gun again for another potshot. A robot’s death is much bloodier (oily-er?) than I would have expected, which really makes you want to get your first shot right, if only to spare yourself the inevitable moaning it does about how it still has time left on this planet. Jesus. Re-reading that makes me feel like a monster.
The environments were also more varied and felt more alive as a result. There’s a lot more variability in terrain, such as stairs and ramps. but there are basically no-go zones for your portal gun, which introduces a bit of frustration where it otherwise wouldn’t be in a flatter, more office-like environment. It’s a give and take that essentially tests the limits of the default locomotion scheme.
I did contend with a few bugs in the sequel, although nowhere near the extent that saw the first pulled on the literal day of its release, which some reported was entirely borked, and unplayable. The developers have mentioned that bug-squashing and more polish are coming to the launch version, but I didn’t run into anything but minor flickering of some assets in heavier scenes, and a few misplaced bits of dialogue.
Comfort
Teleportation is the only way of moving around Budget Cuts2—it’s a fundamental part of the game’s basic mechanic, and even though some hardcore anti-teleportation pundits may be automatically against it, I argue that it not only makes sense in terms of comfort, but is well explained enough to be an integral part of the world at large. You simply couldn’t play the game any other way.
Teleportation is by far one of the most comfortable ways of moving around in VR (although it infringes on immersion), and it probably won’t leave you with the flop sweats and a spinning head, making it good for newcomers and sensitive users alike.
There is snap turn for forward-facing setups (namely the OG Oculus Rift), and 360 support, but you’re going to be standing and using your body to play this game. Seated in not an option, and not encouraged, as you regularly have to squat and hide behind barriers, unless you want to constantly micro-correct for where you’re standing with the portal gun.
Budget Cuts (2018) was originally slated to arrive on PSVR back in May, and due to the global slowdown it also fell victim to another delay in June. Starting today though, PSVR users will finally be able to step into the stealth action game that was so highly anticipated on the PC VR platform.
Budget Cuts is now live on the PlayStation Store, priced at $30 and $24 for PS Plus members. North America has physical copies as well; Europe is said to get them starting October 23rd, with pre-orders opening on the Perp Games Store next week.
We reviewed the game back at its PC VR release in 2018, and while we gave it a resounding [9.2/10] at the time, some users did notice pesky performance issues at launch that prevented them from enjoying the full unfettered fun of sneaking around office corridors and ganking robot guards.
Although those perf issues on PC VR have since been ironed out, it was still uncertain whether the game would actually fit all of its physics-based interactions onto the more modest PS4 platform. It appears though Neat Corp and Coatsink have done an admirable job porting the game for PSVR.
While we haven’t had an opportunity to test it on PSVR yet, YouTube channel Shugghead Gaming has a video review (linked below) that drills into the game’s specifics, noting that performance is a non-issue.
Shugghead Gaming highlights in the video that one of the sticking points to the game is the snap-turn control scheme, which is necessary due to PSVR’s front-facing PS Camera sensor. According to him, the game also feels somewhat dated in comparison to subsequently released titles on the platform, which is in part owed to the teleportation-only locomotion style.
Still, for what we can gather, Budget Cuts on PSVR is basically the same experience you can have on PC, albeit with an extra PSVR exclusive level in addition to the previously released DLC. We’re still waiting to see if Neat Corp/Coatsink will bring the game to Quest, which would be the next logical step for a title that’s already been slimmed down enough to fit on PSVR.
The newly announced Budget Cuts Ultimate, which combines both Budget Cuts (2018) and Budget Cuts 2 (2019) stealth action games into a single experience, is set to launch on PSVR 2 and Quest 2 next month.
Budget Cuts Ultimate is set to bring both games to those respective platforms for the first time, launching on June 1st.
Originally released on PC VR and the original PSVR, Budget Cuts makes use of a unique portaling system that completely rethinks teleportation in VR as we know it. Not only can you pop around corners like a ninja, but also throw knives through portals, making for some compelling encounters with the world’s armed security robots.
Here’s a description, courtesy its developers Neat Corporation:
As your last human co-worker is hauled away, a mysterious briefcase from someone on the outside is delivered to your desk. You need to get to the bottom of what is going on at TransCorp.
Sneak around enemy robots by climbing through air ducts and service tunnels, or embrace violence by unleashing a fistful of knives, quivers of arrows, grenades, and coffee mugs onto their unsuspecting circuits. Once you’ve completed your mission, test your skills in the arcade with multiple modes, difficulty levels, and scoring.
You can wishlist the game on PSVR 2 here, and on Quest 2/Pro here.
