One of the flagship titles for Quest at launch, Robo Recall: Unplugged is a port of the Rift robot shooter that shows how impressive the wire-free VR headset can be.
The game puts you in control of a ‘Recaller’ working for robot making company RoboReady, tasked with controlling a robot via a VR unit (VR within VR?) to fight of waves of their other robots that have gone bad (or just mad in some cases). You won’t be surprised to hear that there’s a big villain behind all this and he happens to be addicted to kitten videos.
Created by Epic Games for Oculus and ported to Quest by Drifter Entertainment, Robo Recall: Unplugged has some obvious compromises in terms of the graphics when compared to the Rift version, which isn’t surprising considering that it’s often thought of as a tech demo for VR as much as it is a fun shooter but it’s surprising how good it still looks, even 9 months down the line.
The action is smooth and, like many other Quest ports, really benefits from the 360 degree movement, being able to look freely around the three arenas that form the levels for the game. You movement is controlled by jumping to spots via the controller, which cuts out any motion sickness that you’d usually get from a more realistic movement system and it works well here as much of the time is spent on one spot, shooting at robots coming at you from all angles.
The enemies vary from larger and heavier robots to small spidery droids that are harder to shoot but go down easier. There’s humour littered throughout the game, with dying enemies uttering some amusing phrases, though they do get repeated a little too often after a while. The scoring system keeps you aiming for multipliers and acts as a good incentive to replay the game after its short runtime, something many games of this type really need to keep them from getting stale too quickly.
While there are many more games out now for Quest than when Robo Recall originally released, this is still a great showcase of what the Oculus hardware can do and it now has the benefit of play the rift version, too, which is free via Cross-buy, there’s no excuse not to have this in your collection.
Robo Recall: Unplugged
Pros
- Frantic robot shooting fun
- 360 environments really enhance the game
- Good use of humour
Cons
- Obvious graphical downgrade
- Rather short runtime
