With Eagle Flight, now you too can experience all the freedom and majesty of flight—coupled with all of the restrictiveness of a videogame.
If you're a VR early adopter, you should probably try out Ubisoft's first-person eagle simulator. It's been available for a little while on Oculus Rift (which I played), is out this week on PlayStation VR, and is coming to Vive on December 20. It's done a lot of work to make flying at high speeds over the rooftops of Paris a comfortable, natural, thrilling experience, and it shows. It's fun right from the beginning, swooping and diving and making hairpin turns. But once the game gets going with its challenges---well, it's still fun, but it quickly becomes clear that the game's design and its mission are at loggerheads.
So, uh, why are there all these eagles in Paris? you might ask. A fine question! Eagle Flight takes place in a post-human city where the animals have taken over. It's not exactly nuclear winter, but nature is reclaiming the space. Hence, your flights around the city are unfettered by any meddling humans who might not take kindly to you fly-by pooping on the Champs-Elysees. (Sadly, this is not a game mode.)
All of your directional movement is controlled with the VR headset. Look up to soar higher, down to dive dramatically. You can look left and right to turn, but the game says (and this is true) that it's much more comfortable to tilt your head from side to side, like a banking airplane, to turn. When you do this, you'll turn much faster. In a nod to good VR design principles, the game will reduce your field of view while you're turning, to help ease feelings of nausea. In general, I never felt sick or woozy even as I was flying around at high speeds.
In your hands, you'll hold a standard game controller. At first, you'll just press buttons to raise and lower your flight speed. From these simple controls, a feeling of "flight" really does emerge. (My wife had the brilliant idea to put a fan in front of her face, and swears by it. Your mileage may vary on this.)
If you like, you can fly around the city, scooping up fish, collecting feathers like it was an Assassin's Creed game or something, and generally enjoying yourself. But eventually you're probably going to want to play the Actual Videogame, and here it may get a bit weird. The first mission is fairly simple: Fly through a series of rings that have been strategically placed along trees and rivers so as to give you an exciting, daring flight path. It's fun! You even get an additional speed boost if you nail the exact center of the ring. It's challenging, if sometimes for the wrong reasons, like you have to guess at where the next ring will be. But so far, so good.
Then it rates your performance out of three stars. What is this, Angry Eagles? Yeah, it kind of is. I don't know what kind of a player you are, but when I see that I missed out on three stars by just a couple of seconds, I gotta go back in there. The timing is so rigid that if you miss a ring or don't nail enough speed boosts, you only get two stars. So it quickly becomes a game of "Oh, crap, I didn't do that perfectly, restart challenge. Whoops, missed that boost, restart challenge." Now it's a lot less of a game about the freedom of flight and more about repeating actions until you get it right.
And some of these flight missions are lengthy, so you can dump a few minutes into one before you realize that you're not going to three-star it, which is a nagging thing that pulls you out of the fun you should be having flying up, down and all around Saint-Denis Basilica. There are still moments, when everything is going perfectly and the next ring you have to pass through isn't placed out of your field of view, when all the promise of Eagle Flight pays off majestically. But the game's challenges just aren't designed to make these moments happen; it seems almost like they happen in spite of it.
Then things take a turn for the extremely videogamey. Now you have a button that shoots an Eagle Bullet out of your Gun Beak, so you can shoot down vultures. (Apology: it's actually called a "Screech," but you know.) Then bats show up, and bats have shields that deflect your Eagle Bullets. Then YOU get shields to deflect incoming fire. Then it's a dogfighting game. But you're still ranked on a three-star basis! So if you don't shoot enough birds in the first few seconds, restart, etc., etc.
I do like the (again, highly contrived and videogamey) tunnel segments, in which the eagle you're playing apparently makes up an excuse to go zipping through Paris' abandoned catacombs and subway systems. This is a test of your ability to not smash into walls, and it can be pretty fun. Although, again, if you don't take the tiny little alternate pathways for each of these levels, you'll never three-star them, so I actually don't even think I ever saw half of the catacombs in these levels.
If you're looking for novel virtual reality experiences, I do think you should check out Eagle Flight to get a sense of how much fun it can be to soar in VR. After playing it, though, I feel like I'd really enjoy a game with these precise mechanics, but without constraints: a more free-form, less demanding play style that would accentuate the freedom of flight—not detract from it.
