Pocket Lands Is A Mixed Reality Playground For Creative Minds
A New Sandbox for Creative Minds: Pocket Lands Review
As a gamer and a creative, I've always been drawn to sandbox games that allow me to express my imagination and build complex worlds. From Minecraft to CyubeVR, these games have given me a sense of freedom and creativity that's hard to find elsewhere. So, when I heard about Pocket Lands, a new sandbox game for the Meta Quest platform, I was excited to dive in and see what it had to offer.
A Promising New Sandbox
Pocket Lands delivers a promising new sandbox for building digital worlds, and it's out now in Early Access on Quest. The game's creator, Mountainborn Studios, has clearly put a lot of thought into designing a game that's both fun and accessible. From the moment I started playing, I was impressed by the game's intuitive controls and beautiful graphics.
A Flexible Canvas
One of the standout features of Pocket Lands is its flexible canvas. You can view your world from three different perspectives: a resizable island in mixed reality, a diorama with your surroundings covered, or a fully immersive mode where everything is rendered in the voxel world, including the day-night cycle. This flexibility allows you to experiment with different building styles and techniques, and it's a great way to get a sense of how your creations will look in different environments.
A God-Mode Perspective
Another feature that I loved was the ability to drop into your own world at any moment, going from a God-mode perspective to walking around next to your creations. This feeling, especially once laser-focused on more elaborate constructions, is a brilliant addition that inspires awe. You can jump and fly around the map to look at the environment from another area, which is a great way to get a sense of the scale and complexity of your creations.
Accessible Building Tools
No creative sandbox is complete without accessible building tools, and Pocket Lands delivers. From a quick 17-slide tutorial that explains how it all works, the onboarding to pick up and play is as easy as it gets. Making the motion of grabbing a rectangle from two opposite sides lets you spawn a figure as long, wide, or short as you wish. A handy menu with over 25 full and half block types awaits to accommodate every type of building. Concrete, sand, wood, and lampshades are but a few foundations to build unique creations on.
A Calming Vibe
The calming music, ranging from medieval Oblivion-esque melodies to soothing piano sounds, instills a relaxing vibe in the creation process. It's a great way to unwind and express your creativity, and it's a feature that I think will appeal to both gamers and non-gamers alike.
Hand Tracking: A Mixed Bag
While hand tracking feels a little hit or miss right now, it's a feature that I think has a lot of potential.//*[@Tapping your thumb to your hand lets you “scroll” through the map as you would a smartphone, turning it yellow to signify selection. You can close your fist to move around the map, pinch to move the edges of the mixed reality diorama, or grab blocks and add new ones. However, Pocket Lands doesn't always register when I stop making a fist gesture, only to end up on an entirely different side of the map. Or worse, the diorama itself ends up in another area of the room.
A Bit of Comic Relief
A bit of comic relief against these issues is the addition of arm-swinging locomotion, which doesn't add much, but it's undoubtedly fun to make that primal motion while exploring. For the avoidance of doubt, artificial stick-based locomotion is also available.
A Promising Future
While Pocket Lands is a wonderful Early Access release with all the aforementioned details, I wish that I could do more in the game right now. Thankfully, the game's creator is aware of these issues and is working to address them. In the meantime, I'm excited to see what the future holds for Pocket Lands. With new items, block types, and creatures in development, along with new biomes and multiplayer, I think this game has the potential to become a classic.
Conclusion
Pocket Lands is a promising new sandbox game that delivers a flexible canvas, accessible building tools, and a calming vibe. While it's not without its issues, I think this game has a lot of potential and is definitely worth checking out. With its intuitive controls and beautiful graphics, I think Pocket Lands is a great playground for creative minds, and I'm excited to see where it goes from here.
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