Resolution Games’ Spatial Ops is a frenetic VR shooter

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I was looking out the glass doors of Resolution Games‘ studio in Austin, Texas. And enemies were coming at me. So I had to start taking them out.

Fortunately, it wasn’t real life. It was a mixed reality game, and I was playing an upcoming game from Resolution Games called Spatial Ops. Played at Roomscale with a Meta Quest Pro headset, it was a heart-pumping experience.

The game is a virtual reality shooting experience, but it makes use of mixed reality with the Quest Pro’s color-passthrough camera. It detects objects in the environment, and you can use those objects as virtual cover to hide behind in the game.

This is the work of Resolution Games, which Candy Crush Saga leader Tommy Palm founded in 2015. The company dove into VR games and is still making them more than seven years later. It has 200 people, including seven at the studio in Austin run by president Paul Brady. And while 20% of the team members are focused on AR games, the VR titles like Spatial Ops represent the leading edge of the studio’s work. The company will show the game to small crowds at the Game Developers Conference next week in San Francisco.

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In an interview with GamesBeat, Palm said the original inspiration was old arcade games like Namco’s Time Crisis, where you used a toy gun to shoot at enemies on the screen. In this case, with the VR headset covering my eyes, I could grab different virtual weapons, starting with a revolver. I pointed the revolver at