Reality Remake 4/21/24 Reality Remake 4/21/24

Payday 2 VR Review and Setup Guide

Payday 2 is part stealth game and part horde shooter, centered around letting you live a life of crime by executing various heists and robberies.

Of course, if you’re here then you’ve probably heard that Payday 2 has released a free DLC that allows anyone who owns the game to play it in Virtual Reality. Very exciting stuff, this isn’t another VR mod that may or may not function or convert all of the features of the game to Virtual Reality.

Nope, Payday 2 VR is actually a very well realized conversion of the flatscreen Payday 2 experience into Virtual Reality that unlike some other official VR ports has clearly been seen through to completion. However, that doesn’t mean this is a perfect conversion.

Payday 2 is part stealth game and part horde shooter, centered around letting you live a life of crime by executing various heists and robberies.

It’s a very unique premise for a horde shooter, and one that has made Payday 2 a popular game, coupled with its excellent and varied mechanics, wide ranging choice of equipment loadouts, and massive replayability.

Of course, if you’re here then you’ve probably heard that Payday 2 has released a free DLC that allows anyone who owns the game to play it in Virtual Reality. Very exciting stuff, this isn’t another VR mod that may or may not function or convert all of the features of the game to Virtual Reality.

Nope, Payday 2 VR is actually a very well realized conversion of the flatscreen Payday 2 experience into Virtual Reality that unlike some other official VR ports has clearly been seen through to completion. However, that doesn’t mean this is a perfect conversion.

So if you want to know more then keep reading this Payday 2 VR Review, and a brief bit at the end where I’ll give you a little guidance on running Payday 2 VR for yourself.

What You Do In Payday 2 VR

First, let’s get caught up on what this game is about. If you’re already a Payday 2 veteran on the flatscreen and are familiar with the game, feel free to skip to the next section where I get more specific on how well this game works in Virtual Reality.

So what do you do in Payday 2 VR? Well, it’s a heisting game, where you and three other players or AI bots form a team of criminals that undertake missions in a variety of urban locations ranging from night clubs to banks to jewelry stores.

The first thing you can do is case the joint. Walk around, avoid the notice of security guards, and if you can do it use stealth to steal what you’re there to steal and bring it back to your van without being noticed.

The stealthy approach often won’t work out, so you’ll have to put your mask on and “go loud.” This means a gunfight with whatever security is on the premises and waves of police that show up on the scene to stop you.

The action of *Payday 2* is very in your face in Virtual Reality

Going loud is what makes the real meat of Payday 2. You’ll have to use whatever weapons and equipment are in your loadout to outsmart the cops and bring the loot to your getaway vehicle.

You’ve got a very impressive amount of health, but if you still take enough bullets to be brought down your teammates can help you back up, at least a few times. So a lot of the gameplay of Payday 2 VR comes down to shooting.

There are so many police after you in this game that they definitely qualify as a horde, and working together as a team (or solo with bots) to hold them off for long enough to get out with the goods is the core of the game unless you pull off a stealthy robbery.

How Payday 2 Translates To Virtual Reality

So now that you know what Payday 2 is all about, how well does it translate to VR?

Surprisingly well. The developers did a very good job in adding VR hand tracked touch controls to the game, and making all of the controls necessary to play Payday 2 easily navigatable and useful in Virtual Reality.

*Payday 2 VR’s* controls are very smooth and well put together

Your VR hands are exactly as you would expect them to be, the gloved hands of your chosen criminal, and your hands closely and smoothly track the physical location of your VR touch controllers with no lag.

Your left hand is for interacting with the world by doing things like picking up objectives, using items, and activating objectives. Meanwhile, your right hand is centered around weaponry. It holds your weapon, and pressing the trigger on that hand fires it. Luckily for left handed VR gamers, you can also reverse these hands in the settings menu, or by simply taking your weapon off of your belt with your left hand instead of your right.

That’s right you have a belt of sorts, though it’s made up of icons instead of the actual items you’d pick up, and on it you can switch between your primary and secondary weapons, select equipment to use, and basically access all of the items you normally would need to access in a game of Payday 2.

