It’s nearly impossible to get Steve Miller’s song Fly Like an Eagle out of my head as I soar through a Paris-inspired city scape during my demo of Ubisoft’s latest VR game. Set to launch this fall on the Oculus Rift, Eagle Flight was developed exclusively for virtual reality and features stunning graphics and architecture.
The game intuitively reacts to the tilting of your head as you steer through hoops and around buildings while using a hand controller to manage your speed.
But what makes this game so addicting is that it’s co-op.
A few minutes after doing this demo solo, an Oculus employee synced up my headset with four other people in the room. I saw each player appear as an eagle perched next to me. We picked teams and lined up our tail feathers gearing up for a hilarious version of my favorite childhood game: capture the flag.
The goal? Get a dead rabbit to your nest before the opposing team catches up to you. You can attack others using bird calls by aiming sonic waves at your enemy, blowing them up into a cloud of feathers.
It is incredibly satisfying.
As soon as the game started I noticed that my attention to the environment was immediately heightened as I strategized the best pathways to victory and routes to sneak up on my other fair feathered friends. Our teams laughed and screamed while taking turns morbidly killing each other in confetti-like explosions. And that sense of presence combined with personal connections are what I’ve been missing for so long in VR.
Eagle Flight is one of many games that will be released on the Oculus headset that plays into our instinctive desire to make VR social. And if this is just the beginning, it’s a really exciting launch point.
Image Sources: Ubisoft and Giphy
