When comparing Audioshield vs Vanishing Realms, the Slant community recommends Vanishing Realms for most people. In the question“What are the best HTC Vive games?” Vanishing Realms is ranked 4th while Audioshield is ranked 30th. The most important reason people chose Vanishing Realms is:
The whole game has been designed from the ground up to be played with motion controls that allow for immersive movements, making it one of the best Vive games currently available. You can swing your hand to swing a sword, raise your arm to block with a shield, move to hide behind a column when having arrows fired at you. Everything feels natural and intuitive. Benefit being, it allows for the player to instinctively react through movement while playing, which makes for an experience not many have had with a video game to date.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Ability to use your own music
You use your own music for the game in order to create the rhythm and difficulty of the gameplay. This means an infinite amount of stages to play on being that each is different due to the rhythm of a song.
Pro Users will work up a sweat
Especially with fast paced songs, you move a lot and quickly so you can work up a sweat quite easily. Much like boxing where you keep your hands up at all times, your hands will never dip below your waist for this game, while that may not sound too difficult, in all actuality keeping ones arms and hands up for extended periods of time can be quite exhausting, usually pretty quickly. Being that you will be constantly swinging your arms while keeping them up, this adds to the exertion you will experience. While it may not be the point of the game, it will allow for quite a workout.
Pro Works with Soundcloud
On top of being able to use your own local music there is built in support for Soundcloud, which makes for an easy built in way to select tracks online.
Pro Detailed leaderboards
Each and every song played in the game by its users will have a leaderboard listing for that song. Even if no one else ever uses that song. This makes for an insurmountable amount of tracks to play and compete in, making for an endless experience for those interested in competing on the leaderboards.
Pro Highly immersive and polished VR gameplay
The whole game has been designed from the ground up to be played with motion controls that allow for immersive movements, making it one of the best Vive games currently available. You can swing your hand to swing a sword, raise your arm to block with a shield, move to hide behind a column when having arrows fired at you. Everything feels natural and intuitive.
Benefit being, it allows for the player to instinctively react through movement while playing, which makes for an experience not many have had with a video game to date.
Pro Works great with room scale
While no one will have enough room in order to completely traverse the game in full, once the player is in an area they want to explore, the immediate surroundings are easily navigated by walking or running around. It works quite well and feels natural, which adds to the immersive experience of the game.
Pro Challenging but not hard
I really love this play.
Pro Intuitive inventory system that is fun to use
Storing and using ones inventory is pretty simple to grasp as there is a virtual tool belt like area when you look down. From this items can be placed to be stored for later use, or equipped at that moment for use. This works through the use of the triggers on the controllers and placement of ones hands, while it may be tricky at first, once the player gets accustomed to the 3D spacing of where their actual hands should be, it all comes very naturally and is a great solution on how to handle items and inventory in a VR game.
Pro Graphically a AAA experience
A good way to describe the looks would be, kid friendly with a cartoonish oriented design that has a clear and professional look. It offers a good amount of detail with good lighting effects, shadows as well as clean textures making it one of the best looking VR games. While not based in any sense of realism, they allow for a comforting and inviting experience that can appeal to anyone while still having enough detail and polish in order to present a game that easily fits in with any AAA title to date.
Cons
Con Music and orbs only have a slight connection
The game has a hard time actually detecting relevant rhythms in most songs. So you cannot hits orbs in synchrony with the base of a song, which detracts from being considered any type of rhythm based gameplay.
Con Unclear menu system
Things such as song difficulty or types of shields are not explained in the menus, leaving the player guessing as to what they do. This makes for an experience where you just need to learn as you play to eventually figure it out.
Con Not finished yet
The game is in early access with only two levels available for play so far. While this does give a good sense of what will be available when finished, there is always the risk that the game will get abandoned or release with many bugs. There is never a guarantee with early access, which means the buyer should beware.
Con The less room in ones house, the more restricting the game can feel
This game requires a certain amount of free space when playing, and has been set up in that there is a way to maneuver in game, even when having little space in ones house. This of course comes with the caveat that the game itself will feel restricted in that movement will not feel natural. There is a work around for this of course called the blink system, where players point to where they want to move in a level, to the teleport there, but this does not feel as natural as actually moving there by walking.