Toy Monsters on Quest 3 made me believe in casual hand-tracking games
Toy Monsters is a mixed reality game that benefits greatly from hand tracking. Here are my first impressions.
Toy Monsters makes the jump from the App Lab to the Meta Quest Store on April 11th, and I had a chance to play it.
In terms of mechanics, Toy Monsters is a classic tower defense game. You must fend off attacks from approaching hordes by selecting defenders and strategically placing them on the playing field.
There are more than a dozen defenders: from exploding traps and candles that spit fireballs, to stout teddy bears with shields that can take a lot of damage, to tanks that fire projectiles.
Hand tracking that works well enough to feel like magic
The special thing about Toy Monsters is that it can be played entirely with your hands. You take the defenders out of their boxes and place them on the board. Each defender costs stars that fall from the sky or are produced by special defenders. You collect them by touching them with your fingers.
But you can do even more with your hands: Thanks to magical abilities, lasers, flames, or ice shoot from your palms or fingertips and destroy enemy hordes in an instant. It makes you feel powerful. If you like, you can also poke individual enemies with your fingers to incapacitate them.
Anyone who reads my articles regularly knows that I am a big hand tracking skeptic, not only but especially in games. But Toy Monsters works sufficiently well with hand tracking and showed me like no other game in recent times that hand tracking has its place in (casual) gaming. The game supports touch controllers, but I actually prefer to play it with my hands.
A perfect couch MR game
Toy Monsters supports passthrough, so you can see the real world as you play and react to the people around you. The board can be moved freely around the room and placed on a table, for example. Moving the board is still a bit fiddly and as far as I know it is not possible to scale it.
The game offers three worlds and more than 33 levels, bonus levels, bosses and an endless mode. I haven't explored the whole game yet, but I've really enjoyed the time I've had so far. Toy Monsters is a perfect couch MR game for short but fun play sessions.
The title will be released on April 11 on the Quest Store and supports Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest Pro. It will cost $15 and can already be pre-ordered with a discount.
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