System: Oculus Rift, Rift S
Price at Time Of Review: Free
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Tool/App
Input: Hand Tracking
Best Playing Position: Sitting, Standing
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: Create and interact with shapes, manipulate gravity and more in this all-new VR experience built for Leap Motion Orion. Blocks is built with our upcoming interaction engine, which lets you experience nuanced physical interactions with digital objects in a way never before possible. Spawn cubes and prisms with your fingers. Grab and stack them, or knock them over. Select between different shapes using a simple menu that appears alongside your outstretched hand. You can even swing your hands up to turn off your universe’s gravity, spin objects into space, and bring everything down to earth!
Review: Before playing this, if someone had come up to be and told me that I looked like the sort of person who would enjoy stacking blocks, I probably would have been very rude to them! But yet, after just a few minutes of play this that was exactly what I was doing and loving every second of it. Words alone can never express just how much fun playing this game is. In fact, it doesn’t feel like a game at all! Within a few minutes of ‘play time,’ you could almost swear you can feel the shapes in your hand.
OK, here is the bad news. This isn’t perfect. The whole Leap Motion Orion project is just that ‘A Project!’ it is designed to see if interacting with your own hands in VR is possible and it kind of is (provided you keep them in front of the headset). This app has improved leaps and bounds due to some very clever programmers and serious amounts of public testing.
There are just two things that make this app amazing. The fact that you can pick yourself up a Leap Motion online for about £20 which means it is very affordable and the fact that once you get used to the parameters in which it works you will have a stupid about of fun playing it! If you are the lucky owner of an Oculus Rift DK2, Oculus Rift CV1 or an HTC Vive and you don’t at least try this for yourself, you will be missing out on one of the greatest experiences you can have in virtual reality and it’s as simple as that. Get it and see the way you might be interacting inside VR in the years to come.
