Echo VR: Basketball in Space
Usually, I am not much of a gamer in general. I play here and there maybe once every 2 months or so. But when I saw the concept of this game for the Oculus Quest 2 it intrigued me enough to want to try it. It honestly became so addicting, and I’ve played it daily for the past few days.
What is it?
The easiest way to describe the game is that is it is kind of like basketball in space. The whole game has zero gravity, you have thrusters in your arms that let you move in every direction, and also you can grab onto any surface to push yourself off of it. In a match, there are two teams of 4 and the goal is to score the frisbee into the opposing teams’ goal area. Also very much like basketball depending on how far you shoot the disc from will dictate how many points you score there are either 3 or 2 pointers. You have the ability to stun the opposite team by punching them in the head as you fly by them. This renders them unable to move or grab onto anything for a few seconds, but they can also block the attack and if they do them you are the one that gets stunned instead. Unlike basketball, there is no penalty for traveling with the ball too long.
I think that this is a game meant for teens and young adults. From my experience, there is a lot of young kids in the lobbies and if I am being completely honest due to the competitive nature of the game, this makes the game’s voice chat super toxic at times. The developers have a lot of messages and ways to try and report this toxic behavior to avoid any cyberbullying and you also have the option to mute them. I think that this is a good decision from the developers to try and keep their servers as positive as possible. But I think that due to the age range of the players, keeping it completely positive is pretty much impossible. It reminded me of those early Call of Duty lobbies.
Potential
I think that this game definitely has a lot of potentials to keep growing. Maybe even the development of a competitive scene for it. Also the introduction of different game modes such as capture the flag mode which is essentially the same but maybe you would have to traverse a different map as opposed to the stadium-like design that it has now. Maybe even a domination mode where the goal is to keep the disc away from your team’s half for as long as possible in a 5-minute game the team with the lowest time at the end of the 5 minutes would be the winner.
This game is available to download on the Oculus Store and it is completely free as of right now.
