A World's End

Virtual reality is the next big thing in the video games industry, and it’s off to a great start. The technology is potent enough to let us transport ourselves to a variety of different worlds, and the graphics quality is good enough to fool our minds. Hence, it’s only a matter of creativity from now on, because there are many great things one can achieve with this technology.

A World's End is an action game driven by a pretty unique set of gameplay mechanics, one that allows you to experience ranged combat without having to worry about motion sickness. In essence, this is a grid-based shooter, and your task is to avoid the incoming projectiles and shoot as many enemies as you can. It may sound tough on paper, but the actual gameplay is pretty simple, at least at first.

There are multiple levels to choose from, and each level features a certain number of enemies you have to defeat. You pass the stage if you manage to survive until each wave is gone, and the other levels are unlocked later on. The key is to keep moving from one grid to the other, because it only takes one hit to die, and you have to restart the whole stage.

Jumping from one platform to the other is actually more like teleportation, because actual jumps would cause a lot of motion sickness in the players. It can be a tad disorienting at first, on the other hand, because it doesn’t feel like you’re moving at all, and you have to look at the ground in the beginning. Thankfully, it gets easier to manage after a few minutes of gameplay.

The controls can be a bit awkward, especially if you are using a keyboard and mouse combo. For some reason, it would appear that the vertical axis is reversed, and there is no way to change it. This might be a bug of sorts, but the same is true if you are using a gamepad instead. However, the graphics are pretty cool, although they cannot be customized either.

A World's End is what VR technology should be all about: innovation and new ideas. While it’s fairly easy to develop first-person shooters and make it available on Oculus/HTC Vive, the results are not the same as if you would manage to take advantage of the device and put the players in a very different type of situation.