The belt that holds your items is very convenient in *VR Payday 2*

This utility belt might not be the most immersive but it definitely gets the job done and lets you access your items cleanly and easily by just grabbing them out of the air in front of your waist, and it can even be adjusted for comfort.

Speaking of comfort, the default movement style used by Payday 2 VR is teleportation movement, likely because this is the type of movement least likely to cause motion sickness in VR. Your off (default left) hand will have a cursor coming out of it that ends in a blue circle on the ground. Then you hold your right thumbstick forward to teleport to the circle.

Teleportation movement is very antiquated, though if you want to use that it is perfectly serviceable in Payday 2 VR, though most will probably want to switch the movement mode to the usual slide movement in the VR options menu (called “direct” there).

Using slide movement is recommended unless you get very bad motion sickness, and you can still do some limited teleporting as a “dash” move using the same cursor, though constantly seeing that cursor and circle coming out of your left hand does add some clutter to the world.

Also, you can’t set your movement direction to follow the direction your headset is facing. Instead, you must slide move in the direction that your offhand is facing, which is a very odd choice to not have in a modern VR game.

Changing the movement mode to slide (aka direct) movement in *Payday 2 VR*

The controls and interface are generally great for a VR mode integrated into a flatscreen game, but there are a few downsides. For instance, a lot of interactions are mapped to your weapon hand’s thumbstick, like throwing throwables (such as grenades) or changing the fire mode on your weapon.

It’s a lot of clutter to have on a single thumbstick, so using it in the heat of combat is confusing and often frustrating when you select the wrong option. Also, some interactions, such as climbing ladders, are a little strange. When climbing a ladder you get on the ladder not by hovering over it with your left hand and pressing grip as you would to interact with any other object, but by pushing in the left thumbstick. Then to climb up you keep pushing the left thumbstick.

Also, you can only snap turn your character by pressing the A or X buttons. So this Virtual Reality port does show its age in some ways, but also tries to fit a lot of inputs in the small number of buttons provided by a VR controller.

Luckily most objects in Payday 2 VR are more straightforward, and once you learn how to use them the few that are strange, like ladders, are easy to get used to.

Otherwise, the only difficulties that VR adds to the game are the occasional clipping issues, which will make your screen go black until you get back into a valid position, for instance when you walk into a wall at an add angle or inside of an NPC or player. These are sometimes quite annoying, but are generally avoidable.

After some time playing the game, I did experience one crash, but they were not common.

The Fun of Virtual Reality Payday 2

So VR Payday 2 controls well, and despite a few issues is generally easy to learn and use. So does Virtual Reality make the experience of pulling off the ultimate heist better?

Of course it does! Payday 2 is a first person shooter at heart, and boy do first person shooters translate well to VR. The action is all the more in your face in Virtual Reality, and the ability to freely turn and look using your actual body and head serves to put you into the shoes of your character so much more than just moving a mouse to look around.

The same goes for the hand controls that I’ve already told you are pretty well implemented and smooth.

Aiming by looking down the actual sights of your weapon and shooting with your actual hands is a ton more fun in VR than just clicking on a screen, though as I’ve mentioned the implementation is not perfect.

There are no manual reloads in Payday 2 VR, you reload automatically by just clicking a button, and while you can grip a weapon in both hands in this game the hands don’t have special positions for grabbing each individual weapon, so they just sort of hover near the grab point.

The biggest downside to the action in Virtual Reality *Payday 2* is that the weapons lack punch and feel a bit weak.

You’re actually just as well off aiming a two handed weapon like a rifle, or even a pistol, with just a single hand. The weapons don’t feel very impactful while you’re firing them and sort of come across more as airsoft guns than actual weapons.

Still the automatic reloads and lack of recoil on the weapons probably serve to not make playing Payday 2 in VR significantly easier or harder than playing it on a flat screen. That’s because there is crossplay when playing Payday 2 VR, you can play with other VR gamers, or with players on the flat screen. This is great because it makes it easy to find a match, and the pool of players to play the game with is not restricted.

The action is more in your face, and if you’d rather aim with your real hands than with a mouse, you’ll find a lot to love in the action of Payday 2 VR. Compared to the original game, and compared to other VR games, it is a fantastic heist inspired VR shooter.

