It was disorienting at first, turning my head to move the camera for a third-person 3D platformer, but playing Lucky’s Tale and watching its cute but generic protagonist bounce around in virtual reality soon felt natural. It’s maybe a little too natural, because once the novelty of playing in VR wore off, I saw it for what it really is: a very short, very conventional game loaded with unnecessary repetition.

Most of Lucky’s Tale could have been an N64-era platformer. It’s that same kind of straightforward double-jumping, ground-pounding platforming while collecting coins and avoiding simple enemies we’ve seen for decades, but easier than most and lacking interesting puzzles or secrets to find. There’s no difficulty progression to speak of, either — the first level teaches you pretty much everything you need to know to get through the entire story mode and rescue Lucky’s pig buddy, and it rarely tries to compound on those simple skills to make its platforming more challenging or exciting. The few boss battles are the most fun, since they take the most advantage of action and platforming with a faster pace than the action in the regular levels.

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The 14 levels would’ve only taken me about an hour and a half to complete, except every few levels Lucky’s Tale forces you to go back and replay the same levels over again in an alternate mode to progress. That’s some blatantly repetitive padding. That said, the Time Trials mode is my favorite way to play, since going for speed made it a little harder and definitely more fun than the slow and steady story levels. The other mode, a coin-collecting game, doesn’t feel significantly different from playing through the first time.

Lucky’s Tale is a VR platformer, but VR doesn’t add much. Looking up at a vertical stretch of platforming or physically moving my head to see around corners adds a little novelty to an otherwise familiar experience, but that didn’t translate into actual gameplay I hadn’t seen before — just a new camera angle. The only time I was really happy to have the Oculus on was in a very dark level, where my head became the light source. Moving my face forward without moving Lucky at all helped me avoid enemies hidden in the dark, which is a cool concept and the most innovative VR aspect of Lucky’s Tale.

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All the other camera movement could have been done just as well with the controller — I would have preferred it, even, because the camera sometimes auto-scrolls forward in an awkward way that occasionally made me feel dizzy because I wasn’t in control. Other times, I’d advance Lucky faster than that scrolling overworld camera could even move, and I’d have to crane my neck or stand up a little to see where I was going. It doesn’t seem intentional, and I wouldn’t have had those awkward breaks in my movement had I just been able to manually control the camera position and movement speed myself. It makes the VR part of the experience feel forced rather than adding anything to the platforming.

That’s a miss on its own, because the Rift’s stereoscopic 3D effect could have been a great way to play with depth perception and mess with what we expect from a 3D platformer. Instead, I didn’t even notice a difference in my ability to gauge my jumps. That doesn’t make the platforming bad — Lucky’s Tale is well done in general, though simple — but it doesn’t make it good, either.