After a brief tease last week, Insomniac Games finally revealed their newest virtual reality game, Stormland. This new VR title puts you into the metal boots of a gardening android as it tries to rise up and reclaim its home. It’s coming out on the Oculus Rift at some undetermined point in time in 2019.
As the reveal trailer shows, Stormland features a variety of traversal and weapon and gadget based mechanics in its single-player campaign. Insomniac is citing their past experience on Sunset Overdrive, Ratchet and Clank, and fellow VR title The Unspoken as the stepping stones in creating Stormland‘s new combat, movement, and community mechanics. The open world will facilitate these new traversal techniques and promises “exhilarating freedom.” The trailer shows multiple different types of movement in this open world like climbing, gliding, and flying.
Stormland also features first-person shooter combat with slight Ratchet and Clank undertones but through a more grounded lens. Different augments give your robot avatar new abilities like cloaking, a shield, or the ability to harness electricity. Makeshift weapons are also available and, judging from the trailer, look to have multiple firing modes. Upgrading your gardener android pushes it past its design and helps it gain a new purpose of freeing its planet.
But you won’t have to free the planet alone. Stormland has co-op in the form of raids and shared missions. Insomniac didn’t say much about this multiplayer mode except that it will be for “the benefit of android gardeners everywhere.”
Stormland is not Insomniac’s first VR title but it looks to be their biggest and most expansive one. It appears to be the culmination of all Insomniac’s games over the years, especially all their previous virtual reality experiments. Oculus Studios is publishing the game so it likely won’t move to other platforms (although it has happened in the past).
