Magic Leap
promised us a world of dreams, we’re getting Angry Birds.
After about
a month in the public spotlight, the Magic Leap One is starting to get its
first titles. Rovio and Resolution Games announced publicly today that they
will be releasing Angry Birds FPS: First Person Slingshot this fall for the
Magic Leap One.
It’s an
actual game, not just a little tech demo. I had a chance to play with the
soon-to-be-released title and it’s actually pretty refreshing and fun making
the futuristic hardware feel a little less alien.
It wasn’t my
first bout with Magic Leap’s new hardware, but it was the first time that I
truly appreciated what improvements it boasts over headsets like Microsoft’s
HoloLens.
You could
probably beat the 20 levels of Angry Birds FPS in around an hour, but I started
fumbling and having to seriously strategize after just a few of them, though
like many others I can honestly say I haven’t played an Angry Birds title since
I had an iPhone 3GS so it’s been a minute.
That said,
the mechanics are pretty familiar in that you’re trying to knock over a little tower
of blocks and the green pigs that inhabit their far reaches. What’s unique is
that the tower is now stacked on your coffee table that you can approach from
any angle and the Magic Leap controller is your slingshot that you can aim a
lot more precisely as a result.
The
Resolution Games team said that they had previously been experimenting with
Microsoft’s headset but it was Magic Leap’s positionally tracked controller
that really opened up the headset to develop something like a full gaming
title.
It’s kind of
interesting that Apple’s main ARKit 2 demo and Magic Leap’s first full title
are slingshot games, but I guess you find what works and move from there.
The title
isn’t ground-breaking by any means in terms of enabling some sort of futuristic
AR use case, but perhaps the most unusual thing about it was how familiar it
felt. Part of that is obviously the IP with Angry Birds but it’s also a game
that doesn’t ask you to freestyle too much and doesn’t give you a world of
options. It felt like a mobile game, if only one that allowed you to visualize
the mobile content overlaid on the world in front of you.
You learn to
deal with limitations like field-of-view and there does seem to be a lot
developers can do to minimize that being the only thing you focus on. It’s kind
of bizarre that Magic Leap didn’t actually ship the headset with more content
like this because the short demos that came onboard the One Creator’s Edition
really didn’t sell it too well. Fortunately, the device is definitely a
developer’s edition and it seems that even by the company’s developer
conference next month, more content seems to be on the way from partners like
Resolution Games and Rovio who have been building this title since January as
an early partner of Magic Leap.
Magic Leap
One may not be the headset everyone wanted it to be — or what the company told
us it would be — but judging by the first big title coming to it, it seems like
it gets enough right that developers are going to have a fun time with it even
if it is just a labor of love for them right now.
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