Path Of Fury - Episode 1: Tetsuo’s Tower Review

If you’re a big fan of VR Exercise, VR Workout Games, or just VR Fighting games for any reason, then I’ve got a pretty solid recommendation to make for you this week. That’s Path Of Fury, or at least the first Episode titled “Tetsuo’s Tower”, which released this previous week.

Here I’ll help you out by giving you a brief overview of what the game is, how it feels to play, and why I think it’s a solid new VR Fighting game that’s worth your money and time.

Oh, and if you’d rather just watch a video about the game then check this one out about it on the Reality Remake Youtube channel.

What Is Path Of Fury - Episode 1: Tetsuo’s Tower?

The Path Of Fury - Episode 1: Tetsuo’s Tower Logo.

So here’s the gist of the game. You’re angry at a guy called Tetsuo. To be honest I’m not sure why, but you are his greatest enemy and he lives at the top of a big tower full of various goons and fighters that don’t want you to reach him at the top.

So this means you’ve got to fight hundreds of people to get to the top of the tower. They’ll be different sorts of people, different styles of fighter, and will go toe to toe with you in a variety of environements.

A solid premise for a Virtual Reality beat-em-up, and here’s what the actual gameplay is like.

In this Path Of Fury - Episode 1: Tetsuo’s Tower Review you’ll find that this is a very punching centric game.

Path Of Fury - Episode 1: Tetsuo’s Tower - Gameplay

The gameplay of this game is pretty simple as easy to grasp. You stand still and are moved through a part of the tower automatically and stop whenever there are enemies in your way. Targets will appear on those enemies that you need to hit with your hands. They are blue or red or grey. You’ve got a blue hand and a red hand. You deal extra damage by hitting a target with the hand colored the same as it, and hand color doesn’t matter for grey targets.

If you don’t hit an opponent fast enough and the target on them shrinks then they get a chance to strike you. You have to punch whatever limb they’re hitting you with to block the blow before they hit you or you take damage.

You’ve got to hit with some force though, and as the game goes on it gets harder and you have to strike faster and faster in order to knock your enemies down and avoid being hit yourself.

This boss absolutely loves to kick in Path Of Fury - Episode 1: Tetsuo’s Tower

There are levels with different themes and environments, and a boss at the end of each level. You get a score depending on how quickly you completed it and how few mistakes you made.

That’s basically it. The game also switches things up by having you punch different things like doors and objects to get them out of your way and progress, or choose which way you want to go. The entire game is basically an on rails shooter… except with punching.

Oh, and should you lose then you have to start from a previous checkpoint (which might be a very far way back). The game is a roguelite in that way, but is far less punishing than other games with a similar system.

Path Of Fury - Episode 1: Tetsuo’s Tower - Review

There are some crazy set pieces in this VR Fighting game.

The end result of all of this is a game that is very quick and easy to get into, but very hard to master because it relies so much on your physical speed and endurance.

You get a break at the end of each level so you won’t have to completely drain yourself to finish one, but the game does get very intense. While it doesn’t involve moving your legs and upper body as much as other punching games like Thrill Of The Fight, Path Of Fury does a great job at wearing your arms out and making you breathe heavily. You’ve got to do a lot of fast punching, and that makes it both very entertaining and a great workout.

The aesthetic of the game is that classic Playstation 1 style so commonly seen in indie games, yet not so much in Virtual Reality. It fits with the grungy setting and world.

Punching a Cop In Path Of Fury - Episode 1: Tetsuo’s Tower

The score is pretty decent with some great upbeat tracks, and in the end Path Of Fury relies on replayability, because it does have a roguelite format that may keep you stuck in a certain portion of the game. Should you actually complete the game though then there are also challenge modes to keep it interesting.

Still, even completing it once is quite the achievement, and even when you do there are multiple paths up the tower to take, and each time you can focus on completing the level faster and more efficiently. All while getting a fantastic workout.

It’s a fairly straightforward premise for a VR Fighting game that Path Of Fury executes excellently with a fantastic gritty look and feel. It is an absolute blast to work up a sweat in this game, and you don’t need a huge VR play space to enjoy it.

An Amazing VR Climbing Game - Crowbar Climber

When I first shelled out 6.99$ for Crowbar Climber in the Meta Quest store I wasn’t prepared to be so impressed by the game, but I was very intrigued by the concept of a VR Climbing Game using crowbars.

