REVIEW / Hubris (PC VR)

While companies like Meta and Sony continue to invest heavily in virtual reality, I can’t help but notice that things seem to be slowing down on the software side. I can’t remember the last time there was a big, exciting new VR-only game. Looking at recent lists of best VR games, they’re mostly filled with games from years ago; where’s the hot new thing? Well, that’s why I took a look at Hubris, a VR shooter trying to be that hot new thing. It certainly has a lot of hard work behind it, but it’s hard to say if that will be enough to bring it mass attention. 

Hubris starts players off in a spaceship for training and plot exposition. These early moments are incredibly immersive, and gave me high hopes for the rest of the game. After the plot is laid out, you move from the ship to a planet, and it looks beautiful. That’s what most of the early talk about Hubris focused on, and I can see why. While its planetary setting is a bit generic (I’ve played a lot of sci-fi VR games over the years), there’s no question that it looks great if you have the hardware for it. And even if you don’t, the scope and physics are impressive on low settings too. Early missions have you exploring an area with a lot of water, and it all looks as it should.

The problem is, once you start playing for a while, the wonder at these visuals wears off, and you’re left with a lot of little problems that add up. Exploration involves not just climbing (which does work pretty well), but also platforming, and platforming in first person just doesn’t work well. In combat, you’ll find that your guns seem to have too little ammo to handle the massive hordes of enemies that you’ll encounter. Healing items quickly become few and far between, even on easier difficulty levels. And the voice of your commanding officer, heard regularly through a drone that follows you through the world, gets very annoying very fast. Before long, you have to stop and question why you’re still playing.

Playing Hubris feels like a struggle, and that’s a real shame, because there’s a lot of good to be said about the visuals and environments. Even when you start going into industrial areas that aren’t exactly breathtaking, the whole thing stays pretty immersive. But every time I started to really get into it, the cheap enemy hordes or inaccurate platforming snapped me out of my immersion. So yes, Hubris does have a lot of hard work behind it. And if you’re up for a challenge and want to play around with some decent environments, it may be worth a look. That may be enough to get a lot of attention for the game, too. But the next big thing in VR, this is not.