Eagle Flight Is the Rare VR Game That Solves Motion Sickness by Making You a Bird

Eagle Flight is a virtual reality game from Ubisoft Montreal that does one thing most VR games of its era could not: it lets you move fast without making you sick. Released for Windows and PlayStation 4 in late 2016, it requires a headset, whether Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR or HTC Vive, and it turns the problem of VR movement into its central pleasure.

Trailer, via IGDBcom.

Paris Without People

The setting is Paris fifty years after humanity’s extinction. Nature has reclaimed the city, and it is a breathtaking playground of overgrown landmarks and narrow streets. You are an eagle. You fly past the monuments, dive through the alleys and, in the campaign, defeat rival animals to build your nest on five different landmarks.

The empty city is the game’s best idea. There is no one to talk to and nothing to read, and the absence makes the flying feel like trespass in the best way.

Head Control

You steer by tilting your head. That is the whole control scheme, and it is why the game works. Because your body is doing what the eagle is doing, the disconnect that causes VR nausea mostly disappears, and you can dive at full speed through a gap the width of a doorway without your stomach objecting. Sonar waves are your weapon against enemies, and the aerial dogfights are about positioning rather than aim.

Multiplayer

A six-player competitive mode built like Capture the Flag is the game’s most surprising strength, and a cooperative Free Flight mode lets you explore the city with five others. The competitive mode is genuinely tense, because dogfights in three dimensions with head-controlled birds reward the kind of spatial awareness no other game asks for.

The Origin

Development started in October 2014 after Far Cry 4 shipped, and the game was greenlit in mid-2015 through Fun House, Ubisoft’s internal idea-pitching platform. It shows. Eagle Flight feels like an experiment that was allowed to become a product, and that is a compliment.

Where It Falls Short

It is thin. Five landmarks and a handful of rival animals do not make a long campaign, and the missions repeat their patterns quickly. The sonar combat is a clever solution to the problem of aiming in VR, but it is not deep. And the game is bound to its hardware. Without a headset it does not exist, and the headsets it was built for are now old.

The Verdict

Eagle Flight is a short, elegant answer to a question the whole VR industry was asking in 2016, and the answer still holds. It is worth playing for the first dive through the streets alone.

Eagle Flight · game review · Oculus Rift · PlayStation VR · Ubisoft Montreal · VR games