It’s one of those ideas that is so simply straightforward and seems obvious when looking back at it. It really brings the hit indie game Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy to mind.

Oh, and if you want to see some video of this game check it out on Youtube.

What’s So Fun In Crowbar Climber?

You can even wave at yourself in Crowbar Climber.

Alright here’s the game put quickly and simply. You’re a little guy in a pot and your hands are crowbars. You climb upwards and try not to fall back downwards.

Boom, bam, that’s it. That’s the game, and it is a lot of fun for such a simple concept for a Virtual Reality Climbing Game. Instead of just putting your hand over a grabbable thing and holding grip down you actually have to concentrate on how you are hanging on to something with the hooked end of a crowbar.

The stages get progressively harder in this VR Climbing Game.

Let’s face it we’ve seen that old “raise hand and hold grip” climbing system in so many VR games from adventure titles like Skydance’s Behemoth to dedicated games like The Climb 2 that it’s just so old and tired by now. It was never a particularly interesting way to simulate climbing in the first place.

Well Crowbar Climber might not be a simulator for real life climbing, but it sure is fun and interesting. The more obstacles you manage to climb past the harder they get. From hooking your way from ledge to ledge to swinging and jumping off of small handholds. After a while the platforms move as well, adding an element of timing.

Things get sort of hectic in Crowbar Climber as you keep going, and it offers a fantastic VR Climbing challenge.

If you fall down you can lose quite a bit of progress, and the feeling of playing Crowbar Climber is a lot like that of playing Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. It can be so frustrating to miss and fall down, but it just makes you want to climb higher even more.

The only downsides are that the visuals are very basic and the clanging of the crowbar can get a little annoying. It could use a little music. Still, I never thought I would have so much fun pulling myself up a hill with a pair of crowbars in VR.

Crowbar Climber is a fantastic use of VR hand controls to create a unique and fun VR Climbing Game. I highly recommend it if you want a Virtual Reality climbing experience that feels fresh and unique, is easy to get into, and it’s reasonably priced.

Alien: Rogue Incursion Is Still Fun Despite The Bad Quest Port | Alien: Rogue Incursion Review

So Alien: Rogue Incursion has hit a bit of flak for the quality of its port to the Quest 3. I’ve played this fantastic Alien VR game exclusively on the Quest 3 and I’d say that well… yea there is some justification to the criticism.

The game occasionally struggles on the Quest 3 even when not recording, and my recordings of it often came out choppy at points, which is a pretty good indicator for an unoptimized game. Not to mention the most obvious indicator of the visual fidelity being below what you would be accustomed to expect on a Quest 3.

There were some bugs as well. The occasional missed trigger for a mission (defend this area… and then nothing happens for five minutes).

Though I do have to say that despite all of this I had an absurdly good time with Alien: Rogue Incursion, as you can see on Youtube.

I’m not saying that the criticism of the low quality port isn’t valid. I am saying that I really loved this game despite the issues that others, and myself, have with it. I guess you’d call this an Alien: Rogue Incursion review… but I’m really just biasing towards the good parts here (and there are many more good parts than bad).

What Alien: Rogue Incursion Does Right

Blasting Xenomorphs in Alien: Rogue Incursion is an Unmatched Aliens VR Experience.

So ignoring the technical faults of the Quest 3 port, what does Alien: Rogue Incursion do right that makes it such an enjoyable VR shooter adventure game?

I think the foremost thing that it does, and how it utilizes Virtual Reality the best, is it immediately gives you a pulse rifle. No intermittent period of the game where you just use a pistol or something stupid like that, you just get a pulse rifle at the very beginning.

Oh and what a pulse rifle it is. It’s got the sound, the heft, the feel, and the firepower of a hundred round magazine that you’d expect from such an iconic weapon. Alien: Rogue Incursion has a pulse rifle that is really the closest you could get to using a real one, since they don’t actually exist. It’s a magnificent and iconic weapon to any lover of the Alien franchise.

Check out the Pulse Rifle in Alien: Rogue Incursion.

The other weapons in the game, while not as unique as the pulse rifle, are also all well implemented and fun to use. Though it would be nice if there was a way to turn off the “snap aim” feature the game comes with that forces your sight down the barrel of a weapon when your eye gets close enough to it.

I’d rather aim the old fashioned way, thank you very much, but this is a feature that you can get used to. I’ve also heard some complain about how slow the weapons are to move and load, but that’s another thing that I think is actually really great about this Aliens VR game.

