Whenever I write about virtual reality, I find it impossible not to bring up my all-time favorite VR game, Stormland by Insomniac Games. A lot of people might not know that the studio behind Ratchet & Clank and Marvel’s Spider-Man used to make VR games for the Oculus Rift, and while I’d happily recommend Feral Rites, Edge of Nowhere, and The Unspoken to any Insomniac fans, Stormland is far and away the best VR game the studio has ever prod💟uced. It&r🙈squo;s hard to find an opportunity to write about a four year old VR game that no one’s ever heard of, and indeed, I haven’t dedicated an article to it in four years. But with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on the horizon and the recent launch of the Quest 3, there may never be a better time to shout out the game that made me fall in love with VR.
That’s no exaggeration. I demoed Stormland at PAX West in 2019, and it was the first VR 𝐆game I ever played. I petitioned Oculus to send me a Rift S specifically to play this game. From November to December 2019, I lived in VR. This is the same year that Asgard’s Wrath, Until You Fall, and Boneworks launched, and yet Stormland is 🦩still the game I think about the most. Which is why I’m devastated to learn that it’s no longer for sale on any platform.
Okay, enough pretense. Stormland is a first-person shooter in a procedurally generated universe that emphasizes exploration and mobility. Set in a sci-fi world made up of dense tropical islands strewn across a cloudscape (think ocean made of clouds) you play as an android gardener taking up arms against an alien threat called The Tempest. Weapons, upgrades, and opportunities to♚ sabotage the enemy in guer𒊎illa warfare abound, but what makes Stormland so special is the incredible freedom of movement it gives.
Stoꦬrmland Review: The Firꦅst AAA VR Shooter (And It Rules)
While Stormlan𓃲d doesn't exactly break the chains of current day VR entirely, the game offers the absolute best experience mov🗹ing and shooting in VR.
You can really f𒅌eel the Insomniac DNA in Stormland. If you enjoy games like Sunset Overdrive and Spider-Man because of how fun it is just to move around, Stormland will impress you, too. To start, every surface is climbable, and a lot of the gameplay is centered around ascending mountains and enemy towers to assault their bases. Thankfully, you’re not just climbing hand over hand all the way to the top. There’s a lot of different ways you can accelerate yourself, and as you collect upgrades and unlock new abilities, you’ll gain even more ways to move around.
For example, when🃏 you’re clinging to a wall you can simply throw your arm down to launch yourself off of it in any direction. You can grab back onto the wall if you want, or you can stretch out your arms and start gliding. Rolling your hands back and forth will control your descent, and when you get good 💟you can make sharp declines to gain momentum then level back out to gain distance. You can even grab onto the ground and pump your arms to launch yourself into the air, giving you a head start up a tower or flinging yourself over a fence to ambush enemies.
Cloudsurfing works li⭕ke driving a car. When you’re in between islands, you just reach your arms around and steer the direction you want to go. If you build up speed you can even fling yourself off of a cloud and soar straight to ෴the top of a tall outpost or island.
You use all of these movement abilities in conjunction with your arsenal of weapons, and the better you get at controlling your body the more expressive and exciting combat becomes. Gliding over a group of enemies and raining down machine gun fire on them as you fall out of the sky, or launching yourself over a building to drop a grenade through an open skylight, are sti💦ll some of the most fun I’ve ever had in VR. It isn’t an easy game to master, and people that get queasy in VR should definitely steer clear, but this iꩲs as cool as VR got until Half-Life: Alyx came around the following year, and in many ways it’s still cooler.
Unfortunately, it seems it isn’t possible to buy Stormland anymore. As a PCVR game published by Oculus, it was only ever available through the Oculus app - an antiquated platform that’s largely unsupported, replaced by the Meta Quest𒅌 mobile app. If you search for Stormland in th🐻e Oculus app, or swap to the Rift store on the Meta Quest app and search it, Stormland appears, but there’s no way to purchase it. There’s an Insomniac bundle for sale, which includes Feral Rites, The Unspoken, and Edge of Nowhere, but not Stormland.
There’s a few things that might be going on. When you launch Stormland, you get a warning message that the game is ‘out of compliance’ and has ‘limited functionality’. This explains why it’s been delisted, but it’s unclear what that limited functionality entails. Stormland has a bit 🦋of an always online thing going on. Once you finish the campaign, it loops back to the beginning and you start a new game mode called the Cycling World that refreshes weekly. 🌞My save got wiped at some point so I don’t have a way to check, but it might be the case that the online functionality of Stormland hasn’t been maintained. It seems like Meta required an update to bring Stormland back into compliance, which isn’t something we can expect Insomniac to do now that it’s owned by Sony.
That leaves Stormland in a really unfortunate position. If Insomniac is to continue working on VR titles, as I fully expect it will, it will be making PSVR2 exclusives. Stormland is an Oculus exclusive published by Oculus, an☂d I’m just guessing here, but I suspect Sony isn’t exactly inclined to give Insomniac development time ꧑so a competing platform can make more money.
Unless Sony buys Stormland from Meta for a PSVR2 re-release - which I don’t expect Sony to do, given how little interest it seems to have i𝓰n building a library of essential VR games for its new headset - then Stormland is likely going to 🦹be lost to time, only available for those that already own it on PC. It’s a deeply unfortunate consequence of the digital era of games♌. We’d like to think the important games will always be preserved, but this one has clearly fallen through the cracks less than four years after it launched.
There’s no telling how long t꧃he Oculus app will even be around, considering it’s mismatched branding and the fact that Meta hasn’t updated it in so long that it’s still promoting four year old games like Fujii and Republique on the home page. On꧒ce that app goes, Stormland - and who knows how many other games - might just be gone forever. Maybe I’m the only one that cares about a VR game from 2019, but I think Stormland deserves better than this.