Reach Review – A leap ahead for VR action games

When you set up a whole new studio and team specifically to create new and better ways to play VR games, you’d better deliver. The aim for nDreams Elevation’s first game was to transfer the classic action-adventure gameplay feel found in games such as Tomb Raider and  Uncharted and make it work in VR. The issue for high action in VR has always been keeping you comfortable and without motion sickness, but Reach has put those worries aside, delivering on that classic action-adventure feel with ease.

You play as a reluctant hero Rosa, a stuntwoman who has returned to her hometown to film a new movie.  After two fairly short introduction levels she finds herself in a magical underground world populated by living statues who are intent on making it to the surface and destroying the human race.  Teaming up with Atlas, a friendly statue, and a Destiny-like Ghost companion, you have to jump, swing, and shoot your way through the world while solving fairly simple physical puzzles. You can play stealthily, sneaking around the corridors and ripping the spines out of unsuspecting statues, or go in all guns blazing. The plot is fairly generic without any major surprises, but it does the job.

You are armed with a crossbow that can fire four different types of shot including ice and fire, a grappling hook mechanism and a Captain America’ style shield. The latter is particularly fun, summoned by a hand gesture and then flung at enemies’ heads, ricocheting around the room and returning to your hand when activated. If you are sneaky, you can also steal the guns off the statues, but all your main weapons have an extra function; You can climb up arrows stuck in walls or jump on a shield wedged in a gap.  It’s a shame that your bow requires both hands as it would have been great to take some shots whilst hanging from a ledge by one hand – proper action hero stuff!

I played a couple of hours of Reach at a preview event, including the first two missions. At that time I was taking things quite slowly, but when I fired up the game to review it was only at the end of the first mission that I realised I had speed-run the entire thing, chaining jumps together and flinging myself around like an acrobat. All the behind-the-scenes trickery that nDreams Elevation created really works.

One of their improvements is so obvious that it’s a wonder no one else had thought of it: you have to swing your arm to jump. It’s exactly what you would do in real life, using your arms to gain momentum, and a great extension of the motion controls in other titles where you pump your arms to walk around. It gives a greater connection between your body and the movement, tricking your brain into thinking you are jumping, thus allowing you to leap from platform to platform to ladder to zipwire in one smooth sequence without motion sickness.

The game also simulates your whole body movement rather than just your arms and head and this gives you a feeling of presence and weight, allowing for smoother transitions. For example, when reaching the top of a ladder, you can lean forward and instinctively know when to mantle up to the platform.  The sense of freedom and physicality, the climbing, jumping, grappling and zip-lining feel all intuitive and immersive.

Reach has some fairly decent graphics, although some areas do seem a little empty, it’s not going to give Horizon VR anything to worry about, but that is on purpose. You are meant to be belting it through this game and too many extra details would distract you from the parkour.

I have two major issues with the game, one specific to myself and one in general. Firstly, there is no way to set your in-game height, and I would guess Rosa is about 5’6″, a foot shorter than me, so I did feel like I had a compressed spine all the time I was playing. My second issue is probably down to the game being developed for multiple VR platforms. After all the work that has gone in to making you feel like you really are in Rosa’s world, all of which works, you regularly get hit with black loading screens that drag you right out of the game. There is absolutely no need for those on a PS5, the levels are not big, but I would assume the limitations of other headsets forced the developers hand.