Guns are heavy, and you can reload guns ridiculously quickly in many Virtual Reality games because you don’t feel the weight of them. Well Alien: Rogue Incursion is part horror game, just like all Aliens games are, and the horror of trying to reload a weapon as quickly as possible mid combat should be well known to any VR gamer. Drawing that out and giving the weapons some real heft as you try to aim and load them not only increases the feeling of immersion with the items you are using, but also increases the tension of every situation.

Of course these situations wouldn’t be tense without a proper creepy setting, and Castor’s Cradle is a really good choice. It’s a barren icy planet, and you spend your time there inside of a Xenomorph infested clandestine research base. It is about as grim and creepy a setting as you could hope for out in space. The place is trashed, it’s cold, and it’s creepy.

Castor’s Cradle is your classic creepy Alien infested facility… but now in a Virtual Reality shooter!

The Xenomorphs themselves, the titular Aliens, also make a pretty fine showing. Though they may also draw criticism as being “not clever” or running into your gunfire too easily.

Sure the Aliens take chances on frontal charges often, but also consider that in this game you have a motion tracker on you at all times. If you consider the Aliens to be too dumb, then turn that tracker off and never use it. It gets a lot harder to even know when a Xenomorph is nearby, and twice as much so to be looking in their direction as they charge you.

Every sound might be an Alien in a vent sneaking up on you. They really are hard to see, and often flee or try to attack you from another angle when a frontal assault isn’t expedient. Though you can tell that they don’t try to attack you from behind as much as they could. Likely for balance purposes.

Let’s face it, fighting a facility full of Aliens that are as stealthy and clever as those in the movies would be a suicide mission.

The Ultimate VR Cat Game That Lets You Become A Cat - I Am Cat VR Review

I Am Cat does exactly what it says in the title. It takes you, a human wearing a Virtual Reality headset, and turns you into a cat.

Well, it doesn’t make you a cat exactly, you’ll still be you, but I Am Cat does an absolutely incredible job of putting you into the furry paws of a feline and making you feel like a cat n Virtual Reality.

You can be a good kitty or literally the worst cat imaginable in I Am Cat, and that’s what makes it such a fun VR Cat Game.

This is the very definition of a VR Cat Game. The game doesn’t involve cats, or happen to show cats, or let you look at cats. I Am Cat makes you the cat, and it does so in very novel and fun ways that make full use of Virtual Reality hand controls and immersion.

Take your view of the world for an example. In most VR games your head is usually situated a few feet above the floor of the virtual world, at about your height or an average human height.

Instead in I Am Cat your head is very close to the ground. Your eyes are just above the floor, a lot like a cat’s. When you move your view of the world feels a lot like watching one of those cat collar camera videos, except with much smoother and less shaky vision.

You can use a lot of things around the house. Like the faucet.

Speaking of movement, the movement in this game is amazingly innovative and designed to make you imitate a cat to move.

You’ve got these long, straight arms, and the paw at the end of them follows your touch controller for each hand. There are no almost no physical buttons to press, no slide movement, all of the movement and interactions in this VR Cat Game are done with your paws. I mean your hands.

There are a tun of little games and cat toys to play with as a VR Cat.

The first thing that the game teaches you to do is walk. It can be tricky to get the hang of, especially if you’re used to other VR games that have you use the motion of your hands to move around the world, like Gorilla Tag.

While Gorilla Tag is a Gorilla VR Game that has you slapping the ground and other surfaces to move yourself around, I Am Cat feels much different. You have to move your arms kind of like you are imitating a cat. You have to quickly swipe at the ground with one paw and then the other in quick succession, just like a cat would.

It does take a little getting used to. I found myself trying to glide my paws across the ground like you would in Gorilla Tag, purely out of habit, and found that the game would frustratingly move me forward and then slingshot me back to where I started. This feedback wasn’t very pleasant, I’d rather just not have moved at all, but I did eventually learn to imitate a cat’s front paws with my hands to move quickly and comfortably.

The movement is so immersive because of this, and you can even pounce by smashing both paws against the ground, or climb by pawing at a vertical surface. You can even pick up objects with the grab button, which releases your claws, and hold items in your mouth. The movement is a lot of what makes this game so fun, and combined with how small you are in the world makes you really feel like a tiny cat scurrying and jumping around a house.

The tutorial in I Am Cat is great at showing you how to walk and move around. It does still take some getting used to though.

