Despite it’s engrossing atmosphere and engaging story, we didn’t really take to Carbon Studio’s Alice VR [Review: 4/10]. Preview builds suggested it could be great, but the final product was ultimately a little dated and too much to be desired.
The developer itself still holds promise, though, and we’re optimistic about its next game.
That game is The Wizards, and it sounds like Carbon is catching up a little with the current trends in VR while making it. Cast as a time-traveling young wizard, you’re tasked with protecting the Realm of Men, and you’ll use the Vive wands or Oculus Touch controllers to do so.
The Wizards is all about spell-casting. It’s a first-person game in which you can summon lightning, fireballs, and other elemental spells to take down enemies in horde-style levels. There’s no gameplay footage yet, but there are a handful of in-game screenshots and the CG video above, which look to offer a fantastical experience. Fans of The Unspoken that wished for a single-player game mode have something very promising to get excited about here.
Carbon came up with the idea for The Wizards during a game jam organized by Epic Games and Nvidia last October, around the time that Alice VR launched. The team devised a prototype in which a spell-casting hero held off waves of enemies. To that, Carbon is adding a Fate Cards system, which modifies the game’s difficulty in exchange for rewards, letting players customize their own experience. It’s being built with Epic’s Unreal Engine 4.
The game’s due for release on Vive and Rift later this year. A possible PlayStation VR version as not been mentioned; Alice VR didn’t make it over to the platform either, at least not yet.
It’s encouraging to see Carbon move up to motion controls, as Alice arrived as a gamepad-based exploration game at a time that Oculus owners were gearing up for Touch and Vive users had been enjoying room-scale tracking for a few months already. Hopefully The Wizards will show what this studio is really capable of.
