With the Oculus Quest launch just a couple months away as the “Spring 2019” timeframe inches ever-closer, we finally got a good taste of what all will be available on the headset at launch. Yesterday, we learned about Creed, Job Simulator, I Expect You To Die, Rec Room, VRChat, and many others. In addition to Beat Saber and Dead and Buried 2 from last week, it’s shaping up to be an impressive catalog of VR games.
We knew that Robo Recall was coming to Oculus Quest and we assumed that it would have to be a heavy downgrade, but seeing it in action today for the first time was still a bit of a shock.
This link is timestamped to the exact moment Robo Recall is about to be shown in today’s sizzle reel video, but don’t blink because it’s only there for literally two seconds right after Superhot VR:
After seeing how similar Dead and Buried 2 looked and not noticing much difference at all while playing Beat Saber I was holding my breath for some development magic, but this is the first evidence we’ve seen that Epic’s intense tech demo that originally debuted on Rift was too much for the Quest to handle at full-scale. I’m assuming this won’t be the full game either and is probably an abbreviated version instead.
The decision to show only a single robot in the trailer, rather than a swarm, feels deliberate. When playing Robo Recall I can’t remember facing off against a single enemy very often to be honest. Usually you’re facing large numbers of enemies all at the same time. This calls into question not only the visual fidelity, but how many enemies it can handle at once as well.
We reached out to Epic Games and Oculus regarding the differences we noticed in the trailer above such as the downgraded visuals and lack of enemies on-screen and an Oculus spokesperson responded:
“Robo Recall on Quest looks and feels great. There are—of course—differences graphically, but the gameplay is as satisfying as what you remember on Rift…now with no wires.”
They also provided a single high-resolution screenshot directly from the game that is, reportedly, more in-line with the visuals you can expect to experience inside the headset itself. That’s the one embedded up above and included again here. Notably, the one single image they decided to officially send doesn’t have any enemies in it, so it’s hard to use it as a real frame of reference.
Nevertheless, you can click to enlarge it here:
For comparison, we’ve included some additional images of the Quest version taken from the trailer embedded up above. Keep in mind that these likely don’t do the game actual justice and it will probably look much better inside the headset itself since the footage was encoded and optimized for YouTube. The footage in the video is also reportedly of an older build of the game that isn’t fully representative of the final product.
Click to enlarge:
And here is a video of Robo Recall on Rift, plus screenshots taken from that video to try and show something similar rather than grabbing doctored up marketing photos. However, keep in mind, these are still higher-quality by nature.
Click to enlarge:
What do you think? Robo Recall should still be free on Quest and will undoubtedly maintain the fast, frenetic, and fun gameplay of its older, bigger PC-based ancestor, but it does appear to have gone through a hefty downgrade in order to fit onto the Snapdragon 835-powered standalone Quest headset as was expected. The most important bits are that the gameplay is still fluid and the physics still work as designed.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Editor’s Note: We added more context regarding the Quest footage.
