On the 23rd of September, 2022, Buckethead Entertainment did what had never been done before with the release of their new VR game, Rumble. Rumble is a revolutionary game incorporating an aspect sought after by gamers (and Avatar fans) for a long time: elemental control. In this VR-only multiplayer game, opponents face off in large arenas and fight each other using the power of controlling the earth around them. You can raise walls from your feet and hurl boulders at your enemy, using combos of moves to annihilate their defences and smack them around with huge rocks.
The mechanics of this game are nothing simple; you can’t just hit a button on your controller to send a stone flying towards your unlucky adversary, no, to use your powers, you must physically place your hands in the correct positions and move them in certain directions. It can be daunting, and even a little tiring when you’ve done the same move 50 times and can’t quite master it, but to execute a perfect move that completely destabilises your attacker is one of the best feelings in the game.
When you start the game, it takes you through a tutorial, as most do. The tutorial takes you through all the regular game aspects; this is where you learn your first moves. You start with three moves: Pillar, Disk, and Straight. Pillar is fairly self-explanatory, and creates a tall pillar of earth that can block some attacks, or be thrown into your enemy. You start in the base pose, a steady stance with your hands placed horizontally by your sides, palms facing up in tight fists; you then shoot your right hand upwards, pointing your fist to the sky, while your left lowers slightly and rotates so your palm faces inwards. The sense of power you get when the move works and a large pillar of stone fires up to shield you is amazing. There are more moves, of course, another starter move being Disk, a slightly more complex hand movement followed by a disk of stone being shot out in front of you at high speeds. Straight makes any object you’re facing shoot forwards; this can make the defensive Pillar, into an offensive stone cannon.
Moves in the game become progressively stronger and more refined, all unlocked by ranking up. To rank up, you have to win a few games, slowly increasing your score until you reach a new level of mastery. The rankings are differentiated by belts. You start off in Pebble, a white belt, and you have access to the previously mentioned moves, but once you’ve won a few ranked games, you move up a rank. This unlocks new moves, allowing you to summon larger walls and bigger boulders, and do more advanced movements. Once you get to the higher ranks, combos can get very complicated and incredibly powerful, but are obviously much harder to pull off.
While Rumble is an incredible VR game, it does come with a couple of flaws. In my experience, I found that unless I had my Oculus Link cable attached to my PC, the game would become buggy, and my hand would phase through objects that were meant to be interacted with. It is definitely a processing-intensive game, so you should make sure you have good enough hardware to run it. Other than that, it mostly only contains a few gameplay glitches, some that can be exploited, some that are merely annoyances
Overall, Buckethead Entertainment has brought a whole new world to VR, and I believe everyone is here for it. Rumble has, so far, been one of my top 3 favourite VR games, only out shadowed by another giant, Blade And Sorcery. It has all the potential to be a seriously popular game, although it unfortunately only has a player base of a few hundred.