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Rats, robots and gloomy skies: Travel back to London 1892 for an epic virtual reality adventure
Tue, 1st Aug 2017
FYI, this story is more than a year old

The game takes place in Victorian London 1892, revolving around the dastardly Professor Rattwurm and his attempts to enslave the English folk with an army of clockwork automatons.

From the safety of an elaborately furnished command centre in an airship, the story unfolds as the player plans their strategy and practise with all the weapons at their disposal.

The player loadout includes a steam hammer, steam cannon, magnet beam, rotor saw, tesla ray and a rail gun.

The game is developed by Showstorm, an indie developer.

SteamHammerVR was developed entirely by a remote working team with creators coming from across the globe.

The core team live in the UK and Poland, but the credits for SteamHammerVR show a truly global involvement with contributors based in the USA, India, Thailand, Serbia, Egypt, Pakistan and Ireland.

This could either mean that the game will be amazing as minds from across the globe came together to create it, or that it will feel disjointed because of communication errors.

Showstorm believes that remote development could be the future.

Martin Rowe, SteamHammerVR artistic director says, “We have proven that using modern technology you can for a fact make something like this without commuting into an office every day, or in fact, any day.

“It has been a delight to work with so many great creative people from across the planet."

The team at GamestormVR also believe that the key to adoption of high-end VR like the HTC Vive starts with people experiencing VR through the more accessible mobile phone based headsets.

Mark Bellinger, Showstorm managing director says, “I don't think we should underestimate the importance of low-end VR, for sure the experiences do not come anywhere close to the quality and interactivity of high-end VR, but it does open up accessibility to the mass market to taste just enough of how great VR is.

“Historically, game development companies struggle to make a profit, only time will tell if we also fall onto the scrap heap of dashed dreams and unrewarded genius, but we have kept the overheads on this development ridiculously frugal, mainly by design but partly by necessity.

"We are really excited to feel the reaction to our game, we have already achieved our ultimate goal to make something that we are proud of, in truth it is much bigger and much more ambitious than the experience we originally set out to make.

The game has two main modes, story mode and seek and destroy.

The story mode titled,'The Rogue Apprentice', contains eleven missions which will take you on an adventure staged in some of the most iconic locations around Victorian London, including, The Tower of London, Limehouse Warehouse and Trafalgar Square.

It promises to be a hugely engaging and immersive experience with several types of challenging gameplay.

Seek and destroy mode gives players full-on 'arcade wave shooting' versions of SteamHammerVR, with combos to boost your score.

Players can compete for the top score on the global leaderboards.

SteamHammerVR will be available for owners of the Oculus Touch, Vive and PlaysationVR later in the year.

Watch the trailer here: