Developer/publisher Oculus Studios (Sanzaru Games)
Format Quest 2, 3 (tested), Pro
Release Out now
Gods have taken many forms over the millennia: animal-headed, many-limbed, indistinguishable from one of us. Asgard’s Wrath 2 depicts them as simply massive. So as Thoth paces his observatory, a walking skyscraper lost in thought, each footstep rattles like thunder. He might be the Egyptian god of communication, but he’s not a great listener – to get his attention we need to reach eye level, scaling the rings of a tabletop astrolabe. Before we can even begin our climb, though, one colossal sandal comes down, its shadow filling the headset’s field of view. Splat.
Occasionally, a metaphor is too bigstudio Sanzaru in 2020 to lend its VR hardware some first-party punch. Or perhaps this sequel – arriving a couple of months after Quest 3, as the closest thing it has to a big launch title – is the giant here. It’s certainly fixated on scale, promising to keep you busy for a hundred hours or more, almost unprecedented for a single continuous campaign in VR. Along the way, Sanzaru crams in a lot. There are dozens of weapons with alternative functions, multiple playable characters, companions who can turn into animal mounts, an open world (of sorts – see ‘Sandbox’) peppered with dungeons, set-piece boss encounters, parkour traversal that avoids motion-sickness pitfalls, RPG skill trees, upgradeable weapons, crafting… The list goes on and on, with mechanics adopted (and adapted) from a wide range of action and adventure games: to to Respawn’s games. As proof that VR can do just about everything traditional videogames can, is remarkable.