That’s where I Am Cat takes place, at least at the time of writing, entirely within a house with a ton of household items, toys, and your owner, an old woman.

She looks absolutely MASSIVE to you in the game. You are a cat after all, she’s so tall compared to you.

Your owner. She looks absolutely massive ingame and towers over you.

The scale of the house around you continues to reinforce that while you are playing this VR Cat Game you are a small cat instead of a human standing in a room with a VR headset on their face.

You can easily run and jump around furniture, mess with the many household items like the very intelligent feline that you are, eat your food, drink water. If you’ve ever seen a cat do something hilarious and silly then you can do it in I Am Cat.

There are a lot of things to explore and do, and interactions to discover, in the house the game takes place in. Despite being a two story and fairly average sized place, the house is a massive playground for you since well, you’re a tiny cat.

Climbing and jumping around is so much fun in this Cat VR Game.

You can turn on the TV, change the channel on the radio. Break into your owner’s computer, or even cook. There are an absolutely insane amount of things you can do.

Oh, and if you’re a bad cat and break some glasses, vases, or fine china, then your owner won’t be too happy with you either.

Make your owner mad in I Am Cat and she’ll whack you with a frying pan. No cats were hurt in the creation of this VR Cat Game.

There’s even a progression system with experience and levels. On your handy cat smartwatch on your left paw you can look at various tasks that you can do around the house.

These are all fun little cat activities like playing the piano, breaking stuff, exploring the top of the refrigerator. You know, Virtual Reality Cat Game things.

Each task gives you experience, and you gain levels over time. They’re an interesting way to introduce you to new wacky things that you can try around the house.

You’re given some direction in your Cat VR Game adventure through these missions, which are a ton of fun to complete.

I Am Cat is exactly what you’d want from a VR Cat Game. It turns you into a cat in VR, and wow does it do a good job at that.

Even if you aren’t a cat lover the unique movement system and perspective are fun an unique on their own, and completely worth checking out. You can play I Am Cat on the Meta Quest, and on Steam using PCVR. Enjoy!

Infinite Inside Review - A Surreal VR Puzzle Game With Passthrough

Infinite Inside is a game that the puzzling part of your brain will enjoy greatly, and it makes great use of Virtual Reality, and the passthrough capabilities of the Quest headset to deliver a unique puzzling experience.

That is, combining Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality to create an impression of a tower in whatever room you are playing in, and you teleporting inside and exploring that tower. Deeper and deeper you go, and the game becomes more surreal and draws you into its atmosphere.

All the while there are enjoyable 3D jigsaw puzzles to complete, and always the question of how to get to the next area to get more puzzle pieces to solve. Infinite Inside is unique for its combination of Passthrough Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality, but even more so for how well it uses Virtual Reality to convey the sense of traveling deeper into a different and mysterious world.

There are some fantastic 3D jigsaw puzzles in Infinite Inside.

Before we get any deeper into the Infinite Inside review though, let me tell you how the game actually plays.

What Do You Do In Infinite Inside?

The first order of business is to set up your playspace, which is quick, easy, and done with the Meta Quest’s superb passthrough. That is, assuming you are using a Meta Quest 3 or Pro.

Using the more inferior passthrough on the Meta Quest 2 might make Infinite Inside a far less enjoyable, and visible, experience. Though fortunately you can turn off the use of passthrough and have the game take place entirely in Virtual Reality, though the passthrough Mixed Reality exterior of the tower you explore does make the whole experience more wonderful and interesting.

You tell the game where the center of your playspace should be, and this is another game where having a larger playspace to work with is definitely beneficial, though you’ll be alright as long as you have an area large enough to just walk around the square you place in the center.

Placing the area where the tower appears in Passthrough.

You don’t need a massive room, and the game does feature a stationary mode if you don’t have one. Playing in roomscale mode, and with enough space to walk around the center of your playspace, is much more enjoyable though.

Then you get to the game, which is puzzling and exploring really. Explore to find 3D puzzle pieces, and then do your best to stick them together. That’s the core of Infinite Inside.

The game starts with the Mixed Reality portion, a massive plinth arises in the center of your playspace. Three empty compartments open up in front of it, and you can quickly intuit that something needs to go into these slots.

The first VR puzzle. Assemble the pieces and place them in the slot.

