Get ready for lots of virtual cubes in virtual reality! Minecraft: Gear VR Edition is now available on the Oculus Store for $6.99.
The blocky blockbuster was met with major fanfare when it was revealed last month that it was landing on the Gear VR. I had a chance to try it out and wasn’t overtly impressed, but it is undoubtedly a major development to have such a triple-A title landing on a virtual reality device.
Before you head to the Oculus store on your Samsung Galaxy and buy it right up, wait! To play Minecraft on Gear VR, you’ll need a separate bluetooth gamepad first.
Gameplay takes place in two flavors: cinema mode and full VR. In cinema mode you’re basically sitting on a little bench looking at a screen that you’re playing Minecraft on. Cool, but kind of a waste of the platform. Tap the Gear VR’s touchpad and you dive into Full VR gameplay. Awesome, but odd.
There are a couple of things that inexplicably make this game especially dizzying. First, because of the gamepad, movement is much more dynamic than most Gear VR users might be used to. Second, the game utilizes snapturns, which are jumpy little camera rotations designed to make gameplay less dizzying. In reality the movements are pretty jarring and kind of downplay the overall immersiveness of the experience.
Though the app is in the Oculus Store, it is not available for download on the Oculus Rift VR headset quite yet. No official word on when the Rift port of Minecraft will be arriving, though that’s probably fine because Rift users should be used to waiting by now.
