Reseñas

• gamedeal user

  Jul 20, 2017

  This is my first review. I'm writing it because Nature Treks VR warrants all the attention it can get. It's a walking sim built from the ground up for VR - Oculus or Vive - with no narrative, no goals and no progression. An elegant load room (playable itself) offers 8 (soon to be 9) beautifully modelled and lit environments ranging from a tropical island to a snow-covered winter wood. Each offers a large environment with plenty to explore including a range of animals and vegetation and a few easter eggs. There's a choice of modes of locomotion: fixed-point teleportation, and, for Vive users, point & click teleportation or arm-swing free locomotion. A togglable interface allows you to interact with the environment in a number of gentle, rewarding ways: you can seed new features: boulders, trees, vegetation & swarms of butterflies; and change the weather or time of day. You can toggle a lotus which furls and unfurls in time with the ideal breathing rhythm for meditation. Meditation was obviously central to developer John Carline's thinking in creating Nature Treks VR: the teleport points are indicated by a ghostly figure in the Lotus position. I don't meditate myself, but I do find myself again and again sitting down on the beach/carpet and simply enjoying the view for minutes at a time. And despite the artificiality of the VR experience generally, I emerge from Nature Treks VR into the real world feeling palpably calmer and refreshed. Nature Treks VR is a great demonstration game to show off of the capabiliites of VR to first-time users, up there with the other great pretties-fest, theBlu, in terms of aesthetics & finish, but with much greater interactivity and variety. For Carline, the game is a labour of love and he is constantly tweaking and improving, adding new features and responding to user requests. I love my actioners as much as any other VR headset owner; but Nature Trek VR offers something different and complementary to John Wick or Vanishing Realms; in the same way that the warm shower afterwards is different from and complementary to a workout or game of soccer.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 17, 2018

  I'm loathe to give this experience a negative review because I don't think it truly deserves one, but there are some glaring issues with it. The "ooh look at that!" factor wears off after ten minutes (even quicker if you look round and see a tiger walking endlessly into a rock), as the only thing to do is plant one of two trees, one shrub, make it rain or make it sunset. As others have said, it's purpose is a sit and chill experience, and it does that job very well. The graphics are better than other meditation-style environment sims for VR. But strange AI and odd derpy animations for the wildlife does break immersion fairly badly at times, and there's not really enough to do to keep me coming back (though the little surprise in the winter scene had me showing it to everyone for an hour!). My family have all tried it and agreed they'd be happy just to have more of a sandbox experience. More objects to interact with or create. Maybe stones for stacking, or a stick you can draw in the sand with, etc. Little physics things we can amuse ourselves with in our own ways. My little niece said she was sad that the animals didn't notice her, too :-) --Niece Update-- She's just had a nightmare about the gorillas and is now sleeping in with her mum :-/ Myeah, I'm with her on that, too. Why did you make the gorillas blind coneheads with vampire teeth?! To recap, AI skating and bad models aside, what's currently there is done well and is enjoyable. There's just nowhere near enough of the 'creation' element, so once you've seen the maps there's not much of an incentive to keep visiting.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 30, 2017

  Loved it! One suggestion, DINOSAURS! Other than that, no invisible walls. Make there be a reason you can't go over here or there. You did it in most but a couple I ran in to invisible walls and that hurt it a little for me.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 5, 2020

  This VR experience can still look gorgeous here and there even after over 3 years. But my recommendation is not universal, here's a list of caveats: - You float. So in order not to break immersion too much, one can't look down. - Something is probably off in terms of scale, comparing the wildlife to flowers. It looks as if only the flowers were scaled larger than they should be to compensate for the floating from the previous point. - Animals sometimes run through you, pushing the camera. It's great that they're not as shy as in real life but that's a bit much. - Some scenarios have the kind of dense flora that you would expect from e.g. a forest while others only have a texture on the ground with very sparse plants/flowers. I'm guessing the latter were early scenarios and never got improved on. - Things really only look good from afar. At least about 10 meters. (Note that that's also how most of the promotional screenshots are taken. Of course they didn't want to show that some tree trunks only have 3 sides (no LODs here) and that clusters of flowers only consist of a single plane.) All of that said, I did once pick a spot on a tiny hill covered in flowers to sit down on the ground (a bit jarring when looking down because of the floating but whatever...) and just looked out towards a river while listening to the rain and thunder. As I wrote in the very beginning - it can be gorgeous here and there. You just have to find a good vantage point. Looking at this project, I suspect that what happened is that a LOT of work went into it (especially content because that's how things tend to sell - quantity over quality) but the financial return was less than hoped for and so the basic issues mentioned above were never addressed and there won't be a sequel. Which is a real shame because there's a lot of potential here. But it's only 10$. Considering the pretty large number of scenarios and wildlife variety, if it actually was more polished and visually impressive, it would probably be worth 20$.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 2, 2022

  A good concept marred by some of the worst sound design I've ever heard and stiff wildlife models. Seriously, some of the bird and tree noises sounded like they're 16k audio clips from the 90s. You can sprout trees and flowers...but they spawn in front of you in almost comic cheesiness. Orange sunset was pretty, but not enough to redeem this game. Not worth $5, not sure what there is to like.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 11, 2020

  Had high hopes that I could use this to show off the Oculus, but it was instead quite a disappointment as an experience. The animal animations are stiff, their walking animations cause their feet to slide, they don't react to you or seemingly anything, they aren't really doing anything besides standing or moving, they don't seem to scale (specifically the dinosaurs don't seem very big), they have low textures, poor sounds (both sounds they make vocally and with their movement), etc. So, you don't feel like you're next to an animal. Might have been good. The walking system is poor. You can't turn smoothly with the joystick nor run (i.e. smooth & fast). Personally, teleporting around or turning in increments ruins the experience for me. The interactivity/control of the orbs is not at all straight forward. Never figured it out and the "help" didn't help with them. The areas to explore was pretty small. I circled a few of them in just a couple minutes.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 1, 2020

  I petted a tiny rhino.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 23, 2017

  Critical performance issues (massive amount of dropped frames) on a computer that meets spec, badly needs optimization
• gamedeal user

  Nov 20, 2017

  I've played a lot of games on the Vive, but this was the first one to keep me in there until my cheeks were being chafed from the Vive. I just didn't want to leave these beautiful worlds. Really, really lovely. Keep up the good work! I'm looking forward to what you've got in store for the future.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 26, 2017

  This game is exactly why I bought VR (ok, aside from Fallout 4 VR) I love how easy it is to explore new environments. This "game" looks great, and is very relaxing on my Vive. The locomotion may seem off-putting at first, but you quickly get used to it. I suggest walking in place at first (Or walking slowly and then teleporting once you reach the edge and walk back) I was skeptical on the occean, until I ran into a whale. My jaw dropped as I watched it float by. I'm not even exaggerating! This is extremely relaxing, and it almost feels like a lucid dream when I change the weather. More weather options would be fun! I think this was worth every penny. I love the feeling of exploration this provides.