TO THE TOP

I came into TO THE TOP expecting a tech demo dressed up as a game, the kind of thing you show flat-screen friends for ninety seconds before putting back on the shelf. I was wrong, and it took about ten minutes of chaining together handholds at speed to realise it. The core loop is deceptively simple: you grab onto colour-coded surfaces with your motion controllers, one hand at a time to traverse and reposition, both hands together to coil energy and then release into a gaze-directed leap. That leap mechanic is where the skill ceiling opens up. Chaining jumps without stopping builds speed and distance, so the difference between a clean run and a sluggish one comes down to whether you can read the geometry fast enough to keep momentum. It is closer to movement tech in a movement-shooter than anything you associate with "VR platformer". Road to VR clocked the locomotion as the game's headline feature, noting that the developer spent a year fine-tuning it. That work shows. Comfort-wise, the studio claims zero motion sickness, and players with genuine VR legs largely back that up, though reviewers are consistent that acrophobia and high motion sensitivity are real disqualifiers. If your stomach is borderline, the vertigo from the big open drops can take twenty to thirty minutes to settle into. The 35-plus levels are laid out with multiple routes both horizontally and vertically, which gives speedrunning a meaningful routing layer. Each level also hides collectible Geoms placed specifically to require timing and problem-solving to grab, so there is a secondary objective track beyond the timer. The campaign runs around four to six hours on a first pass, but that is not where the hours go. The leaderboard loop is where this thing lives or dies, and for anyone who wants to grind personal bests, it holds up. There is online multiplayer as well, which adds competitive race pressure and is one of the more honest uses of VR PvP I have seen in this genre. The progression gate system, where medal thresholds unlock later stages, drew criticism at launch for interrupting the flow for players who just want to tear forward. It is a legitimate complaint. If you are strong at the movement early, being held back by medal quotas on easier levels feels like a waste of your time. Graphically, nobody is buying this for the visuals. The art style is clean and functional, and the bright colour-coded geometry reads well in VR, which matters more than polygon count when you are moving this fast. The soundtrack is a genuine standout: full licensed tracks synced to the tempo of the gameplay, and once the music and movement clicks into a flow state, it is genuinely hard to put the controllers down. Steam's user verdict sits at 87 percent positive across over 700 reviews, which for a 2017 indie VR title with no major publisher backing is a real signal about consistent quality. Hardware note: this is SteamVR, so HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with Touch controllers are the home base. Room-scale with 360-degree tracking is the optimal setup. PSVR owners at launch flagged that the lack of full tracking created extra friction on turns, though the developers built snap and smooth turn options to compensate. On PC with a proper room-scale setup, there are no excuses.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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