Joy Way released a two minute gameplay trailer recently highlighting some of the mechanics and play-styles that they’ll be offering gamers in the upcoming VR parkour title called Stride. It looks and plays a lot like DICE’s original vision for Mirror’s Edge when it was running on the Unreal Engine 3, only you manually have to move your body and head to perform certain moves or execute tactically proficient combat maneuvers.
The two minute trailer starts with the player character a rooftop, running along a ledge and then using a window to run and leap off the side of the building to the next building.
You can climb pipes, shimmy along edges, run across platforms, and also use melee attacks to take down foes.
You can see what the gameplay is like with the trailer below.
The movement definitely looks floaty and I can already imagine a bunch of people getting motion sickness from playing the game. Then again, Sprint Vector managed to avoid many of those complaints even though it’s a Jet Set-style racing game with a lot of movement and parkour. But that’s mostly because it doesn’t imitate running and is more about maintaining a smooth pace of momentum.
To cut down on queasiness you can see that Joy Way did away with the landing roll that you would typically see when performing high jumps.
Even still, it’s a risky move having a parkour game where you can’t see your legs, you have disembodied hands, and the movement isn’t entirely accurately simulating real human movement.
I’m curious to see what the user reviews will be like or whether or not they’ll have some customization options available for the movement and FOV.
Anyway, the game is scheduled to release on VR headsets for PC sometime this summer. You can wishlist or learn more about it by visiting the Steam store page.