So you search around the monolith and discover some handles on it that you can slide open, revealing puzzle pieces. You put these pieces together so they fit in 3D space, and then place the finished object inside of the plinth.

Soon after some of this we get to the VR section, which caught me completely by surprise.

Exploring inside the tower in VR involves a lot of teleporting around. That’s the biggest negative takeaway from this Infinite Inside review.

Placing a statue of a little man inside the Plinth causes you to go inside as well, and in there you can collect more puzzle pieces to put together and solve outside of it.

Then later on you can move through larger environments by grabbing these geometric objects to teleport around inside. If you’re wondering, yes unfortunately the only way to move and explore is through teleport movement. More on that later on in this review.

You explore these stone rooms, sometimes dotted with vintage objects from our world, and get more puzzle pieces so you can leave and assemble them back in Mixed Reality.

Explore inside the plinth to get all of the 3D puzzle pieces you will need.

Is Infinite Inside Fun?

If you like 3D jigsaw puzzles and are intrigued by the idea of breaking them up with some VR exploration, then Infinite Inside holds up pretty well.

What’s odd about the game is that it doesn’t lean far enough into either the Mixed Reality Passthrough or Virtual Reality elements for them to complement each other greatly. Rather the Mixed Reality beginning to the game is merely just a way to anchor the monolith at the center of the experience in the real world. This is cool, but not necessary. It could just as easily be a VR scene as well, and you can make it that way in the options menu.

Using this small figure of a man to move inside and outside this monolith, or tower, or plinth, or whatever you want to call it, is a great way to make the world feel immersive. The transition between the two modes of play makes traveling inside of the game a significant change in gameplay. The exterior space is for putting puzzle pieces together, and going inside to the interior is for exploring to find puzzle pieces.

That’s mostly what Infinite Inside amounts to, changing gameplay between these two modes of play. Exploring in VR feels much different from poking around the outside of the plinth and putting puzzle pieces together in MR.

Infinite Inside shines when the puzzles combine the inside and outside of the tower.

Where the game really shines is actually more in the VR sections inside of the monolith, and where the exterior of the structure briefly interacts with the interior. As the game progresses there are portions where you can actually move puzzle pieces around the tower that will change the environment as you explore.

This way you can create new pathways and explore new areas in order to find all of the puzzle pieces. Occasionally you need to dip back out of the tower to change a piece of the environment around, and give yourself a new area to access. In this way the exploration becomes a whole new set of puzzles alongside the 3D jigsaw puzzles that you complete once you get all of the puzzle pieces.

It gets even more intense and surreal when you find even smaller areas to teleport into while you’re already inside of the monolith, creating layers upon layers of different exploration and environment puzzles in a single level. It’s fantastic, and provides many moments where you can wonder at the surrealness of it all.

Infinite Inside’s surreal look and mysterious tone are well executed and fitting.

Moreover the reliance on teleportation movement in the VR exploration portions of the game was the biggest disappointment of the whole experience. A Virtual Reality game on the Meta Quest relying completely on teleportation movement feels very pre 2020 and hopelessly outdated today.

Teleporting from place to place feels tedious and unimmersive, and is bad for all of the reasons that developers no longer base their games around it except as an option for the hopelessly motion sick.

In this entire Infinite Inside review I’d have to say the reliance on teleport movement is the one element that was truly disappointing and entirely negative.

Eventually you will uncover layers of worlds to explore. Puzzles within puzzles. Infinite Inside slowly escalates its mechanics.

I’ve had fun with Infinite Inside though, and found it to be a very calming and mysterious experience. The austere visuals of the game look fantastic on the Quest 3. They really shine when the simple geometry at the beginning of the game starts to dip into the more surreal.

The look of this game combined with the simple yet elegant and mysterious music give a feeling of mysterious calm that put you in the mood for solving some puzzles and poking around a digital tower in the middle of your living room. The aesthetic and mood of the game are perfectly executed by the developer.

So Infinite Inside is a surreal puzzler that feels like a journey into a dream, and it’s much more fun for how well it commits and pulls of that theme and feeling. Though beware that the puzzles are pretty difficult, and only get harder as the game goes on. If you’re not prepared to scratch your head for a while while trying to figure things out then don’t test your patience here.

That’s all for this Infinite Inside review. If you like 3D jigsaw puzzles in Mixed Reality or Virtual Reality, and are intrigued by the idea of combining that with a little VR exploration then this is a game that is easy to recommend for its pacing, ambiance, and creativity.