Against all odds, Zenith might just be a VR MMO that delivers. Read on for our Zenith review, currently in-progress.
Note: We’ve had access to Zenith for the past few days but believe the game couldn’t be properly judged until it had launched in full. We’ll be updating this review in the days to come with final impressions, but the below thoughts are based on the first few hours of gameplay.
We’ve seen this all promised before. A massively multiplayer online (MMO) game for VR which offers hours upon hours of questing with friends, exploring sweeping landscapes and battling the forces of evil. The ambition is lofty and the reality has, in the past, left a lot to be desired. When Zenith was first announced in 2019, I had little reason to believe that this story would be any different.
But Ramen VR has, against all odds, bucked that trend. Zenith isn’t some half-hearted cash grab or helplessly buggy undertaking – it’s a genuinely decent stab at bringing the MMO to VR in a meaningful way, and it’s a refreshingly undaunting game, too.
Crucially, Zenith doesn’t aim to revolutionize the way we play MMOs. It very much feels like a traditional take on the genre, and most of its core tenants are here: you pick between six classes (two main types with three roles each) and largely fulfil simple quests like finding items, killing a certain amount of enemies or exploring new areas. All the while you’re earning XP which will increase your core stats and grant you new abilities known as Godstones, as well as unearthing better armor for improved defenses, all of which will slowly let you progress to tougher areas to face new enemies. Numbers fly from foes as you deliver blows and a quest tracker keeps a tally of your objective progress towards the left of your vision.
What this isn’t, then, is some radicalization that rips up the rule book and, if you’re not partial to the core structure of the MMO genre, Zenith doesn’t really make any strides to talk you round. It’ll be very familiar to pretty much anyone that’s spent even just a few hours getting started in an MMO, be they World of Warcfat veterans, current Final Fantasy 14 players or anyone that simply remembers killing time in Runescape back in the day.
That’s not to say the game doesn’t have some ideas of its own. Combat in Zenith plays with VR’s motion controls in clever ways that, while not as cinematic or immersive as some single-player efforts, ensures you’re not just waggling your wrists away with your eyes glazed over. Swordmasters wield two katanas, but there’s a small cooldown every time you land a blow, meaning you’ll do minimal damage if you furiously swipe back and forth. Mages, meanwhile, have two wrist-mounted gauntlets that fire projectiles, but their key use really stems from the gesture-basede godstone abilities, which can introduce area of effect attacks or buffs. Even swinging swords in certain directions conjures up different attack types.
Zenith strikes a curious balance between the physical and the calculated, then. It’s got the time-tested satisfaction of watching your character improve on a stastical level mixed in with a certain rhytmic combat that you can only really do inside VR. If you’re looking for only the most physical and immersive of action systems, you won’t find that here, but the combat does just enough to help differentiate the game from its flatscreen counterparts.
I do hope, though, that we see more features that really capitalize on that physicality as we move further into the progression and the game’s roadmap. Hopefully new powers are going to bring about more intricate and involved actions, but all of that remains to be seen.
There’s also cooking which is an unexpectedly robust affair. Pretty much at any point you can summon a kitchen to start preparing food, which offers health and stat benefits. It’s not a set of passive menu clicks but instead a really charming little minigame in itself in which you flip dough to avoid it burning and heat milk whilst making sure not to overdo it.
Finally there’s the gliding, which takes its cues from Population: One but ends up delivering that uplifting gracefulness that everyone’s stealing from Breath of the Wild recently. Combined with the VR 101 climbing, which lets you clamber up just about anything you can grab, Zenith is a quick-footed MMO that lets you get about with a welcome versatility.
This is all in addition to the elements that are fundamentally changed by bringing an MMO to VR. Social is, obviously, a big element of Zenith and Ramen VR has clearly put a lot of work into making sure it runs smoothly from day one. Once you’re matched up on servers you’ll be able to find and make friends simply by walking up to them, activating a menu and sending an invite. From there you can party up and join guilds and activate different voice chat options so you can mute everyone or speak to specific people.
For better and worse, this is really different to when you join a flatscreen MMO and see people running around. In VR, these are imposing figures that you often really feel like are there. This unlocks magic when it comes to randomly bumping into friends and then deciding to storm a monster-filled cave together, but you’ll need to be prepared for a lot of people getting up into your space without you wanting them to. A few button clicks and vanish them away but it’d be great to have some personal privacy options like proximity bubbles to keep anyone unwanted from getting too close.
Overall, though, the social infastructure of Zenith is remarkably instant in an age where just getting into a lot of VR games together has you jumping through multiple hurdles, and cross-play support between Quest, PC and PSVR (along with cross-progression with you own multiple copies) really reduces the hassle of playing with friends. It’s perhaps the biggest praise I could bestow on Zenith on day one that — pending any likely server issues — the core fundamentals that should work… work.
Everything else? Well, it’s early days but it’s looking good. Though you only have two main attack types, the roles system does provide some much-needed variety in how you play the game. On the surface, there are some stat differences depending on if you pick Tank, Damage-Per-Second and Support, as those names imply. But you’ll also be getting different Godstone abilities as you level up and, in the case of the mage, even the core attacks are different from the start. A Tank shoots a continuous beam, for example, whereas Support and DPS shoot different colored orbs. A few hours in as Support and I have a few different healing abilities, whilst my DPS build has a completely different set of powers more concerned with maximizing attack power.
Zenith Review – Current Thoughts
I’ve been really encouraged by my opening hours with Zenith, then. If you’re not into MMOs then the familiar structure and stat-driven focus probably won’t talk you round, but the game does experiment with the VR format to provide some interesting interactivity and a lot of the key features you’d expect from the biggest MMOs out there are ready and waiting on day one. Simply put, Ramen VR is in a very good position on launch day (which, again, could be impeded by server launch issues).
What I’ll be looking to see now is how those foundations build out into something more compelx and rewarding across the hopefully tens of hours of content that’s included in the game right now, because that’s where Zenith will really live or die. Check back over the coming days for expanded thoughts as I get further into the game.
For more on how we arrived at this rating, read our review guidelines. What did you make of our Zenith review? Let us know in the comments below!
