Reach is a game that made me remember why I love VR

At Summer Game Fest, while music blared and the noise from other demo kiosks bled through, I had the most intense VR experience I’ve had in years.

Reach, the next game from nDreams, seems designed to push VR and the player to the limits. It’s a VR game that breaks all the rules of VR within ten minutes. Your character is running at full speed. You’re scaling buildings and doing a hell of a lot of jumping.

As you’d probably expect, if you’re not familiar with VR, or you last dusted off your old headset some years ago, this is an instant vomit generator; in fact, multiple journalists at the event reported feeling sick while playing. It’s also absolutely brilliant.

It was revealed at the end of the demo that the entire time I was running, jumping, sliding, shooting, bow and arrowing, you were in the shoes of a stuntman.

It would be easy for a game like this to be a gimmick. Something akin to a test of how far VR can push a player before being too much, but it’s much more than that. Reach features great, intuitive controls that hardly need explaining at all.

I was presented with a bow, and without thinking, found it natural to pull an arrow from my quiver and shoot them through enemy heads. The gunplay is satisfying, and all of this happens at top speed, at a solid framerate.

The game is only compatible with Meta’s more powerful headsets, plus PlayStation VR2, because, as developer nDreams concedes, this level of action on a weaker headset would be a recipe for disaster.

Reach still had the VR silliness that I get a kick out of. You can pick up glass bottles and launch them at the wall. The same goes for pretty much anything that’s not nailed down. There’s also a whiteboard and a selection of colored pens. According to the developers, I was the first journalist so far who resisted the urge to draw an… immature etching onto the whiteboard.

These little breaks in the action help get your breath back, because it would be pretty intense to go nonstop from action sequence to action sequence. The game occasionally feels more like a VR workout than a traditional VR shooter.

It wasn’t a long demo, but by the end of it I’d noticed that I’d turned almost entirely to the right in the midst of the various firefights. It’s the first time in a long time that I had one of those VR moments where your body totally forgets what you’re supposed to be doing. I felt my knees getting weak.

If there wasn’t a couch behind me, I could so easily have seen myself stumbling, and as someone who’s played a lot of VR over the last decade, including plenty of intense, room-scale titles, that’s very impressive.

I want to play more of Reach to see how much more I can take. It’s absolutely not something I’d recommend to casual VR users or those with sensitive stomachs, but for thrill seekers and VR enthusiasts, it’s shaping up to be a high-octane, rock-solid thriller.