Until You Fall - VR Gameplay Valve Index
13Despite some rough edges getting started, Until You Fall may just be a new gold standard for melee combat in VR.
Combat feels amazing here. No waggle to win. Light wimpy strikes are penalized. You're encouraged to take long broad swings with your weapon to get full damage. This just engrosses you in the roll even more and leads to more overall enjoyment of the combat mechanic.
The combo system and loop of guard breaking to damage health gives a sense of power to the player. The guard hits take a bit of strategy, not much but some, to get in. The payout of the health hits just has a visceral power to them that just feels good.
The dodge mechanic just adds to the physicality of the combat. When you need to duck a swipe to your head and then immediately follow that up with a series of 3 blocks and another dodge to the right... You get your whole body involved in the game and that's what VR is all about. Feeling like you're in the game. Until You Fall does that in spades.
19/10 for combat.
Graphically the game is no slouch either. The alien world is beautiful to look at. There are some issues here though with things like the fog which displays incorrectly depending on how even your eyes are. A minor issues but slightly tilting your head is enough to make the fog look 'wrong' and cause some eyestrain. If you don't focus on it too much it can be ignored though. All in all though Until You Fall was a pleasure for my eye sockets.
Audio is in a similar situation. The music was 'instrumental in getting you pumped up... Sorry... Bad puns aside the high energy background helped get you into that mindset of being ready for a fight. The sounds of clashing steal on steal helped to sell the power of the hits though on rewatching some of my gameplay they were a bit grating for onlookers. Still pleased with the audio as a whole though.
If I were to strike the game for anything it would be for the movement. It's painfully slow when not dodging. I expect this is by design but it's still frustrating to have to burn my dashes to move at any sort of reasonable speed. Adding to this there appears to be a bug with movement where it doesn't actually update the direction you're supposed to be moving as you move your head/controller around. If you press to the right and physically spin in a 180 you will be moving in game in the opposite direction you're pressing on the controller. This did come up in combat a couple of times and I sincerely hope this gets patched out asap.
And here's the rant. You knew it was coming... There's no reason for the devs to have taken time to explicitly lock HMDs out of their game on launch until some unknown patch in the future that will magically make the HMDs work. Using PsuedoVive(https://github.com/schellingb/PseudoVive) I was able to play on my Index just fine proving the HMD lockout is BS and actively detrimental to the game. All PseudoVive does is change the name that is reported back to the caller so the game reads my Index as having the name of 'Vive'. No other magic is happening. The Index simply just works.
Players shouldn't have to jump through hoops to play your game. If the HMD isn't supported, that's what the 'VR Support - Headsets' section is for on Steam. List the supported headsets and move on. No other action necessary. If someone comes in with an Index/Rift S/WMR issues, you point at that and go 'not supported until October'. That's an immensely better experience than buying the game and getting shut out. No other game does that and it's a shitty practice and a shitty experience for players.
Also while I'm ranting... What does the idle, 'put on the HMD' screen do for anyone? It's a worthless waste of dev effort. Why do people think this is a good idea? I Know this only impacts me and other content creators but the effort that went into making this screen and this logic could have been put into fixing the fog, or the movement, or Index support, or Rift S support, or WMR support, or any number of other valuable items in the backlog.
/rant
My ranting aside this is a strong melee hack and slash roguelike RPG. A definite must have for your VR collection.
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Until You Fall Statistics For Shadow's Thoughts
At present, Shadow's Thoughts has 1,376 views spread across 2 videos for Until You Fall, with the game making up 6 hours of published video on his channel. This is less than 0.55% of Until You Fall video content that Shadow's Thoughts has uploaded to YouTube.