Five years since its release, Half-Life: Alyx still stands as the high bar for a full-length blockbuster VR game in visuals, storytelling and gameplay. Not that there haven’t been admirable attempts, like Batman: Arkham Shadow, Horizon Call of the Mountain or Alien: Rogue Incursion, but I’ve always found they fall short.
That however hasn’t stopped VR studio nDreams – who previously made the wonderful Synapse – from uttering Valve’s masterpiece when I was invited to play its new game Reach, ahead of its reveal at the Future Games Show.
The UK-based studio (and technically the largest in the world dedicated to just VR gaming) has made its share of action-packed VR games like the aformentioned PSVR2 exclusive Synapse and Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghostlord, but within constraints of budget and technology. Reach however comes from its new Elevation studio, set up specifically to make a AAA VR game that gives you all the thrills and production values of a single-player story-driven campaign like Uncharted or Tomb Raider.
Triple-A VR is a thing
Although it’s developed with Unreal Engine 5, it’s clear from the demo that Reach’s focus isn’t on wowing you with surface-level gimmicks to sell you on the medium’s sense of immersion – no eye-catching vistas you can gaze at like in Horizon: Call of the Mountain or detailed expressive characters getting in your face like in Blood & Truth. Honestly, you might even say the tutorial level that my secret agent is dropped into is a very generic warehouse. But that doesn’t matter, because what immerses me in Reach is what I’m getting to do.
Speaking to Elevation studio head Glenn Brace, he says the most important part of designing Reach has been heightening emotions with physical one-to-one motion. “We wanted to give true agency and really double down on that sense of emotion in the moment,” he tells me. “We’ve very much landed on a physical one-to-oneness and getting rid of abstraction like buttons and getting people to role play more and physically take part. The more you do that, not only is it more comfortable, but you feel more immersed.”
One of the mechanics the game introduces early on is platforming. Action games are tricky to execute in VR, not so much for gunplay but traversing – how do you do that without simply holding up on a control stick, or teleporting, and without getting motion sick? Reach takes something of a hybrid approach, so while there is technically a jump button you press, it actually only registers when you also make the gesture of swinging your arm upwards, like you’re actually propelling yourself in the air, and unconsciously bending your knees.
This move mechanic didn’t take long for me to adjust to this, or that I could also make longer jumps by also sprinting (movement is still done with moving the left stick and clicking in to run). And if you don’t land on the platform with your jump, then you can still reach out and grab onto the ledge to pull yourself up like you’re John McClane.
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Unreal Engine 5 climbs to new heights
Yes, ledge climbing is still a thing, but mixing this up between platforming means Reach feels much more dynamic than other games that end up becoming climbing simulators that quickly tire out your arms. It’s also more fun because rather than just climbing one hold after another, I can actually do a flinging motion so that I can for instance reach a window ledge much higher above me, or I can even fling myself sideways from one building ledge to another.
What also grounds you in these actions is that rather than playing as a pair of disembodied hands, when you look down you can see that you have a full body. When climbing a building or traversing down a zipline, you can even see your legs realistically dangling in the air.
“We call it full body awareness, which has been intrinsic to this development,” says Brace. “We found early on, not only is that good just for perception, it actually adds comfort. Normally, you just have button inputs but when you have a full body simulating, you have another input beyond the input, which is another layer of control bias.”
Interspersed with the platforming are combat sections, which begin after I get hold of a special bow that fires off an infinite supply of energy arrows, while later on I also pick up a hand gun, and then another, allowing me the option to dual-wield like John Wick.
This is more standard VR combat fare, though it does utilise mechanics implemented in past nDreams games like grabbing any part of the environment to use as a cover while peering out to take a shot. While the enemies in this demo are pretty generic goons, I’m more intrigued by the bipedal robots in the final game. I’m told about some tantalising melee actions you’ll be able to perform on them, including grabbing an enemy’s gun off them to use, or a stealth takedown that involves pulling out the robot’s spinal cord.
I’m hoping the final game will still deliver on the kind of spectacle and storytelling chops that’s expected of a full-fat AAA campaign, although the demo does end on a fairly explosive chase sequence as I’m running and jumping between buildings, smashing through glass, before throwing myself off a building down onto a crash mat, revealing that this is all an elaborate action film shoot.
Brace teases a bit more of what I can expect from the final game in terms of immersive storytelling. “We do actually have next-gen VR narrative interaction scenes where characters are coming right up to you with [high-fieldity] facial animation, but instead of you being locked in position or unable to interact with them, they acknowledge your presence,” he explains. “We’re keeping you on the move. The pacing is up and down in a nice way. And all the time we’re managing your physicality.”
VR now means freedom
What really proved Reach’s hold on me is that with the spare time in my session, I decided to play it again, and felt even more confident of its mechanics. It’s largely because I realised that it’s not a strictly linear game, so rather than take a long way around to walk to the warehouse entrance, I could parkour over the van in front of me.
I then found there’s actually shortcuts I could leap across to in the early parts rather than sticking to the original tutorial route, and I must have finished the demo in less than half the time.
It’s precisely the kind of feeling Brace was hoping for too. “We want you to go to an edge, you don’t want to jump because you think it’s too far and you can’t make it, so you find a different route, but then you build up to the point where you can confidently leap and make that jump. If we can build a person’s confidence in that traversal in a real-world sense, that’s action adventure on a whole other level.”
It may still be too early to say whether Reach will give Half Life: Alyx a run for its money, but it definitely feels within touching distance.
Reach releases on Meta Quest 3, PlayStation VR2 and Steam VR in late 2025. New to VR? Read our guide to the best VR headsets.
