EVE: Valkyrie review

^{[Reviewed on Oculus Rift]}

When you first start to play, you do just sit there and gawp. Clever engineering and VR magic tells your brain that you really are in the place you’re seeing. And with EVE: Valkyrie, that means you become almost, almost convinced that you’re actually the pilot of a space fighter craft.

There you are, in the cockpit. It’s deliciously rendered, with scrolling panels above your head, a ton of HUD elements, and blinking lights everywhere. Outside the window is an astounding scene of capital ships in ruins and a darting battle raging. Inside, there’s a joystick that moves with your commands, with an attached pair of hands.

You look down. The hands are attached to a torso just like yours, you have legs and arms, and you can choose to be male or female. As you lean around, the torso shifts to match you. Turn your head to the left and you’ll see your shoulder move up. Lean forwards and the whole mass of flesh moves with you. It’s uncanny, but convincing.

You should probably pay attention to the actual game, though. After all, if you’ve made it through EVE: Valkyrie’s very clever but slightly annoying VR menu, and gone through the initial tutorial (complete with Katee Sackhoff, aka Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica), then you’ll almost certainly be in a place where people are shooting at you. With your gamepad in hand, you’ll need to start taking part in this aerial melee.

And yet this is the also the point where some of you will almost certainly need to stop playing. On the Oculus Store, EVE: Valkyrie is rated as ‘intense’. That’s a rare high rating. It means, because of all the dodging, dogfighting and boosting, you’ll feel like you’re being flung all over the place, like Bond in a villainous centrifuge. You’re also trapped in a closed, hot space. Weaker constitutions are quite unable to take it. We were fine for nausea, but after an hour started developing a pain in one eye that was presumably attempting things it wasn’t evolved for. Others have felt immediately sick.

Still, if you can stomach the new way that your senses are trying to deal with the strange new information you’re feeding them, it’s time to get on with the important business of dogfighting. EVE: Valkyrie is set in the EVE: Online universe created by Iceland’s CCP Games. It’s a space opera sci-fi world, with giant capital ships, enormous galactic empires, mining and crafting. Valkyrie takes place in a small corner of that world, and lets you become a dogfighting ace.

Luke Skywalker, essentially. Except that you’ve been raised from the dead to fight as a ‘Valkyrie’. A thin single-player experience called ‘Chronicles’ lets you find out more of the story, by exploring the game’s maps, or fighting AI bots in a Survival mode, but the meat is in multiplayer.

You start with a simple fighter, the Wraith, which is controlled from the gamepad in your hand. Its armament is traditional for a space fighter – a laser gatling gun and homing missiles, with other buttons boosting you, braking, or deploying chaff. Your lasers need to lead the target – daft, when you consider they travel at the speed of light, but we’re so used to it from dogfighting plane sims that it feels oddly natural.

Missiles, however, are a different story. When targeting a foe, you have to hold down the left trigger to lock on up to five of them. When you release, they shoot off, at which point the real game begins, as the head tracking ensures they hit their target. This is something common across weaponry for several different ship types; it’s smart because it encourages you to not simply look straight ahead, a common flaw in many VR games.

Once you’ve got the basics down, the game is a joy. Hunting enemies through ship wreckage or getting involved in a spiralling meleé or winning a game of chicken-with-lasers or unleashing all of your missiles on an enemy and taking a moment to watch them try to shake them off… It’s all classic adrenalin pumping stuff, delivered in a new and innovative way – the VR and head-tracking definitely gives it that extra level of immersion.

What’s noticeable, though, is the lack of human players at the moment – on the European servers, most matches have just one or two, with the other places taken by AIs. It’s not clear whether that’s a design decision or a reflection of low server populations, but it does make the game a lot, lot easier.

Complete a mission and you get experience points for your ship and your character, as well a smattering of cash and resources. Unlocking upgrades and other ships in game is a slow process, especially given that you then need the right resources to craft them. It’s also hard to notice the effects of an upgrade – though new craft are substantially different, even within the Fighter/Heavy/Support classes that are available.

Given that this is a free game, the developer is rather insistent that you purchase something with real money. Prompts to buy items with actual cash flash up after every mission, and the downtime between missions is normally around a minute – just long enough that you really are tempted by that new skin it’s thrown up. You can rent new launch tubes (allowing you to pick from more than one ship in-mission), buy new skins, XP boosters and premium ships (which are fully-upgraded versions of the basic ships), and customise your ship with new paint jobs.

It remains to be seen what our more VR-savvy selves will think of this a year down the line; as people get used to any new hardware that first flush of excitement fades and it becomes normalised. If we’re honest, stripping away the VR allure, this is a standard F2P arcade shooter with some polish. But, if you own Oculus, you should at least try it.