Beyond the City VR

I want to be honest with you upfront: my spreadsheet instincts lit up when I read "commander lays towers, then physically steps inside them to shoot" - that is a structurally interesting idea for a VR tower defense. The concept threads two distinct layers of play into one solo session. First you sit at the strategic level, placing Archer Towers, Magic Towers, and Turrets on the map and upgrading them with in-game currency as waves of swordsmen, priests, WM warriors, and forest demons press in. Then you drop into first-person inside whichever tower you chose, physically aiming a bow, casting a magic wand, or calling artillery strikes yourself. On paper, that pivot from macro to micro is exactly the kind of dual-register thinking I enjoy in a good strategy game. The reality, unfortunately, is that this project stalled out almost immediately after launch. The last developer update landed in April 2017 - version 0.4 - and Steam itself now flags that no developer update has been made in over eight years. There are no Steam reviews, no Metacritic score, and the community forum is functionally silent. Three tower types were available at the Early Access entry point, with multiplayer, additional maps, voice packs, and new enemy varieties all listed as planned content that never materialised. The planned development window of three to six months came and went without a full release. For strategy players asking whether the dual-role loop delivers depth worth your time, the honest answer is: there is not enough content here to find out. Three tower variants with upgrade paths gives you very little build space to work with. The wave roster is thin. Without a full release or a mod ecosystem, the kind of late-game complexity I look for simply does not exist in any confirmed form. There is also no stated tutorial structure, and English localisation was still a work-in-progress when the updates stopped, so new players would be navigating interface friction with no safety net. VR hardware has also moved on considerably since 2017. The game targets SteamVR with standing and room-scale support, but compatibility with current headsets is unverified and community reports of Oculus controller mapping issues suggest the control layer was never fully resolved. Anyone picking this up today is essentially paying for an archived prototype rather than a functioning product. If the dual commander-and-soldier design genuinely appeals to you as a concept, games like Dungeon Defenders or more recent VR tower defense titles have iterated on that hybrid loop with actual post-launch support behind them. Beyond the City VR belongs in the historical curiosity column, not the active recommendations one.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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