DUO Reviews

The oldest video game in the world brought into the future. There are two balls which bounce around and you need to guard and reflect them with your shields in such a manner to destroy some cubic sculpture that is in the middle of the room. The game has a lot of levels.

Duo is fairly simple and surprisingly addictive. You are in a room on a space station. The same room every time, listening to the same uplifting trance soundtrack. You have balls that you whack with your shields. They bounce around, and break the blocks of structures built to be various things, like an elephant, or a tie fighter. You have to smash enough blocks in a set time frame to win the round. You can get power ups, like extra balls and more time. You can get power downs, like 'black out' where everything turns black and white, or 'small ball', where your whacky balls get smaller and thus easier to fly over your shields. If you don't hit the ball heading towards you, it goes out of bounds and you lose it. If you lose too many balls you lose the round. I think I paid like $2.50 for this on sale. I love it when a game gives you far more enjoyment for the price than you ever expected. Good exercise and good fun. Based on price-to-enjoyment ratio alone, it gets a perfect rank in my books. Even if I'd paid full price (which is only twice what I paid), I'd say the same. This is one you can't afford not to have in your collection!

Fun take on Arkanoid/Breakout in VR. Good for getting some light exercise, and it's cheap as well. NB: I played it on the Quest 2 with no issues despite Oculus devices not being listed as supported headsets on the Steam page.

A simple puzzle game where you have to move a lot around. For those who like to be physically active but also want a simple puzzle game as well, this is the game for you. It helps me to forget things and get my mind back in focus again. In short, start solving puzzles while moving about.

I have a random selection of VR games, some cheap and some more expensive. I thought this game is going to be one of those cheaper ones, meaning lower quality, like some others in the collection, that I play for a few minutes and then move on. But man, how wrong I was! I just spend 1.5 hours completing a dozen or so levels and there is still so much more to play! The game is fun, fast paced, and the higher the level the more bricks you have to disintegrate before a timeout. When the ball bounces from your shield you can direct the ball to some extent by pulling the shield in the desired direction, which I discovered after a few levels. This allows to direct the ball where there are still some bricks to break down. Some bricks have special functions, e.g. making the ball go through bricks, add extra speed to them, or even add additional balls. I can tell you, when you have 3 or 4 balls jumping around you need to be quite fit to sustain the pace of the game and not let the ball slip through your shields. Finally a physical exercise that is entertaining and engaging! Just make sure you are aware of your physical surrounding and remove items that you could accidentally break when trying to hit that ball that is trying to sneak in the gap between your shield and the wall...

[h1] DO NOT BUY THIS [/h1] I love arcade games. I love VR. I love VR arcade games. I thought, sweet, a brick breaker for VR?! Immediately purchased. Then almost Immediately refunded. This is not an enjoyable experience. Cons: 1. There is no options or settings menu. 2. There is no tutorial. (there are no buttons to press so this is arguably understandable but I still want you to tell me what the goal is or something.) 3. You cannot simply reflect the shots back into the play field. You have to physically swing -hard- to give them enough force to fly back to the bricks. Like playing tennis. I played for 11 minutes and was done exerting. 4. You cannot angle your shield to "aim" the shots. They stay parallel to the bricks so if you want to change the angle of the shot you have to use the very outer edge of the shield which only offers 1 alternate angle, and is very hard to do. 5. Because the balls bounce around 3D space and can very easily go behind the clump of bricks, they always seem to return to you on the perimeter of your play area. Rarely do they hit bricks and return straight back to you close to center. Not so bad except then you are forced to look in the extreme directions to track the balls and move your arms to outer edges to return them. 6. There are 2 required balls to use so double every con I just listed. Pro: 1. The game launches correctly.

It's like the devs never played a brick breaker. Balls bounce wrong, slow down and get sucked into the 'lose gate'. Bricks break insoncistantly. Some times the ball will break through and keep going. Some times it will stop and drift towards the player, even breaking through the structure to do it. Some times it'll almost follow the rules and bounce off at a random angle.

This is a super fun game, like a retro arcade game except you're INSIDE the game world :) It's perfect for showing off the Vive to new friends and just having fun together without needing to become involved in a complex narrative or learning a lot of moves. Just block the balls and send them bouncing back toward the blocks! My only disappointment with the game so far is that my 6-year-old daughter can't play easily because the room size does not adapt itself to her height. UPDATE: I'm told the height issue has been fixed in the latest release, but unfortunately, I can no longer play at all. When the game starts, there's a red flash and then all I can see is an open world (no game objects) and my two "shield" controllers.

Well, if you enjoy brick breaking games, you can't really go wrong with Duo. The first few levels are really slow and kind of boring, but the later levels get really intense with some nice power-ups and some pretty bad negative pickups, which can have you flailing your hands around like mad. A couple of downsides - The game has you confined to a very small circle, and if you move slightly outside of the circle it flashes up huge warning signs which are quite annoying. The paddles sometimes seem a little too large, meaning the game can be very easy once you get used to it. A difficulty option would nice. Overall, would recommend to anyone looking for a brick breaker in VR.

Loved Audioshield, Cyberpong, and Holoball, along with classic brick-breaker games, so I figured I'd give it a try, and expected to like it. There's way too much randomness to how the ball moves. It doesn't feel like i'm intentionally trying to break the bricks, just like it's a byproduct of the ball somewhat randomly swirling around the play space. This is made worse by the ball movement around you--the ball kinda slows down and moves inward when it gets near you, which is distracting and annoying and contributes to an overall feeling that all you're doing is trying to block the ball from getting past you, and that you should ignore everything other than the balls that are directly in front of your play space. Also, I get blue and orange balls, and blue and orange paddles, but the two are seemingly unrelated, as far as I can tell? I thought you'd be forced to block one with the other. I'm not really sure I get it. Also, there's too much random crap flying around the screen. Like, in addition to the blue and orange balls, there are the blue and orange balls which *spawn* the blue and orange balls? Also, if I run out of orange balls, I die. Even though I'm still playing with a blue ball. It's unexpected.