When we originally reviewed The Assembly, it felt like a game that was too little too late. It came out several months after the consumer launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive with little reason to play it over other similar titles such as Technolust, which launched with the Rift, or The Gallery, which featured roomscale and motion controller support on the Vive.
The Assembly’s scientific compound was white and sterile with an inventive take on dual-protagonist storytelling, but it did little to rise above the fold as anything other than a good, albeit basic, VR exploration title. This week, that may be finally changing when nDream’s narrative adventure finally gets motion controller support.
The patch for the Vive version of the game will be going live at approximately 10AM November 22nd, 2016, and support for both Oculus Touch and PlayStation Move controllers on Rift and PS VR respectively will be live as well before the end of the year.
You can see in the video above what it looks like playing The Assembly using the VR motion controllers and the experience on the other two major platforms will likely be quite similar. Motion controller support has been an oft-requested feature for some time and helps it maintain an edge over the likes of Obduction for the time being. Thunderbird is still on the horizon and a similar update is coming for Technolust as well, showing that developers are committed to bringing players’ hands into VR as much as possible.
nDreams also recently released Danger Goat on Google’s Daydream platform and maintains the expectation that the company will at least break even on VR game development this year. The industry is just getting started, but both Raw Data and The Gallery’s developers, as well as the one-man team behind Onward, are proving that financial success is already possible.
