Modern military-focused VR shooter, Contractors VR from Caveman Studios, is out now on Oculus Quest at a price point of $20. It’s also cross-buy and cross-play with the Rift version.
In the above gameplay trailer the studio is showing footage from the original Oculus Quest, but I can confirm it does look a little bit sharper and a little bit more detailed on the Oculus Quest 2, although it doesn’t seem like there are any Quest 2-specific enhancements just yet.
Here is a look at the actual Quest screenshots from the Store page, so you can get an idea of what to expect:
And here are the screenshots from the Rift store page:
The main focus of Contractors VR is the competitive multiplayer, but it does offer solo and co-op content via secondary missions as well. With customizable loadouts and over 30 different weapons this is definitely a fully-fledged VR shooter for the standalone VR platform.
Other than the visual downgrade to account for running on mobile hardware, Contractors VR is the same game on Quest versus PC VR. The studio has stated that more co-op missions and more maps are already in development, so post-launch support should hopefully be quite strong for this one.
The only other realistic-style VR shooter of this caliber available on Quest is Onward for $25. That game is much more grounded and focused on realism, sort of like ARMA in VR, whereas Contractors is more of a run-and-gun fast-paced shooter, more like Call of Duty. Whichever you like more is mostly going to come down to personal preference.
For launch yesterday, Facebook published an interview on the Oculus blog with a few interesting details, including some of the challenges with porting the game to Quest:
“Running Contractors VR on a mobile chipset is a tall order. We want the Quest port to retain the same flavor as the PC version. To get the best performance out of Quest, we improved code efficiency and rewrote parts that might cause CPU overhead. Another major obstacle is GPU overhead. The original Quest allows a maximum of 200,000 triangles and 200 draw calls. It is impossible to just copy-paste PC assets to the Quest version, so we made tools to conveniently switch between PC and mobile assets. We are a relatively small team at the moment, so handy tools saved us plenty of time and energy so we could focus on the thing that is most important: gameplay.”
The end of the interview concludes with a tease that the possibility of bringing over “mod features” to the Quest version is a possibility. This would allow players to create their own game modes, maps, and weapon loadouts — then share them with others.
Let us know what you think of Contractors VR if you grab it for Quest and keep an eye on UploadVR for our coverage soon!
