Quest for the Golden Trophy

FYI, if you haven't downloaded Rec Room because it's a social app, looks cartoony/casual, whatever, you're missing out on some great multiplayer VR gaming. They recently added Quest for the Golden Trophy, which is a short 4-player dungeon crawl where you clear a series of increasingly difficult mini-levels and win cosmetic stuff for your avatar if you can beat the final boss (not easy even getting there).

My son's been addicted to it for a couple days so I finally tried it and was surprised at how good it is. It's just a mini-game in the context of Rec Room, but it's more fun than a lot of stand-alone VR titles. The graphics are very clean and well done. The weapons feel great to use. The sword has a satisfying swoosh and visible trail when you swing it, and you can hold a shield in your off-hand, much like Space Pirate Simulator. The bow draws nicely, has satisfying physics, and the arrows leave a nice tracer behind them.

I found the bow to be more satisfying that Long Bow in The Lab (probably because of that tracer) with the added bonus that you're actually moving (teleporting) down corridors with friends, avoiding getting cornered by the enemy, positioning yourself to avoid friendly fire, etc.

The game gets hard fast. When your friends are killed, they drop their weapons and become a ghost at the spot where they were killed. If you can get to them and high-five their ghost, they rejoin the battle at that spot (and have to scramble to pick up their weapons). If everybody goes down, your team loses and you have to start completely over. This adds a nice layer of tactical play. Do you stay hunkered down in this safe-ish corner and try to take care of the remaining baddies by yourself, or do you venture out into harm's way and drop your weapon briefly to revive some backup? There were a few awesome moments in my play last night where only one survivor remained on the team, but he managed to fight his ass off, defeat a bunch of baddies by himself, and get the rest of the team back up. Fun stuff.

If somebody made a full blown Diablo-esque dungeon crawler for VR, my life would be over for a while. Until then, this is a fun little game, and a taste of how good VR gaming is going to get in the future.