Anyway now that I’ve told you that Payday 2 VR is a ton of fun in this review, despite a few setbacks, let’s talk about how to play it if you’re interseted.

How To Play Payday 2 VR

Just like the base game of Payday 2, the VR DLC can be found on Steam.

It is a completely free DLC for the base game, and it should be automatically added to your account if you own a copy of Payday 2. Just to make sure though, visit the page and make sure the DLC is added to your account.

Now you can launch and play Payday 2 VR just like any other Virtual Reality game that you would play through Steam. There are a number of ways to do this. If you’re accustomed to playing Steam VR games on your VR headset then it’s as easy as plugging your headset in and launching Payday 2 from your Steam VR library as you would any other game.

If you’re using a Meta Quest 2 or Meta Quest 3 headset then you might be wondering how to play Steam VR games on your headset. The easiest way is with Steam Link. Though as always you’ll have the smoothest experience if you are running the game on a PC that is connected to a 5 GHz network and wired to your router with an ethernet cable.

You can also run Payday 2 VR like any other Steam PCVR game by using Oculus Airlink. This method is a little more difficult to set up but can be used when connected to your PC with a link cable if your WiFi setup isn’t sufficient for streaming the game wirelessly.

So that’s how to play Payday 2 in VR! Once you start the game the intro video should start playing in front of you on the projector in the main menu room.

The intro movie you see when starting up VR *Payday 2*.

However you choose to play Payday 2 in Virtual Reality, enjoy!

Reality Remake 4/17/24 Reality Remake 4/17/24

5 Best Free VR Shooting Games For Oculus Quest 2 and 3

So you’re a big fan of virtual reality shooting games, and you’ve got a nice Oculus Quest 2 or 3 to enjoy playing them on. The problem is you don’t have or don’t want to spend a lot of money to enjoy a fun VR shooter.

Well, don’t worry because there are some fantastic free VR shooting games for you to try on your Oculus Quest 2 or 3. Here are the best ones I’ve found.

You might also be interested in:

Aim XR - Free Virtual Reality Shooting Games

Aim XR is a fast paced free VR multiplayer shooter with lobbies of 5 versus 5 players (generally).

Aim XR plays sort of like Pavlov VR or even Contractors, but it’s completely free! All of the weapons are based on real ones, and it’s in a modern setting, the usual army dudes versus army dudes. There is a huge array of weapons to choose from and several game modes, like Deathmatch, my favorite, which has you spawning, fighting the enemy team, dying, and then spawning again to do it all over again with a random weapon each time.

While Aim XR doesn’t have the smoothest weapon controls or the tightest movement system, it is a really solid free multiplayer shooter for virtual reality. If you want a free Counter-Strike VR sort of experience but don’t want to pay any money for it then give Aim XR a try.

Despite having a little jankiness it’s definitely a fun free VR shooting game.

POPULATION: ONE - A Battle Royale Free VR Shooting Game

POPULATION: ONE is the original Virtual Reality battle royale game, and now it is also completely free!

It plays sort of like a free Fortnite VR, where you can team up with up to two other people to take on each match and be the last team standing. As with any battle royale game you spawn in and jump onto the map, except in POPULATION: ONE you jump out of or land in a landing pod instead of a plane or battle bus.

Anyway, once you land you’ve got to scavenge the map to find weapons, equipment, and healing items. There is a zone around the map as well, like in any battle royale, and it closes in and restricts where you can go. You’ll take constant damage if you’re outside of the zone.

This zone keeps closing until the whole map is covered by it, and so you’ll have to fight other teams and take them out to be the last team standing. There’s even building, kind of like in Fortnite, but building takes a lot longer in POPULATION: ONE. So luckily a lot of the fighting isn’t just a contest of who can build a big tower the fastest.

Overall this has got to be the most polished of all the free virtual reality shooting games out there, and if you really want a free VR battle royale to play there is no alternative to POPULATION: ONE, which isn’t a bad thing because it is a fantastic VR game.

