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.
Ubisoft
