Fast paced, kinetic encounters with time slowing at critical junctures to allow you to execute (pun intended) your plan of attack. There are echoes of Rocksteady’s Batman combat, Platinum Games’ Vanquish (2010), and even the recent Doom (2016) reboot. This is all in service of completing challenges and racking up immense scores to attack the leaderboard. Grabbing enemy ordnance out of the air and sending it back at them is a frequent happening – the signature moves from Bullet Train all present and correct – and you’ll need to get good at analysing enemy abilities, managing encounters, prioritising targets, building and keeping your multiplier up, and finding your flow. This is a game about mastering movement while engaging bad guys through the twin mediums of guns and casual up-close dismemberment. …it’s all very tongue in cheek and deliciously meme-heavy which may delight or annoy depending on the individual. This is no grimdark future, it’s all very tongue in cheek and deliciously meme-heavy which may delight or annoy depending on the individual. The robots themselves impress with a tangible solidity and presence, and they chatter away to you endearingly during gameplay. Clean lines, readable environments and enemies, and an excellent sense of scale abound as billboards shine their adverts at you, and blimps pass by overhead. The Unreal Engine is put to good use building a visually arresting future cityscape, with supersampling options that allow those with the GPU horsepower to improve clarity even further, and enough graphical settings to ensure that even minimum spec machines get a smooth ride. That’s the sort of thing that was lost on the journey from Showdown to Robo Recall – a reflection of the relatively modest size of the team working on it – but what have we gained? Quite a lot as it turns out, not least of which is a far more lighthearted tone, resulting in an experience that is all the better for not taking itself too seriously. There aren’t any vehicles to take a trip on, and with the exception of a few blimps high in the sky there’s not much else moving around the play area. There is no ongoing pitched battle between opposing forces, we’re back to gaming’s favourite lone wolf cliché as you clear each area solo. The excess of Showdown’s environmental destruction is completely absent Robo Recall’s world is one that you traverse through but never impact. Comparing to those earlier sketches it’s what doesn’t make the transition that sticks in my mind more than what does. It is telling that in the nascent VR industry even bigger players like Epic Games need partnerships to justify investment in VR content. From humble beginnings with a tiny team begging, stealing, and borrowing assets and time to build prototypes for their VR vision, the partnership with Oculus has allowed Epic Games to spin up a team of 15 people to turn Bullet Train into Robo Recall. You can draw a line from the Showdown cinematic from 2014 through to the playable Bullet Train demo that captured everyone’s imagination in 2016, and now to Robo Recall. It stayed with me, and it’s still well worth a look today if you haven’t seen it. You reach the end of the street and stop beneath the gigantic robot, where you look up and take in the scale of it all, and the culmination of the demo is when this robot stares right into your eyes and roars. If you own an Oculus Rift, it’s being brought to you absolutely free of charge.Īvailable On: Oculus Rift (Oculus Touch Required)Įpic Games’ Showdown demo first shown way back in 2014 was a cinematic walk down a street during an assault on a giant robot rockets firing and bullets whizzing all around you, people diving for cover, cars flipped into the air by explosions, and you right in the middle of it all. Unlike an arcade machine you won’t need a stack of shiny coins to play this shooter. That’s the company in which Robo Recall belongs. When the Robo Recall title screen first appears – a voice calling its name out like a boxing ring announcer while the electro-rock soundtrack builds in the background – arcade aficionados could be forgiven for thinking they had stepped into an alternate universe where Sega’s legendary arcade divisions were still churning out hits to this very day.
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