I’ve wanted a great stealth game in VR ever since consumer-grade headsets started hitting the market. When you’re wearing a headset you at first have a tendency to either sit or stand in one place without moving too much. But then you take a step, and you lean around, and you reach out with motion controllers. Then when a game asks you to crouch down or get on the ground the immersion is ramped up to whole new levels. That’s precisely where games like Espire 1: VR Operative seek to provide their thrills.
So far Espire 1 (by a team of devs that’s just referring to themselves as Espire right now as far as we can tell) is billing itself as “Metal Gear Solid meets Goldeneye 007 in an immersive VR world” and from what we’ve seen that seems about right. They’ve been doing a good job of releasing new dev diary updates and the latest entry (embedded below) is the first time we’ve really seen the locomotion system explained in detail.
In practice it works kind of like a combination of Eagle Flight and Onward. You move around by pressing on the Vive wand’s trackpad or the Oculus Touch control stick to guide your movement just like in any first-person shooter. However, as you accelerate your field of vision starts to narrow into a box to cut down on sickness. In the periphery you can still see through the design that appears to digitize your surroundings.
Gameplay otherwise works a lot like Onward with you handling weapons realistically, moving and ducking and hiding behind objects, and even using spy tools like cameras to peek around corners. We’re eagerly anticipating the chance to get our hands on the game and seeing how it plays. What do you think of what you’ve seen of Espire 1: VR Operative so far? Let us know down in the comments below!
