Realm Protector Early Access [Review/Preview]
Realm Protector is an early access VR Tower defense game made by Ultimate VR SA. In this game players have to use towers to defend themselves against fantasy-esque creatures like frogmen and direwolves. In the hub world, you see a battlemap and your towers, where you can buy, place, and upgrade towers before each wave. You buy little figures and place them on the map as if it was a TTRPG, and you can teleport to whichever tower you wish to be controlling. In this tower defense game you control all the towers, and frankly it can become overwhelming. But we’ll get into that.
For an early access game, I didn’t encounter many glitches, except for the tutorial. Which doesn’t seem necessary honestly, all it teaches you is how to walk and teleport, which is something they can put in the actual tutorial of the game when you learn all the towers. I had to complete this walking tutorial four times. The first time glitched out at the end, so I sped through it quickly. But if you finish it before the fuzzy spark ball is done talking, it glitches out once more. So, the third time I went at a normal pace and took a break after completing it. When coming back to the game, opening and closing the grimoire caused me to go back to the walking tutorial once more. It was frustrating, but luckily those were the only glitches I had to deal with.
As for the game, it starts off a bit slow and frustrating with the tower tutorial. The first tower you have to play is the worst one in the game—the ice drums. I like the idea, and it’s definitely unique, but it does not work for this kind of game. It’s clunky and easy to mess up the rhythm, and turning the drums to attack is really awkward. You have to reach around the drum set and hit the crystal in order to change the direction. This being your first tower in the game will leave a sour taste in your mouth, but the game does get better after this. All the other towers are fine to use; the lightning is definitely the best. What was difficult for me was the height configuration. There isn’t one in the settings but there is one in the hub world. It took me a long time to realize that this was meant for the towers and not the player, because I was too short in game to see over the desk to see the tower changing height. I had to stand for a while in order to figure this stuff out. I was able to figure out heights for the towers for me to sit down, but it feels like it’d be easier if there was an option to adjust the player height.
After learning about all the towers you are able to play the actual game. I like the tabletop aspect where you get to place your towers on a battle map and then teleport to the game. It’s unique and makes for some fun lore ideas. Once you get the towers set up you get to man the tower and start fighting the enemies. Once the enemies pass the tower you’re using, you have to teleport to the next one and continue. The towers do attack while left unmanned, but they only hit one enemy at a time (even though towers like the lightning tower attack multiple enemies at the same time). It is very awkward and difficult switch between each tower. If you switch using the grimoire book, it can actually get in the way of trying to pick up the weapon, and throwing it off the tower has it just float back to you. You can use crystals to teleport to the towers, but it's also a bit awkward because the button to grab it and to destroy it is the same button (the trigger button) so you have to let go and click it again, but that just gives you an opportunity to drop the crystal. To be completely honest, I don’t really care for the mechanic of having to operate every tower. It is a tower defense game after all, it’s supposed to be mainly up to strategy rather than how quickly you can go between each tower.
There are also not a lot of towers. Which isn’t that big of a deal because you are supposed to be operating each tower, but in tower defense games there’s a lot of different towers that all do very different tasks (not just attack the enemy), like support towers or towers that generate currency. Speaking of currency, I don’t see the point of having the currency go to a crystal that you have to touch in order to transfer the currency to your glove. Why doesn’t it just already go directly to your glove? It just takes up precious set up time in between waves. There are no support towers, as every tower just attacks the enemies. The enemies have strengths and weaknesses, but it doesn’t really seem to matter. I just kept using the lightning towers since those were the only ones I had fun using, and I still managed to survive each wave in the first level. I didn’t even use any upgrades, mainly because I forgot, but also because I wasn’t losing to the point of thinking about it. It doesn’t feel very strategic if stuff like that doesn’t matter, and if it did matter then enemies weak to ice would be frustrating because it would force you to use the drums. I will keep all of you readers updated with coverage on new content and features for the game. New review and review scores will be provided with future updates.
The game could benefit from multiplayer. If you could have a team of people, where one person mans each tower, this game could actually be amazing. But as of now, controlling each tower and teleporting between them and the hub world is far too slow and awkward for a game that needs you to constantly know what's happening and where enemies are.
Realm Protector is available now in early access on the Meta Quest Store for 6.99
Review was made possible using the Meta Quest 3