PREVIEW / Realm Protector (Quest)

It feels like the promise of major triple-A games in virtual reality has finally come to pass, with games like Asgard’s Wrath 2 and Assassin’s Creed Nexus really upping the ante. But for my money, the best VR games are still the ones that you can play for just a bit here and there. And while the Quest storefront tends to push the bigger titles, thanks to App Lab, you can still find smaller and more experimental games on the platform. Realm Protector is one such game, bringing the tower defense genre to VR in a really interesting way.

I’ll admit that the game doesn’t give the best first impression. The visuals are about as barebones as you can get away with for a VR game, for one, but they have a charm to them. The tutorial is a little annoying too; it really needs to be refined and trimmed down. But once I got past that, I found the actual mechanics very entertaining. Placing down towers is done in the style of a tabletop game, as you literally place miniature towers on a board representing the battlefield. You can then teleport into the towers, where the action side of things takes over. Each elemental tower has different mechanics: one works like a sort of grenade launcher, for example, and another has you play along to a rhythm on drums. It can get hectic, and aiming the tower with the drums can be a pain, but there are some very good ideas here.

With such a variety of VR games available now, I can’t promise that Realm Protector will remain part of my rotation; there are too many things to try, and right now its charm doesn’t quite overpower the jank I feel in some parts of the experience. But I’ll be watching the continued development closely. And in the meantime, it’s enough fun that I definitely can recommend giving it a try.