Wall Town Wonders Review (Rune)
A high-quality town-building game great for relaxation, but also a port of a MR game made for the Quest standalone hmds.
The VR version contains new 3D environments, which have been beautifully designed. Depending on your home, the VR experience may be a lot nicer than the MR version.
That said the new 3D environments have close to no interactivity, as you cannot pick up anything - not even a cup on a table. It would have been a nice touch being able to pick up items for better realism and immersion.
The game has been greatly enhanced for PCVR with realtime lighting, dynamic shadows, high-res textures and much more. The game is rather demanding, and performs about the same as Kayak VR Mirage maxed out on my rig.
The game gets more demanding as the wall town grows. I started with Index res 300% with no motion smoothing in 80 Hz, but had to reduce to res 250% later to maintain 80 fps. I'm using an oc'ed RTX 3090, i9 10900K, 32GB ram and Win10 - and the Valve Index.
Btw, it might show the Quest origin, as there are no graphics settings in the game. This is a rather severe omission, as I'm sure many PCVR users would appreciate to select the settings they want.
Index controllers are supported, and there are smooth/snap turning, teleport/full locomotion, and both standing/seated positions.
All talk is in text, there are no voices, and I would greatly have preferred the latter. The game takes up about 6GB of drive space.
I did have some issues with the seated position which did not work correctly with floor height. Also releasing a lake on the floor was cumbersome as the game did not correctly register my selected position. But I'm sure devs will get these minor annoyances fixed soon.
The game feels slightly like the Settlers on a wall, and here the game shows its MR origin. In real VR we do not need to build a town on a wall - it seems very silly, when it's much more natural to build on the ground. Opening hidden doors in a table feels strange in VR, but may work better in MR. The game does have several design choices that may work well for MR, but probably would not have been implemented if the game was designed ground-up for high-end VR. Still the game is fun and worth recommending for relaxation - and note that this is by far no Hubris sequel ;-)
My rating 7/10 - might also be a great game - or intro to VR - for kids.