Hover Junkers is one of my favorite VR games right now. The game takes place in apocalyptic times on a dying planet where there are very few resources. It immediately reminds me the movie Mad Max, and I have no doubt that this game was inspired by this movie to some degree.
So in the game, you'll be flying a ship. Although the game can be played while sitting or standing, you get the full immersive experience with a room-scale gameplay. The movement of the players fits 1-to-1 to what happens in the game. So for example, if you have a large ship, you need to make sure that you have plenty of room to move around the room while playing. There are several type of ships you can shoot from like the Longboat (long and narrow ship) The Tugboat (small and circular), The Bus, Viktor (fast moving ship with full 360 view with large moving area), The Skiff and others.
This is an FPS game, and it's main focus is on the competitive multiplayer action aspect.You can choose your preferred character, whether a female or male human character or a robot. While in the ship, you can hang around inside it, check your setup, choose your preferred character and your ship to get started like the
One in the ship, you have the option to move around in a limited area. You can use the ship movement area to hide, crouch and dodge from incoming attacks. The players can control both the ship movement direction and speed using the motion controllers.
Of course the fun part starts when you hold your weapons. The game features various weapons which you can use to shoot down your enemies. Again, it's fully controlled using motion controllers gestures. For example, reloading is done using a button press and rotating the controller up and shooting is done by moving the controller to aim at a specific spot and press the front button to trigger a shot. As you can see from the video below, there is not aim assist. You want to take your enemy down, just aim and shoot. The motion controllers provide very accurate positioning of the gun in the virtual reality space. It's accurate because the controllers are very sensitive to movement, there is almost no lag and you have plenty of space and the use of your body movement to aim at a specific point in the 3D space. If you are a bad shooter in real life, you probably gonna suck in this one as well :)
I personally really liked the cover system. To cover, you just need to crouch down. Yes, it's simple to do, but I assume that if you do it a lot of time, you probably need to be in shape to hang on for a long period of time. You can place various objects that you collect and place it around you in several places that can help protect you against an incoming fire from different directions.
The game features a loot system, where you venture the world to find loot to upgrade your ship and weapons. Some of the loot can be sold to others.
Hover Junkers takes the conventional FPS shooter and brings it to a whole new level. The movement and shooting mechanics and the fact that it plays in room-scale VR make it a completely different and much more immersive experience for every FPS fan out there. I love how the players interacted with each other in the VR space using motion gestures, I love the vivid scenes that the game takes place in, the covering mechanism and the loot system.
It's a well-designed space adventure FPS game. It features both competitive and cooperative multiplayer gameplay experience. It seems that everything was thought through to make this game one of the most attractive shooters coming up for VR, specifically for HTC Vive VR headset - Don't miss this one!