Warning: The following preview contains minor spoilers for Asgard’s Wrath 2.
Asgard’s Wrath 2 is a game that’s got a couple of things to overcome. It’s definitely the premier VR game coming out in 2023 and the first game that’s aiming to really push players toward the might of the Meta Quest 3, but it’s also a sequel to a game that was tied to the Oculus software on PC, meaning most people who played it would have done so on the Oculus Rift.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with the Oculus Rift, but it’s not as popular as any of the Quest models, and many users don’t even use their PC with VR anyway. This means that a lot of people aren’t going to have played the first game, and sequels can struggle to overcome that obstacle. It’s also a monstrously large RPG that takes place entirely on a headset with a two-hour battery life, which means it’s tough to go hard in one long session.
By the Power of the Gods
We’ve been playing a fair bit of Asgard’s Wrath 2, and it’s an excellent game so far. It also has a couple of interesting ways to deal with those two problems. The first is that you get to sit through an amazing VR cutscene showing you the story from the first game with larger-than-life figures, big old fights, and some great use of imagery to tell the tale.
The battery issue is dealt with by just covering the game in autosave points. Every five or so minutes, you’ll come across somewhere that saves, at least in a lot of the game. It makes it easy to jump in and out as you go, which helps alleviate the battery issues of the Meta Quest 3 and 2, but it still means you’ve got limits on how long you can jump in for.
Outside of those things, it’s all good news about how the game feels to play and how it looks. Visually, this is easily one of the best-looking games available on the Meta Quest 3, especially as it’s completely stand-alone. There are plenty of deeply unpleasant jumpscares to endure, including one every time you load up the game, and the monsters you fight look intimidating, and chopping them up is a delight.
Related: Meta Quest 3 Made Me a Believer in VR (Review)
Ladder-Be-Gone
Movement is clean as well in Asgard’s Wrath 2, with plenty of options for those seasoned with VR gaming and those who might be newer to it and not have their VR legs yet. This includes things like rings on the top and bottom of ladders and staircases to allow you to just teleport instead of having to climb anything, which should help a lot of people feel more comfortable.
Combat is incredible. You start with two main options for combat, with one melee weapon and one ranged one. Both of these can be thrown and magically yanked back to you, and trust us when we say doing so is deeply satisfying in a way that makes it hard to want to do anything else. When you’re fighting something up close, you need to swing into melee attacks to parry them and open up your foes to counterattacks, and if you hit them just right, you can remove limbs with your mighty strikes. It’s very good fun.
There are also plenty of puzzles in Asgard’s Wrath 2, with most of those either involving timing your movement to avoid traps or switching between your godly form and that of those you’re possessing. The latter are a fun change of pace but aren’t always the most challenging things. It does feel good to suddenly become enormous and interact with absurd statues, hooks, or pots, though.
In fact, the only thing that doesn’t feel as polished is that you can end up feeling a bit stuck when you’re staring at jumps you’re pretty sure you could make. You can’t drop down into big pits of treasure, even though such jumps are possible elsewhere on the same level. It’s a touch aggravating and is one of the few things in the game that ruins the immersion.
We’d love to talk about the story, but we’ll do that in a different article when we’re ready to share our full review of Asgard’s Wrath 2. So, for now, just know that Asgard’s Wrath 2 is a worthy successor and could well set a new standard for VR games, which is pretty exciting.
Asgard’s Wrath 2 releases on Dec. 15.
