A virtual reality version of the stylishly minimalistic first-person shooter Superhot will launch alongside Oculus Touch controllers in December, developer Team Superhot told Polygon this week.
Superhot VR will be among the first fully fledged games to take advantage of the Oculus Touch’s gyroscopic hardware and will feature new levels and challenges not seen in previous editions released for consoles and PCs.
Superhot is a unique shooter that challenges players to survive a series of fast-paced shootouts against overwhelming odds. While players frequently find themselves outnumbered by heavily armed enemies, Superhot‘s in-game action pauses until players move or shoot, allowing them to size up the situation and react accordingly.
Expert players who have mastered Superhot‘s time-bending mechanics can string together risky stunts and trick shots that would be impossible to reproduce in a traditional first-person shooter. Superhot VR gives players a similar degree of control over space and time, making for an immersive and trippy virtual reality experience.
In redesigning Superhot for the virtual reality realm, its creators found that little of the original game was able to survive the platform shift intact.
“We hope that we’re going to get to reuse some of the levels from the original version, but when we got down to it we found out that when you’re designing geometry for first-person shooters on regular screens, it’s always different,” designer Tomasz Kaczmarczyk told Polygon. “It’s always kind of off-scale, you need to have wider corridors or wider doors or otherwise it feels claustrophobic. When you use those levels in VR, everything seems so large.”
As a result, Superhot VR will offer a new selection of challenges in addition to reconfigured levels featured in the original release. Character hit boxes will also be radically redesigned to account for the player’s increased range of movement, giving veterans a new degree of challenge.
Superhot VR premieres alongside Oculus Touch controllers on December 7.
