For months, my copy of VTOL VR sat there on my SSD, unattended and unloved. I struggled to find any motivation to boot it up since I was not really in the mood to play it alone, at least until my friend and fellow Skyward creator, Hueman, got his first VR headset. As it is kind of typical in our friend group, he was immediately bombarded with VR games to give him the best shot at enjoying his time in VR, one of which was VTOL VR.
This finally gave me an excuse to revisit this game with a clear mind, and now with a larger group of friends to fly alongside me. We all assembled the past two days to have fun in the game, but I never expected to have such a good time with it, especially considering my previous stagnation with the game.
DAY 1: MULTI-CREW TIME
The first session was sort of an impromptu one, and I wanted to do something different that I just couldn't do by myself. That is why I proposed to Hueman to do some multi-crew flights with two aircraft, the AH-94 and the T-45.
The sessions started very rough, as it was the first time in months that I had touched VTOL VR. I had to readjust myself to the controls, while trying to teach some of the basics of the AH-94 gunner seat to Hue. He ended up figuring out most of it himself for the sole reason that I already kind of had enough trying to teach myself the pilot seat of the helicopter to myself.
After a couple of suboptimal flights, half of which we flew with one engine because I rushed the startup, we learned the hard way that we needed more people for the mission we were engaging. We only managed to get some of the objectives done, and the last couple of objectives were impossible with our current level of proficiency.
That is why we switched to the T-45, a simpler and more familiar aircraft. In my initial review, I found this plane to be a lovely experience in VR and an excellent way to teach your friends to do anything you need to do in VTOL VR. Much of this experience did transfer through even after months of disuse, but we still struggled a bit because of my poor weapon choices for the missions we were tackling. At the end of the day, we had spent hours flying and getting things done. I had a blast with Hue and he did too. This would wrap up the first day of flying.
DAY 2 AND 3: BIG MISSION, MADE BETTER WITH FRIENDS
For the second and third days, we had some of our friends show up to the session. This made it possible to tackle some bigger multiplayer CO-OP missions that were just unreasonable to do alone. We did two sessions of the same mission, but with different parameters and people.
This mission was one of the biggest ones included with the base game, and has a lot of potential to do many types of tasks and objectives. From air-to-air, air-to-ground, SEAD and anti-ship, this mission has a bit of everything.
RibbonBlue, as expected, decided to get on the EF-24 and fly for us as a dedicated SEAD and Electronic Warfare aircraft. He suppressed as many as possible, allowing us to get insanely close to some of the more difficult objectives, such as the enemy fleet. He also, surprisingly, focused himself on jamming the enemies' radar warning receivers, but what does this mean?
In simple terms, he made it so that if he had focused on that enemy aircraft, that pilot couldn't even know that they were being shot at until the last seconds before impact. This came in handy more times than I'd like to admit. The others, including me, dedicated ourselves to all other miscellaneous objectives. I personally made it my mission to annihilate all known enemy air defenses and the enemy fleet with the F-45, this game's equivalent to the F-35 Lightning II. I did this with both Sournetic, another member of Skyward's team, Hueman and Wyvern613.
We did a lot over both sessions, and had a blast. So much happened that it would be here typing all day if I were to recount every sortie, but a couple of the highlights from my sides were: sinking three quarters of the enemy fleet with anti-radiation missiles, downing three out of four enemy stealth aircraft while engaging solo with one wing after Sour was shot down, doing SEAD the old way by engaging the emplacements with the gun while defeating missiles kinetically, etc.
IF YOU OWN VR, PLEASE GO PLAY VTOL VR
I am not joking when I say that I fell in love with this game all over again over the span of a week. Our friend group is now planning future sessions and Hueman, as expected, is now engaging with the game's mission editor to create custom terrain and missions for the group to fly to. This is to say, expect more VTOL VR content in the future!
About the creator:
Santiago "Cubeboy" Cuberos
Longtime aviation fanatic with particular preference towards military aviation and its history. Said interests date back to the early 2000s, leading into his livelong dive into civil and combat flight simulators. He has been involved in a few communities, but only started being active around the mid 2010s. Joined as a Spanish to English translator in 2017, he has been active as the co-founder and writer ever since. Twitter | Discord: Cubeboy
.png)