Game details Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment

Publisher: Oculus

Platform: Oculus Touch on Windows (reviewed)

Release Date: February 22, 2018

Price: $40 (free online-compatible demo)

Links: Official website Hidden Path Entertainment: Oculus: Oculus Touch on Windows (reviewed)February 22, 2018: $40 (free online-compatible demo)

BELLEVUE, Washington—Virtual reality has been a thing for years, yet for some reason, it has had a lack of real-time strategy (RTS) games. To this, I can't help but say, what gives? Managing a giant army à la StarCraft seems like a nice fit for VR's mix of hand-tracked controllers and first-person twists—while also minding VR's limits. Stand above a battlefield (or, if your room is cramped, sit without losing the effect). Use your hands to become a war puppeteer. Enjoy a refreshing control and perspective alternative to ancient, mouse-driven menus.

It's a VR no-brainer... that nobody has truly attempted until this week.

Unlike other RTS-ish games in VR, this week's Brass Tactics is the first full-blown take on the genre to see a retail release. It's not perfect—indeed, it has a couple of glaring issues ahead of its Thursday launch—but Brass Tactics is clearly a few steps above "just good enough." It functions as a pure, solid RTS, while it also comes packed with nice VR touches. Best of all, thanks to a free, unlimited, works-online demo version, every single VR owner out there (even outside the Oculus ecosystem) can try it for themselves—and try it they should.

Clear RTS skies













To explain how Brass Tactics works, it's best to start with what the game doesn't reinvent: the RTS wheel.

As an overseeing commander in medieval combat, your objective is to manage troops and economies while trying to win a one-on-one war skirmish. The setup almost sounds copied-and-pasted from a '90s classic in the genre: each player starts at a corner of a map. Create and direct wimpy troops to march toward your opponent (or occasionally to various edges of the map) while capturing points that you can use to accumulate resources and build new troops. Grow your army. Create more powerful units and spend resources on updating your existing ones. Contend with a crisscrossing rock-paper-scissors system of combat (archer beats warrior, warrior beats cavalry, cavalry beats archer, etc.) to ultimately destroy your opponent's base.

With those basic building blocks established, Brass Tactics flexes its risk-taking muscles almost exclusively around its VR perspective. For starters: there's no fog of war. Unlike classics like StarCraft, in which you have to create and direct troops to "light up" unseen parts of the map, Brass' commanders can instead freely look and wander around a battle arena to see everything at all times. To move around the battlefield, grab and fling the table around, using a comfortable-yet-quick "sliding" mechanic.

As early as the first seconds of a match, you can do this to waltz right up to your opponent's base, if not his or her VR avatar. Or even wave hi from afar. (I did this a lot in testing.) This starts out feeling awkward—like, really? You're gonna let me see everything my opponent is up to at all times? But Hidden Path cofounder Jeff Pobst tells Ars Technica that he thinks an in-the-battle VR perspective offers something different and organic: a "fog of attention."

I quote him not to give him a free sales pitch but to say that he's on to something. My time playing Brass Tactics, particularly across the retail version's variety of branching-path tactical options, was always tempered by a relatively limited perspective from wherever I stood in the VR space. Importantly, players cannot "pinch" in this VR space to make the world grow or shrink. Players are stuck at a fixed perspective, and they'll need to rapidly slide to and from bases and units to tap, activate, and direct them, anyway. I found myself within my own fog of war enough as it was. (Hidden Path probably appreciates the slightly narrow field-of-view within VR headsets at this point.)

Hidden Path had actually planned to launch an RTS without fog of war for some time, confirming to Ars that the twist had been tested in two unreleased RTS games. Hidden Path had been wanting to return to the RTS games it had loved in the past—like what company cofounder Marc Terrano had worked on in Age of Empires' earliest days—but knew that hour-long matches weren't going to cut it for modern players' and streamers' attention spans. Pobst describes that shift as "a scary thing" for RTS traditionalists, but his team had long believed that dumping fog-of-war could work in terms of decreasing match length without reducing pure RTS complexity.







I press Pobst on his mention of streaming, asking if sites like Twitch played any part in that design decision. He minces no words: "Yeah, actually! But it wasn't a design pillar. This is just a great way for people to see what fun can be had inside of VR."

He then points to the game's surprise appearance at PAX South 2017, which shows two competitors in the expo's "Omegathon" contest facing off. It's quite watchable, thanks to Hidden Path's broadcasting toolset and the game's easily seen floating VR avatars managing their armies—not to mention a crisp 12-minute runtime from start to "gg."

Wait, unreleased games? My ears perked up when Pobst mentioned unreleased RTS games. When asked what platforms they were slated for, he answered that one was a "mouse and keyboard" game, while another, which was shut down in 2007, had aspirations to "reinvent RTS for consoles with an online experience." (That shutdown came two years before Halo Wars launched to a lukewarm reception.) He's vague about whether a third one may or may not have existed for some other peripheral, VR or otherwise. My ears perked up when Pobst mentioned unreleased RTS games. When asked what platforms they were slated for, he answered that one was a "mouse and keyboard" game, while another, which was shut down in 2007, had aspirations to "reinvent RTS for consoles with an online experience." (That shutdown came two years before Halo Wars launched to a lukewarm reception.) He's vague about whether a third one may or may not have existed for some other peripheral, VR or otherwise. Pobst shrugs off the games that never launched, as if they're a standard casualty of game development. He estimates that roughly as many of his games have been published since 2006 as have been canceled by publishing partners. He also says that Hidden Path began work on "first party" video game projects for Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft in its first year of business. Only the Microsoft one ever saw the light of day as an internal demo for the burgeoning XNA platform. The others were canceled. When asked if any of those games had "familiar characters," Pobst confidently says no, emphasizing that Hidden Path was all about original IP at the time,

From there, the game really is more about easing players into a hand-controlled RTS control suite. Every major, cool thing about Brass Tactics is subtle. An example: when you take over an empty base, you might want to slap a cavalry tower into its slot so you can start producing horse-riding warriors on the left side of the map. To do so, flip one of your wrists over to reveal a small, wooden shelf of roughly eight tower options, then use your other hand to grab the tower you want and stick it into the slot.

Utilizing an RTS-styled "tech tree" works in a similar fashion. To access it, you must slide all the way back to your base, which sits at the end of a giant, wooden table. At that point, a drawer will slide out, full of boost options. Pick the one you want, labeled with clear text, and slap it into your castle to buy and activate it.

But perhaps coolest of all is the incredible ease with which you can pick, activate, and aim your individual army units. When your hand is near a unit you want to command, hold down your controller's trigger button, then aim your hand so that the direction of your index finger is where you want your unit to go. Hidden Path tells Ars that it worked for quite some time on fine-tuning this "move units in the direction of your forearm" control system, and there's really no way to describe it that sells just how bloody elegant it is in practice. (The devs had worked on control systems such as a direct laser pointer; this kind of thing works in other games, they say, but in 20- to 25-minute Brass Tactics battles, players reported wrist fatigue.)

Additionally, you can grab and direct a single unit by half-squeezing the trigger, or you can grab and direct a whole gang of units at once by full-squeezing the trigger while gliding your hand over every unit you want to move. This also feels quite slick in practice, but it exposes one Brass letdown. Testers have already begun begging for one more option: a way to select all units of a certain type (like, grab every archer or tank on the battlefield at once). Hidden Path tells fans it's working on it, but that's the kind of classic-RTS option I would have expected on day one. (With that in mind, I doubt that they'll go so far as to let players create custom selectable unit groups, but hey, who knows?)