Hyper Dash - Free VR Shooting Games

The Hyper Dash Logo

If you want a free VR shooter that is more focused on movement and gives you a lot of options to quickly zip around the map while blasting at other players, give Hyper Dash a look.

While the movement system takes a little learning and getting used to, Hyper Dash has a great tutorial that will teach you how to use it, and each map has a ton of rails to grind on, platforms to hop around on, and new weapons and powerups to use.

Hyper Dash is a ton of fun if you want a free VR shooting game that is fast and gives you a lot of options to quickly travel around the arena. The main game mode is a sort of capture the flag where you need to fight with the other team over a ball and bring that ball to your team’s goal.

It’s a ton of fun to zoom around the map in this free VR shooting game, and most importantly it’s absolutely free to play. If you want a VR shooter that lets you fly around and go really fast while shooting then give Hyper Dash a try.

X8 - Free Virtual Reality Shooting Games

X8 is a free VR Hero Shooter that focuses on a Valorant “Demolition” gamemode where one team attacks and tries to plant a siphon at one of two sites on the map, while the other team tries to prevent the other team from planting it or defuse it when it is planted.

X8 is different from other free VR shooting games because, unlike other free Virtual Reality shooting games, it has heroes for you to choose between during each match. Each hero has a different selection of powers to use during the match that can drastically affect how the game progresses, though each hero shares a pool of weapons and armor that can be purchased at the start of each round.

So X8 plays like Valorant. The only downside in this comparison is that a lot of the characters don’t feel as unique as those in Valorant, but there are still plenty of interesting options to choose from.

Still, X8 is a solid free VR shooter, and for the low low price of no dollars, it’s worth a look.

SHOOTOUT - Free Virtual Reality Shooting Games

SHOOTOUT is yet another free multiplayer VR shooter, and unfortunately the last one on this list of the best free virtual reality shooting games.

Still, I’m ending this list with a real bang here, because SHOOTOUT is very unique. Not in how it moves, or how the shooting feels, but in the weapons that you use in the game.

You see in SHOOTOUT, instead of just using the same weapons over and over like in any other virtual reality shooter, you build your weapons out of parts. For instance, you take an assault rifle part and attach it to your arm. Boom it’s an assault rifle. However, next you find a fire weapon part, so you attach that to your arm behind the barrel of the assault rifle. Now your assault rifle arm shoots flaming bullets.

That’s just the start of the many different weapon types and combinations available in SHOOTOUT. Every firefight with another player is extremely unique because both of you could have any in a huge series of weapon combinations, so the game constantly feels very fresh.

You can move pretty fast, and there are some movement related weapons like the hook, which is basically a grappling hook you can use to climb or swing around the map.

So if you want to mix and match and see what sort of amazing weapon you can create, try SHOOTOUT, it is a very enjoyable free VR shooter.

Anyway, that’s it for this list of the best free VR shooting games on the Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3. No matter which you pick, enjoy yourself out there in virtual reality.

You might also be interested in:

Reality Remake 4/12/24 Reality Remake 4/12/24

The Thrill Of The Fight Quest 3 Update Looks Great And Adds Mixed Reality

It’s no secret that The Thrill Of The Fight is one of, if not the, best VR fitness and fighting games out there. Of course, this depends on who you ask, but here at Reality Remake I’ve gushed many times about how fantastic this game is for fun workouts and just fun in general.

If you want a fantastic VR boxing experience then there really is no substitute for The Thrill Of The Fight.

While The Thrill Of The Fight 2 still seems so tantalizingly close yet far away as it remains in development, for the time being, the original The Thrill Of The Fight has received a fantastic update for Meta Quest 3 headsets.

It’s no secret that The Thrill Of The Fight is one of, if not the, best VR fitness and fighting games out there. Of course, this depends on who you ask, but here at Reality Remake I’ve gushed many times about how fantastic this game is for fun workouts and just fun in general.

If you want a fantastic VR boxing experience then there really is no substitute for The Thrill Of The Fight.

While The Thrill Of The Fight 2 still seems so tantalizingly close yet far away as it remains in development, for the time being, the original The Thrill Of The Fight has received a fantastic update for Meta Quest 3 headsets.

