As anyone that’s been playing Echo Arena this weekend will know, hands make for a great way to move in VR. Clambering around objects and throwing yourself from point A to B feels incredibly intuitive, even with your feet on the ground, removing many of the immersion-breaking factors of other locomotion systems. That’s why The Zero Dome caught our eye.
Check out the trailer for this intriguing shooter from Pillow Head Games below. Like Echo Arena, the game is set in zero gravity, and has players throwing themselves between triangular objects to navigate around a large dome. Unlike Echo Arena, though, The Zero Dome is single-player and focused more on survival and sandbox play. The game is set on an alien planet on which the player crash-lands, and must fight for survival inside this strange facility.
To do that, they can build structures to navigate and use for cover, returning fire from drones with their own gun.
The developer’s Braycen Jackwitz told UploadVR that his goal was to create something “more open” than many VR games out there right now.
“Using climbing locomotion, like that used in games such as ‘Climbey’ and ‘Lone Echo’, is a natural fit for this type of game because it enables the freedom of movement in a roomscale game that allows for gameplay mechanics with more depth, more like what we would see in traditional video games where movement is key,” he said. “Building on top of that with resource management, building and survival mechanics of the now popular survival genre, I’ve been able to create a unique sort of survival-lite game, one that will offer many hours of fun and many ways to play, but is still easy and intuitive to pick up and quick to get into.”
The Zero Dome is aiming to release later this year on the HTC Vive. We’re looking forward to going hands-on with it.
