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Quest 2's new strategy multiplayer RTS game Gods of Gravity makes a strong first impression

by: Eric -
More On: Gods of Gravity

While I love first-person experiences as much as the next person, my favorite games to play in VR have always been strategy titles. I love standing over an enormous playing field and manipulating my little dudes, trying to outwit and outrace an opponent. I was a huge fan of PSVR's Korix, and logged dozens of hours in WWII strategy battler Final Assault.

So I was pretty excited to check out Gods of Gravity, the new space-based RTS game released this week on Meta Quest 2. Gods of Gravity has players battling it out for control of a solar system, with wild gameplay that requires speed, precision, and maybe a bit of luck.

Players start out a Gods of Gravity match standing beside their home planet. Your base has a few ships circling it, and a couple of defensive structures. By grabbing a couple of ships and flinging them towards nearby moons, you can quickly expand your area of influence. Your ships automatically set up shop on new planets, mining for resources and building more units. But on the other side of the sun, your opponent is doing the same thing, slowly expanding into the system, with their eyes on your home base.

A key mechanic in Gods of Gravity is wormhole construction. Players can very quickly open a worm hole at one planet or moon, and send every ship they have zipping across the map to the other end of the wormhole. Judicious use of wormholes can allow players to create a veritable attack-ship-highway, shuffling ships from several source planets to attack some poor beleaguered planet all at once.

I jumped into a few multiplayer matches at lunchtime today with GN Tech Editor John Yan, and we had a blast trying to out-navigate each other. At one point in our second match, John really had me on the ropes, dominating the majority of the planets in the system. But then the sun went supernova, cutting off some of his lines of supply, allowing me to route around him into his home base for an unexpected win.

As usual with games of this sort, playing multiplayer in VR is an absolute blast. You can clearly see your opponent at all times, and Gods of Gravity offers some quick and intuitive movement controls, allowing you to zip around the system with the tap of a button. Built-in voice chat allows for easy communication, both for "how does this work?" and smack talk purposes.

Tress Games, the company behind Gods of Gravity, is committed to keeping the game free-to-play. There are zero pay-to-win mechanics, with all of the multiplayer content being free for anyone that downloads the game. Ponying up cash gets players an extended single-player campaign, the ability to create their own maps, and modifiers for custom games. And of course, buying one of the access passes supports the developers, which is always nice.

We'll be playing more Gods of Gravity over the next couple of weeks and will likely have more coverage, so keep an eye on Gaming Nexus. In the meantime, if you have a Quest 2, you should grab a copy for yourself. First impressions on Gods of Gravity are very strong; this does indeed appear to be the good stuff.