Part of me would love a VR headset, but the rest of me lives in a flat, which means I’m usually thankful that most VR game trailers don’t do much for me. Besides Half-Life: Alyx and Superhot, there aren’t many games that have me wishing I had an Index or Quest.
Except now they’re apparently making some sort of Assassin’s Creed game for your pint-size holodecks, and it actually looks pretty cool so long as you manage not to throw up.
Assassin’s Creed Nexus was announced back in June for the Meta Quest Pro, 2, and 3, but it’s a recent gameplay trailer (above) that came out ahead of the game’s November 16 release that’s piqued my curiosity. Featuring the game’s creative director David Votypka walking you through the various ways Ubisoft has tried to adapt AC’s stab-happy gameplay to dizzying 360-degree 3D, it actually makes a fairly compelling case for a classic Assassin’s Creed experience in virtual reality, which, hey, I admit I wasn’t expecting.
Traversing the rooftops of Italy, Greece, and the colonial US—the game is split across Ezio, Kassandra, and Connor’s stories for presumably very intricate narrative reasons I’ve long since stopped trying to keep track of—looks genuinely engaging, as does jankily descending on your enemies with your hidden blade in a nightmarish pileup of animation priorities. It doesn’t look smooth, it has all the characteristic herky-jerky tremors I’ve come to associate with VR games, but it does look fun.
My only concern is the literal first few seconds of the trailer, in which some brave VR player undertakes a classic AC leap of faith into a haystack. ‘Plummeting’ is, like, your key verb in these games, and that holds true here, but it’s also something that’s sent my stomach doing cartwheels whenever I’ve experienced it in the few VR games I’ve played.
So only ironguts need apply, I suppose, although I should note that the devs go into quite some detail about the game’s various accessibility options towards the end of the gameplay trailer. There’s nothing you’ve not seen in other VR games—tunnel vision, teleporting around instead of full locomotion, that kind of thing—but it could make the difference between playing and not playing if you’re as sensitive to, uh, gravity as I am.
