System: Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift & Windows MR
Price at Time Of Review: £3.99
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers, Gamepad
Best Playing Position: Standing
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: Enjoy a beautiful day at the sunny beach, savour a majestic view on a mountain peak or feel the thrilling height of a skyscraper at night. Harness the wind and launch your stunt kite! Practice exciting manoeuvres as your kite dances in the sky or leave gravity behind and draw figures in the blue with a smoke trail. Get started with ‘Stunt Kite Masters VR’ and you’ll enjoy total immersion and the most realistic virtual reality kite experience ever!
Take flight and glide in a faint breeze or steer your kite through a gusty wind. Learn to fly a sport kite in the comfort of the custom mode, where you can determine the direction and speed of the wind. Challenge yourself with the Snake Mode, where precision flying is key. Prove your skills in the racy Outrun mode where you dodge and destroy remote-controlled aeroplanes chasing you. Carve up the sky with perfect control and master awesome high-speed aerobatics!
Review: Sadly flying a kite is not as easy as you might think. Not only do you need to know how to fly the thing (and often assemble it as well). Then you also need to get lucky with the weather. Too windy you can’t fly it, to calm, to wet and even too hot! Yep, flying a kite and getting those flying conditions perfect is not easy. So thank god Stunt Kite Masters VR has come along to offer us perfect flying conditions every single day.
Stunt Kite Masters VR is a kite flying simulator that gives you control of 2 different types of kites (with several customisable styles to it) then you get to choose from Snake Kite mode where you have to go around collecting stars to make your kites tale grow (like snake, but with a kite) or free fly mode that gives you the chance to get used to your kite. Which is very handy indeed given the lack of a tutorial. From the moment you pull the strings to get the kite in the air you will be taken back at just how realistic and responsive the kite is. I could have sworn I could feel the sand between my toes.
While this app does get repetitive quickly, for a while it really immersed me and for a moment I started to believe I really was on a beach flying a stunt kite! The kite feels so responsive and realistic that it could have real-world kite flying applications. If I got good at this app I really would be encouraged to go out and buy a real kite. Graphics, control and physics wise I can’t fault this app. But the lack of training, game modes and scenery options are what kills it for me. It would have been so much better with some simple step-by-step training missions, so I could slowly get the hang of the kite. But even as it is, I think it’s yet another amazing application for VR that I never saw coming.