The Thrill Of The Fight Looks Great On the Meta Quest 3

Just look at the image below. On the left is the VR game on the Quest 2, and on the right is the same game on the Quest 3.

On the left, The Duke on the Quest 2, on the Right, the Duke on Quest 3

The image sharpness and quality are lightyears apart, even when you see them on a flat screen. The difference when viewing this environment, and your many opponents, in Virtual Reality as intended is even more mind blowing.

This update uses the increased processing power and superior construction of the Quest 3 to make the game look so much better on Quest 3 headsets. It’s great to see that even with the sequel in development, some love is still being given to the original.

While this might not be anything major like new enemies or new gamemodes, it’s much easier to get immersed in each boxing match with the game looking so much better.

You might notice that some of the opponent models have strange black lines on them in some places, like around the chin. Unfortunately, this makes them look a little wonky. So if you’re still stuck with a Quest 2, at least you won’t have to deal with that.

See the seam on Moneymaker’s arm here? There are a lot of models that are a bit broken like that

The Thrill Of The Fight Mixed Reality Is Also Very Cool

Of course, Mixed Reality and passthrough are also fantastic on the Oculus Quest 3, much better than we had on the Quest 2. Among the slew of additions of MR support and applications, comes a new Mixed Reality mode for The Thrill Of The Fight.

Now you can fight all of your classic opponents inside whatever room in your house you desire, or an actual physical boxing ring if you’re lucky enough to have access to one.

*The Thrill Of The Fight* in Mixed Reality is a trip, and also just as fun as in Virtual Reality

This Mixed Reality mode does have the usual issues of objects and people in Mixed Reality seeming strangely disconnected from their surroundings.

For instance, if you look closely the feet of your opponents might not seem like they quite touch the floor, but this is still a fun new way to box in Virtual Reality.

That’s it for now, if you’ve got a Meta Quest 3 and want to get back into some VR boxing, now is a better time than ever to hop into The Thrill Of The Fight. Enjoy!

Reality Remake 4/9/24 Reality Remake 4/9/24

Is PCVR Dying? Steam Hardware Survey Shows VR Users Stagnating

The conversation of “VR Is Dead” or “VR Is Dying” pops up on social media, especially X (Twitter), every now and again.

Strong sales of VR headsets in general in the early 2020s proved this continual conversation to be wrong, at least until the recent stagnation of VR headset sales in 2023.

United States headset sales, according to CNBC, went down nearly forty percent in 2023. This is pretty shocking news to someone who is a Virtual Reality fan and wants to see others enjoy VR as much as possible.

This could be attributed to a number of things, like the cessation of COVID restrictions on living and travel, or simply market fatigue and general awareness of Virtual Reality reaching its peak. What the VR headset sales numbers don’t show you, however, is how many games existing users are buying, and most importantly how often existing users are using their headsets.

The conversation of “VR Is Dead” or “VR Is Dying” pops up on social media, especially X (Twitter), every now and again.

Strong sales of VR headsets in general in the early 2020s proved this continual conversation to be wrong, at least until the recent stagnation of VR headset sales in 2023.

While we don’t have either of these numbers for what appears to be the most popular way to enjoy VR, standalone headsets like the Meta Quest, we do have some PCVR information from the March 2024 Steam Hardware Survey.

The “VR Headsets” results from the March 2024 Steam Hardware Survey.

This information is much more useful than headset sales. It doesn’t matter how many headsets get sold if new adopters don’t use it, or those already playing VR stop using it. While it would be great to have some numbers for how often standalone headsets get used, we can at least see if PCVR is still popular.

Most PCVR games are played through Steam, and what we see here in the hardware survey isn’t encouraging. You would think with new headsets still being continually sold in the millions that we would have at least a slight uptick in the amount of Steam users with VR headsets.

Yet we have a slight decrease, basically a net neutral change. In fact, what’s even more alarming is the decrease in PCVR usage among Quest users. Could this potentially be pointing to a stagnation in Quest usage or just a stagnation in people streaming PCVR games to their Quest?

Either way with continual sales of VR headsets it’s not encouraging to see that PCVR numbers are not increasing. That being said, the cost of both a headset and a PC capable of playing VR games is limiting and means that far fewer people have access to PCVR in general.

