In game, I’m a graceful sword-wielding warrior, acrobatically swooping around a city to plant precision blows on rampaging titans. In reality, I’m obliterating my mantlepiece for the second time as my increasingly exasperated partner tells me to go out and buy some superglue to piece together the shattered remains of her ornaments. Is calling this game “Unbreakable” some kind of sick joke?
Is Attack on Titan VR worth this chaos, pain, and suffering a disgruntled girlfriend?
No. No it is not.
The basic concept will be familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the anime. In a bizarre post-apocalyptic future mankind lives in walled cities as rampaging titans (giant naked flesh-eating man-monsters) try to break in. If they make it through the walls that’s where you come in, using ultra-manoeuvrable sci-fi grappling hooks to Spider-Man your way around them in the hopes of delivering a crippling blow to the weak point on the back of their neck.
First impressions are good. You fire your twin grappling hooks at buildings, yank them back, and propel yourself through the city. The titans themselves are suitably intimidating in VR, perhaps the only medium that lets you truly appreciate their scale. To cement this the game opens with you being snatched by one and slowly raised to their gaping mouth, only to be saved from being chomped at the last minute. From here the opening missions allow you to enjoy the freedom of movement and the satisfaction of downing these colossal opponents. For one brief shining moment, you feel as if you’ve stepped into the anime.
But Attack on Titan VR soon proves to be a one-trick pony and settles into a repetitive and unimaginative groove that wears thin fast. In an ideal world, the Campaign mode would not only let you not only slice up titans but immerse you in Attack on Titan’s fascinating world and juicy interpersonal drama. This simply doesn’t happen - there is no story to this game, merely a series of repeated mission types of increasing difficulty.
The most common is, as you’d expect, defeating titans. You have a generous time limit and a set number of enemies to bring down. It’s straightforward but, at least in the first few chapters, satisfying. Bringing up the rear are reaching a series of checkpoints in the city to a time limit, and missions where you collect floating “supplies” dotted around the streets, both of which are ludicrously easy. The final type - the mission variety I dreaded most - has you defending a building against waves of enemies. This represents a frustrating difficulty spike as even a single titan can demolish the building’s health bar in just a few swipes and keeping track of the spawns from all directions is near impossible. Even dialling things back to “Recruit” difficulty, which lowers titan speed, doesn’t make things that much easier.
By around the third chapter, it becomes clear that the game has run out of ideas: its method of progression isn’t adding new wrinkles to the gameplay, it’s upping mission requirements: instead of defending a building for 120 seconds, you must defend it for 150 seconds and so on.
Perhaps developer UNIVRS shouldn’t get too much blame here, because this was clearly made on a shoestring budget. Cutscenes are still images with non-animated characters, voiced lines are repeated ad nauseum (you’ll hear “Broken blades won’t do in battle! Change them for new ones!” every 30 seconds or so) and, disappointingly for fans, the anime characters are relegated to barely animated mannequins rather than active participants in missions.
Then there’s the graphics. I’m usually prepared to cut VR games a lot of slack on this front. In this medium, a smooth frame rate must be prioritised above all else to prevent nausea and there are tight hardware overheads, particularly if a game is Quest 2 compatible. But even with all those caveats, it’s safe to say Attack on Titan’s game world wouldn’t have looked out of place on the N64, a collection of boxy repetitive buildings with low-res textures and empty streets.
I could have forgiven this for being an ugly game if the gameplay was tuned to perfection but, well, see everything above..jpg "Attack on Titan VR: Unbreakable Meta Quest 3 Review")
SUMMARY
If you’re a die-hard Attack on Titan superfan then maybe the base thrill of swooping around and fighting titans will be enough to justify a purchase.
The basic concept will be familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the anime. In a bizarre post-apocalyptic future mankind lives in walled cities as rampaging titans (giant naked flesh-eating man-monsters) try to break in. If they make it through the walls that’s where you come in, using ultra-manoeuvrable sci-fi grappling hooks to Spider-Man your way around them in the hopes of delivering a crippling blow to the weak point on the back of their neck.
But Attack on Titan VR soon proves to be a one-trick pony and settles into a repetitive and unimaginative groove that wears thin fast. In an ideal world, the Campaign mode would not only let you not only slice up titans but immerse you in Attack on Titan’s fascinating world and juicy interpersonal drama. This simply doesn’t happen - there is no story to this game, merely a series of repeated mission types of increasing difficulty.
Perhaps developer UNIVRS shouldn’t get too much blame here, because this was clearly made on a shoestring budget. Cutscenes are still images with non-animated characters, voiced lines are repeated ad nauseum (you’ll hear “Broken blades won’t do in battle! Change them for new ones!” every 30 seconds or so) and, disappointingly for fans, the anime characters are relegated to barely animated mannequins rather than active participants in missions.
Then there’s the graphics. I’m usually prepared to cut VR games a lot of slack on this front. In this medium, a smooth frame rate must be prioritised above all else to prevent nausea and there are tight hardware overheads, particularly if a game is Quest 2 compatible. But even with all those caveats, it’s safe to say Attack on Titan’s game world wouldn’t have looked out of place on the N64, a collection of boxy repetitive buildings with low-res textures and empty streets.
I could have forgiven this for being an ugly game if the gameplay was tuned to perfection but, well, see everything above.
.jpg "Attack on Titan VR: Unbreakable Meta Quest 3 Review")
Rubbing salt into the wound is that there’s a free Unreal Engine-powered Attack on Titan VR fangame that looks light-years better than this. Yes, it’s a PC VR title that can take full advantage of high-spec hardware and isn’t feasible for release on Quest, but putting footage from that project alongside this official release is a night-and-day comparison.
This game does boast multiplayer and co-op modes, but despite waiting around for a match I couldn’t find anyone to play with (possibly due to this being a pre-release review copy), so I can’t say whether this mode is where the game truly comes to life. Somehow I doubt it.
If you’re a die-hard Attack on Titan superfan then maybe the base thrill of swooping around and fighting titans will be enough to justify a purchase.
But even if you are you’ll still quickly smash into the frustrating and repetitive game design and have to deal with bargain-basement ugly graphics.
All of which makes the sacrifice of my girlfriend’s precious glass snails that much sadder. If they’d been smashed while playing a good game that’d be one thing, but for this?
All of which makes the sacrifice of my girlfriend’s precious glass snails that much sadder. If they’d been smashed while playing a good game that’d be one thing, but for this?
The pain is real.
3/10
🌊MELTED🌊
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