We’ve had our Oculus Rift in the office now for just shy of two months and during that time I’ve been playing a whole lot of EVE: Valkyrie…so much in fact that this review is about a month late, but that actually turned out to be a good thing since CCP has just released their Carrier Assault expansion, breathing all new life into a game just as I was about to put it away.
EVE: Valkyrie satisfies an itch that non-VR gamers have been dying to scratch for years now – the space combat shooter. The fact that is does so using some impressive VR and immersive 3D effects only sweetens the deal. From the very moment you slip on the Rift headset and load the game you are transported to a completely new and believable universe. A holographic menu is suspended over fully animated backgrounds depicting various functions of your carrier such as the control room, hangar bay, or even this weird pod chamber with virtual versions of your teammates as you prepare for multiplayer.
The game is divided into single and 8v8 multiplayer components. The solo experience is rather short, but since EVE: Valkyrie is primarily a multiplayer game the campaign is mostly training to hone your combat skills before going online. In the solo game, Chronicles, you will get to relive past memories, visiting a half-dozen unique levels that can be played in one of two ways. The first is a relaxing exploration mode where you fly around looking for numerous Echoes. These are depicted with giant eyeball icons and not terribly hard to find. You’ll also be looking for Salvage. These flashing green beacons can be super-challenging to find, but thanks to some immaculate 3D positional audio and the excellent audio quality of the Rift headset, it’s basically a matter of flying around and following your ears.
These solo levels can also be played in Survival mode where you simply fly around the same area you previously explored for collectibles only this time there are endless waves of enemies coming at you. This is where you get to hone your combat abilities. Combat is really intuitive and makes great use of the Xbox controller. Weapons and strategies are specific to the various classes of ships you can fly. Something like the standard Wraith fighter has cannons on the right trigger and lock-on swarm missiles on the left. The physics engine makes great use of inertia and momentum, allowing you to spin your ship on a dime, barrel roll, and navigate like a ninja. Countermeasures can defend against incoming attacks, and green repair pods can fix your damaged ship in mid-combat.
The best part of all of this is the complete and total immersion that starts back in the menus with “holographic” icons so real you just want to reach out and touch them. Instead, you just look at something and press the A button and it happens…so simple. Once you are in the cockpit of your chosen ship you are surrounded by instruments and displays that offer you all the necessary info for combat as well as a stunning view of the space environments through the crystal-clear canopy…at least until it shatters during combat and you flash-freeze to death.
Moving on to multiplayer, until just a few days ago there was only Team Deathmatch, which was fun but not nearly enough to carry an online community. Thankfully, Carrier Assault turns EVE: Valkyrie into an entirely new experience by expanding on the TDM concept. In this new mode each team has a massive carrier that is protected by three shield generators scattered about the level between the two ships. Both teams race to the central area and drop drones near any of the shield generators to slowly take control of that point. Once a team has control over the generators the shields will drop on the enemy carrier, and everyone races to that ship trying to destroy it by targeting key locations on the ship while avoiding turret fire and enemy fighters that have come to defend it.
Eventually the carrier’s shields will come back, and everyone returns to the battlefield to do it all again until one of the carriers goes down. It’s a fantastic spin on the entire domination mode found in other games, as players strategically try to place their drone where others can’t find them then go shoot down enemy drones to slow or reverse the takeover meter. The dogfighting around the capital ships is intense and as always, the game works best with teamwork and communication. Sadly, it seems that most people are simply playing with their standard Rift earphones and not using a chat headset, which is supported.
If you preordered an Oculus Rift, then you get EVE: Valkyrie for free while everyone else pays $60 for the Founders’ Pack. While not mandatory, the game does feature an in-your-face monetization scheme that teases and tempts you to spend real money on fake stuff in the game. It’s mostly cosmetic things like paint jobs for your ship or new cockpit visuals. You can also purchase pilot implants that will boost your XP earnings, etc. It’s definitely not a pay-to-win situation but targeted more for the player with more money than time.
There are two types of currency in EVE: Valkyrie; silver and gold. Silver is earned by playing the game normally while gold can only be purchased with real-world money. My only complaint is that there is a LOT of content that can only be purchased with gold, and with no in-game way to earn or even convert silver to gold (you can convert gold to silver) and my inherent cheapness, there is a lot of cool stuff I’m never going to see. But again, silver is all you need to buy the stuff that matters, like unlocking new launch tubes so you can own and select multiple ships, upgrade shields, armor, weapons, etc.
That’s not to say your fun is limited if you choose to not spend money. Do you really want to spend $3 of real money on a new paint job for a ship you only see during the hangar menu and nobody else will ever see in combat because if you are that close to another ship in combat you are already dead. Once I got over the initial frustration of scrolling through all the items, I knew I could never buy, I still managed to log more than 60 hours with this game, and I have no intention of quitting anytime soon. And with new modes like Carrier Assault, I can’t wait to see what CCP comes up with next to keep me coming back for more awesome combat in space.
