If you're an Oculus Rift early adopter eagerly awaiting the new Touch controllers, your patience will be rewarded with a bonus: Dead and Buried, a first-person shooter game set in the Wild West, will be bundled free with Oculus Touch.
We played versions of Dead and Buried at the GDC2016 and OC3 annual conventions. We found that Touch controllers are ideally suited to stand in for weaponry – you can physically reach out to pick up, aim and fire guns – but the real excitement is the duck-and-cover mentality made possible by VR. As your adversaries fire, you need to physically dodge and dive to avoid them.
Dead and Buried has a shooting gallery mode for single-player practice or a multiplayer mode where you can choose the role of an outlaw or a lawman. Developers also announced a new Robbery mode, where one team tries to steal a train and the other defends it.
Based on our experience, Dead and Buried should serve as an excellent introduction to VR gaming. The familiar first-person shooter concept shortens the learning curve that often hinders the VR experience, while the idea of being shot at keeps the immersion level at full throttle. Plus, the cartoony depiction of the Old West keeps things visually interesting without giving into blood and guts or full-blown nerdery.
Facebook's Oculus Touch controllers are available now for pre-order (US$199) and start shipping on December 6. Dead and Buried comes with every Touch purchase, along with VR Sports Challenge and spell-casting game The Unspoken.
Source: Oculus