So PCVR is stagnating according to Steam. Is PCVR dead? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Reality Remake 4/7/24 Reality Remake 4/7/24

Medieval Dynasty VR Review - A Good VR Crafting and Building Game

Today we're going to get in depth with Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, a VR port by Spectral Games of the flatscreen game Medieval Dynasty by Render Cube.

The flatscreen game has been around for a while, originally released in 2021, and according to Steam reviews is pretty well received and sold well. Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, or rather Medieval Dynasty VR, is a rebuilding of the concept of the original flatscreen game from the ground up for the Meta Quest, and features the same focus on surviving, crafting, and building yourself up from a simple peasant to the well respected owner of your own sprawling medieval estate, except now it's all in Virtual Reality!

Today we're going to get in depth with Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, a VR port by Spectral Games of the flatscreen game Medieval Dynasty by Render Cube.

The flatscreen game has been around for a while, originally released in 2021, and according to Steam reviews is pretty well received and sold well. Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, or rather Medieval Dynasty VR, is a rebuilding of the concept of the original flatscreen game from the ground up for the Meta Quest, and features the same focus on surviving, crafting, and building yourself up from a simple peasant to the well respected owner of your own sprawling medieval estate, except now it's all in Virtual Reality!

Building a wall in *Medieval Dynasty New Settlement*

Medieval Dynasty VR Is Focused On Creating

So how is it? Well if you're a fan of chiller and less action oriented VR experiences that involve a lot of crafting, building, and generally just doing virtual tasks like chopping trees, mining, and making virtual items over and over as you build your settlement and expand your wealth, then you'll find a lot to love in this game.

That is if you can get past the many bugs and technical issues this game has, as well as some very lazy feeling oversights that make the game feel kind of rushed overall, though hopefully those will be fixed with more patches like the first hotfix that just came out.

While you'll rarely fight for your life and really have to focus on how to "survive" in Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, there's a lot of satisfaction to be had in its many different kinds of crafting systems, and mostly in turning a pristine wilderness into your own vision of a medieval town.

That's because you start the game in both the Adventure and Sandbox modes as a nobody with hardly anything but the clothes on your back. As a new arrival to Green Valley, you've got to do some virtual work to establish yourself

Chopping down a tree in *Medieval Dynasty VR*

Work Your Way From Peasant To Lord

First, you build a house, do some tasks for the locals to get their respect, and learn more about what you can create through either the quests in Adventure mode or just trying out new things as you please in Sandbox mode. At the start, nobody knows or respects you, and you've got nothing but an empty plot of land and ambition.

You have to gather resources with your VR hands, and then with those same hands use those resources to build more buildings on your land and craft various items to use or sell. Over time you can even hire people to work on your estate for you, and romance and marry to have children and continue your dynasty. Medieval Dynasty VR aims to be a medieval life simulator like the first game, and largely succeeds at this, while also incorporating all of the magic of physically performing the work you need to do these things with VR tracked hand controls.

Sandbox mode releases you into the game world capable of building anything that you want, while Adventure mode has a series of story quests for you to do centered around the two existing towns in Green Valley. These quests function like extended tutorials with a lot of reading text boxes and fetching items for people in between.

The story itself wasn't hugely interesting, and really got boring at some points, but it would shortly pick itself back up with an exciting journey into the unknown or a new type of building or type of crafting to try.

There are many Quests to do in this VR game, but many of them end up feeling the same

In adventure mode you unlock new buildings by doing story quests, and while that was a little frustrating at times, for instance not being able to do any sort of farming until VERY far into the game, the quests do function as a great way for the game to naturally teach you its many gathering and crafting systems.

If you want to be taught how to do all of the things you can do in Medieval Dynasty VR and have a little story to go along with it, then I'd recommend Adventure mode, but if you just want to go wild and do whatever you please then Sandbox might be more your speed. Though Sandbox feels a little less fleshed out without the quest system to give the world of Green Valley more context and character.

Medieval Dynasty New Settlement Looks Great

Speaking of character, this game looks really fantastic on the Meta Quest 3. With the usual limitations given by the hardware of a standalone headset, the team over at Spectral Games has done a great job of depicting the wilderness of Green Valley in the warmer seasons, and especially in Winter.

