When I think of Skydance Interactive, I think of the most epic VR games in existence. The studio's seminal work, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, was a masterpiece that was simply unexpected in the VR space back in 2020 when it released. While the Chapter 2 follow-up to that game was very buggy at launch, it went on to get fixed and become one of the best Meta Quest games you can buy.
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Now, the studio's third big title, Skydance's Behemoth, is stomping across VR headsets across the globe with its long-awaited December 5 release and I can confidently say this one lives up to the Skydance Interactive pedigree. I had previously tried the game back in June on a PSVR 2 and wondered how it would translate to the Meta Quest 3. Thankfully, it's even better than I expected.
In fact, based on early impressions of the final game, the Meta Quest version is the version to get as it's the most polished, best-running version of the game. Skydance Interactive says it'll be patching the PSVR 2 version today and the PC release just hit virtual Steam shelves today, too. Regardless of the platform you play on, my experience with the game so far has been nothing short of brilliant.
The twelve hours of Behemoths
Behemoth isn't nearly as expansive of a game as either of the Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners titles. That's not a problem by any means — especially not in a year when we got Batman Arkham Shadow, Metro Awakening, and literally dozens of other games worth playing in the span of the last two months — but it's worth noting that Skydance Interactive didn't go for the same scale with this game's length.
Nothing in the VR space comes close to matching the scale of the giants — not even Attack on Titan.
Instead, the studio aimed for the moon with the scale of objects that's only possible in VR. Fighting a Behemoth is a lot like the PS2 classic Shadow of the Colossus, but while watching a character climb such a beast on a TV is cool enough, it's an entirely different feeling when you are the one doing the climbing and the stabbing.
Behemoth certainly borrows enough traits from SotC while fighting, ahem, Behemoths, including stabbing weak points and climbing specific sections of each beast. There aren’t nearly as many of them as I had hoped — just four in total — but maybe we’ll get a DLC or sequel with even more if this game does as well as Saints & Sinners did.
Nothing in the VR space comes close to matching the scale of the giants — not even Attack on Titan, which finally hits version 1.0 on December 17. Standing under a Behemoth as it tries to stomp you to death is uniquely harrowing, especially since you can't fly through the air and easily dispatch them. You certainly have superhuman powers, but there's a limit to them.
Combat is simply wonderful and feels like the proper evolution of what we got in The Walking Dead S&S. That makes sense since some of the enemies are just slightly more intelligent zombies, affected by the rot that's also consuming your character in the story.
Like Saints & Sinners, combat is entirely open-ended but relies much more on blocking and parrying since your opponents aren't just zombies. They have weapons and skills, and many of them have armor that prevents your weapons from one-shotting them.
Most areas have some sort of environmental traps that can be used to more creatively dispatch enemies.
To get around this, you've got a superhuman power that can be enabled every 20 seconds or so, allowing you to overwhelm many different types of enemies. While this sounds overpowered, it's not since the largest enemies cannot be grabbed and thrown. In fact, ranged enemies often picked me off while I was worried about a warhammer-wielding foe bashing in my skull, forcing me to rethink my tactics on the next respawn.
Most areas have some sort of environmental traps that can be used to more creatively dispatch enemies, too. Grabbing an enemy and throwing them against a spike wall is incredibly satisfying, and while some of the physics for pulling down trees or rock traps sometimes look funny, they're no less satisfying to use.
There's no durability system for weapons so when you find a weapon you like, you can keep it for the foreseeable future. Eventually, most weapons get replaced with a story-centric one that you can't get rid of — one sword, one axe, and one bow — but can be upgraded with shards you find throughout the game.
Grappling and repelling up and down cliffs and between grapple points feels fantastic, and the sense of vertigo I got when launching myself out and over a chasm was incredibly exciting in a way most games simply don't nail.
Skydance Interactive also seems to have addressed some of the things that I found funky in the hands-on a few months ago. Grabbing a rope to pull it now feels accurate each time, whereas I regularly dropped the rope during the hands-on — maybe I should call it a hands-off, then.
Grappling and repelling up and down cliffs and between grapple points feels fantastic, and the sense of vertigo I got when launching myself out and over a chasm was incredibly exciting in a way most games simply don't nail.
I also noticed that the first Behemoth no longer "skates" on the ice as it did in the hands-on. This wasn't the type of ice skating that you think, it was more a pathfinding issue where the legs would slide unnaturally as the Behemoth turned around.
It's these little things — plus some incredible voice acting and memorable characters that you meet along the way — that really got me immersed into the world in the first few seconds. There's no long intro or nonsense to slink through. You're immediately thrown into a blizzard and expected to find safety.
It's brilliant, and I'm so happy Skydance is back with another must-have VR game, especially when expectations of the studio's latest work were sky high.
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