Everest VR is more like an education experience rather than a game but even keeping that in mind I found the experience a little underwhelming.
I played the game on an HP Reverb G2 the game does not officially support it however it played fine except for a bug in the version of the Unreal engine they used (more on that in the controls section)
The game consists of three modes the campaign, God mode and expedition mode.
The Campaign is no so much a campaign and more like a narrated highlight reel of a few important points on the climb with the most basic of gameplay bolted on as an after thought
God mod is exactly as you expect you are able to teleport around and change scale at will and even see near by peaks.
Expedition mode is the educational experience, the mountain becomes littered with audio clips from climbers 360 videos and Info graphic style videos explaining everything from the gear a climb takes to effects of global warming on the summit to the effects of oxygen deprivation on a human.
The entire experience takes about 50 to 75 minutes depending on how leisurely you play.
Spec of my PC used to play:
I7 7700k
GTX 1080 Ti
16gb Ram
HP Reverb G2
Visually the game is stunning from standing at the base and looking up at the mountain to standing atop Everest and basking in the view and every spot in between, however on closer inspection of any of the models the detail is not quite as sharp or crisp, its kind of a whole greater than the sum of its parts kind of thing.
The 360 videos in the Expedition mode however were quite low quality something one might not have noticed back in 2016 but now are quite noticeable on higher resolution headsets.
The sounds of Everest from the wind to the heavy breath really helped sell the experience.
The audio logs in the Expedition mode while fantastic are a tad hard to understand at times and subtitles would have been appreciated.
The gameplay is really the most basic there is the game consists of teleporting from point to point, The campaign adds a little more in that there is a few ice pick sections, pulley ropes and carabiner clips however these sections are extremely short and extremely basic.
the games biggest flaw I think is just how little of the climb the player actually gets to experience in the campaign, sure you can teleport the whole thing in god mode if you would like, but I would have loved to experience climbing the mountain in its entirety with a team and more refined climbing mechanics, maybe more akin to the game "The Climb"
The game only has teleportation for locomotion which is a huge disappointment now but very common place for games of 2016 (when it was released)
As mentioned in the first paragraph the game also suffers from a bug that was in all early Unreal VR games and that's controller swapping, now for players with symmetrical controllers this is not an issue, but for but for the majority of headsets now this is an issue, that is Unreal bases the left and right controller on which is turned on first meaning if you turn them on in the wrong order your hands are swapped meaning you need to shut down the game (or possibly even steam VR) and try again.
While the game is an interesting experience I think most of if not more of the replay valve is lost due to the existence of Google Earth VR so I would only recommend this game really if on sale for at least 50% off
While I really Liked the concept and wanted to like this game ultimately it falls very short of what I think it could have been and can only recommend this game on deep sale but even then its still disappointing to think what this could have been
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Everest VR
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