The landscape is dense with crafting resources to gather and animals to hunt. Not to mention the many secrets and treasures to dig up spread across the map. This VR game looks fantastic and is one of the best depictions of a natural environment seen so far on the Quest.

The sound is also great, with the chirping of birds, clanging of hammers, and animal calls all sounding crisp and greatly adding to the immersion to the wilderness around you as well as the physical actions you're doing.

The sound design does falter in a couple of places though. Especially at night. No matter what you're doing the usual relaxed ambient music is replaced by the same creepy, scary musical track. Nighttime isn't that dangerous, and so this choice to make it always sound like it is was certainly a weird one.

Even a satisfyingly productive late night at the forge is ruined when you've got this ominous music constantly playing in your ears. I'd often go to sleep just to not have to listen to it anymore.

The sounds for people also aren't very good. A lot of the villagers sound weirdly depressed when you're saying goodbye despite that voice line not matching their character in the quest text. Also, some lone bandits will yell a victory cry while sounding like three bandits at once before running away. This is probably a bug though.

This Is A Very Buggy Game At Release

Medieval Dynasty New Settlement was released with a lot of bugs and inconsistencies. Like how its entries in the in game encyclopedia are sometimes wrong, like this one stating that copper can't be mined with a stone pickaxe... though it actually can, or a child butt sliding across the floor instead of walking.

I couldn’t get around this bug, so I never finished Adventure mode in *Medieval Dynasty VR*

One hotfix is already in place, and hopefully, more fixes and support will be given to this game going forward, but the release version has a rushed and unfinished feeling. Like the entrance to a mine clearly just being a door in front of a wall of rock. I could give a lot of examples of this, but if you're playing this game soon after the publication of this article expect some jankiness and issues.

The biggest problem I ran into actually cut my Adventure mode playthrough short when I was getting close to the end. Darkness consumed my world despite the lit torch in my hand. Trying different torches didn't help, nor did reloading a save. I couldn’t see… forever.

I definitely didn't want to redo all of those hours of fetch quests to reach the end. Luckily this at least freed me from the burden of carrying around all those quest items that were no longer relevant but were taking up inventory slots because the game refused to let me drop them. Hopefully, these issues will be fixed in time, and if you're seeing this article far in the future they hopefully already have.

Medieval Dynasty VR Is Great At Gathering, Building, Crafting, and Not Much Else

Let's talk more about how this game actually plays. Most of what you do in Medieval Dynasty VR is gather resources and make things out of those resources. There's even money you can sell goods for, but you can't buy too many things, and mostly money is for paying your workers and paying your taxes.

It would be nice to have been able to buy fertilizer for a farm without having to make your own pigpen just to get some, while seeds are purchasable because you can't make them yourself.

So the economy is barebones, and so are the NPCs. Without a quest they just bark one of the same few lines of dialog at you and wander around, or are either hireable workers or romanceable women with little personality.

Where Medieval Dynasty New Settlement really shines is its many different kinds of crafting. Each crafting station has its own systems for making things physically with your VR hands. If you want to make some stew to keep you fed for the day you select your recipe, chop up your ingredients, throw them in the pot, light the fire under it, and stir to completion before dipping a bowl in and eating up.

Soup will easily feed you forever in this VR “survival” game

Though it is odd that stew left in the pot disappears after you sleep, while stew in bowls does not. There are a lot of weird little quirks to this game just like that.

The crafting is generally great though, and is the strongest part of this game. Making pots involves molding clay on a potter's wheel with your hands, and making tools in the smithy involves its own system of heating up ingots, beating them into shape, and adding a handle.

Gathering resources involves a lot of physically chopping down trees and physically swinging your pick at rocks in dark caves. You can also physically pick up resources off of the ground, and you will need to do that a lot.

Magically vacuuming up reeds is something you’ll have to do a lot

The world of Medieval Dynasty VR is held together with Reeds. So many things need Reeds. The world would collapse without them. The same goes for various sizes of sticks. Luckily you can easily pick up these items quickly whenever you see them by pointing at them and pressing the trigger, which transfers them to your inventory.

Does this lack immersion? Sure, but you can still physically grab them and put them away in your backpack if you like.

Mining in a Dark Cave in *Medieval Dynasty New Settlement…* see how this stone pick can mine copper?

Building crafting stations and then crafting things with those stations is a very relaxing experience, and also the most fun part of this game. The satisfaction of making something from nothing with your hands is where Medieval Dynasty New Settlement really shines. You can even hire workers to gather materials for you so that you can focus on more crafting and more journeying.

Though it's in the more adventurous elements that this VR survival game doesn't shine nearly as much. While being billed as a survival title, the survival elements are entirely optional.

Keeping yourself watered and fed isn't much of a problem. A pot full of mushroom stew will last you at least two days, and you can make those very early on in the game. You'll need some water every day too... but wells and streams are everywhere. Keeping your bars full isn't ever as much of a challenge as it is in other games like Green Hell VR.

So does the combat add a fun survival challenge? Not really. It's very easy. I quickly discovered that just poking enemies with your spear while backing away works against basically anything. If you're hurt because your finger slipped off the thumbstick just eat a bunch of your plentiful food and you'll quickly feel better. The combat is laughably simple and clearly an afterthought. To be interesting it would need to be redone from the ground up.

Bandits aren’t much of a threat in this VR game, really no enemies are

Hunting intersects with this and is also where the gathering part of the game is at its weakest. Arrows simply would not register as hits half of the time, even when they clearly were. The animals are frightfully stupid and not a challenge to simply chase down with a spear, so why bother attacking them from a distance? Either way just skinning more aggressive varieties of critters like wolves, bears, and boars left me with plenty of leather and food.

There are some neat mysteries to explore and discover in the Green Valley, though some centered around finding hidden treasure chests spread across the map, and to be honest I don't find scouring every inch of such a large map for mounds of dirt to be very compelling. Maybe it would be to you, but I've walked these roads quite a lot and I think I've walked them enough.

My Sandbox playthrough of Medieval Dynasty New Settlement ended when I realized that I'd built all of the production buildings I could want, hired some workers, and now had a pretty self-sufficient setup going.

Then I wondered... what now? I'd done the virtual work, fun as it was, and created a little estate for myself out of nothing. Now I would use those resources to... make it bigger? Why? Maybe I quit too early before any more intriguing challenges came up, but I didn't see Medieval Dynasty VR giving a satisfying endgame now that I was a successful farmer and local craftsman.

There was possibly the aforementioned exploration to try and some secrets to still uncover, sure, but the lack of compelling survival mechanics or combat to complicate exploration made that feel like a chore.

Wolves aren’t much of a threat either, but give you lots of leather and meat

There were repeatable quests scattered around to get more reputation and money, but I had enough of those things already. Outside of technical and polish issues that's where Medieval Dynasty New Settlement is most disappointing. Once your dynasty is set and you've built yourself up, there's nowhere to go from there.

Maybe the quests in Adventure mode might have given a more satisfying resolution, but there's no way I’m going to rebuild from scratch a third time and do all those fetch quests again to find out. Maybe if Medieval Dynasty VR had multiplayer that would extend the fun as well, and Spectral Games has announced plans to introduce a Coop mode on their roadmap, which also includes bug fixes.

Getting to this point involved many pleasurable hours in this game, and I got a lot more entertainment out of Medieval Dynasty VR than I get out of most VR games. So if you want to build a medieval settlement of your own, and gather and craft your way to the pinnacle of success, I'd recommend Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, despite the higher than usual asking price of thirty dollars on the Meta Quest store.

If you want a survival or combat focused experience, look elsewhere, but if you love VR gathering and crafting this is the game for you. As long as you don't mind a bit of jank that is.

If you’ve tried Medieval Dynasty VR, let me know in the comments, do you agree that the crafting is good and the survival and combat is bad? What do you think about the endgame of Medieval Dynasty New Settlement?

Planing wood to make planks, one of the many great kinds of crafting in this game.

As always enjoy yourself out there in Virtual Reality, this has been Reality Remake.