PLANET OF THE APES To Have A Virtual-Reality CRISIS In New Game

Did you play Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier? It’s pretty heavily flawed, as I noted in my review, but it’s a pretty strong Apes story, and an unconventional, narrative-driven way for Fox to expand the series into interactive media.

Crisis On The Planet of the Apes is the second title in FoxNext’s apparently comprehensive plan to plunder the Apes franchise for interactive material, and like Last Frontier, it’s leaping on a current trend - in this case, virtual reality. A trailer dropped today, and though it doesn’t show much gameplay, it’s intriguing:

Co-developed with Imaginati Studios much like Last Frontier was, Crisis puts players into the non-shoes of an ape in the reboot version of the franchise (between Rise and Dawn). Based on the PlayStation blog entry announcing the game, it seems to be a shortish experience (like, frankly, most of the best VR games), all about escaping a military camp via a series of gameplay tableaus. It’s got a fully motion-captured narrative, with multiple human and ape characters - about what you’d expect from a studio aligned with Andy Serkis’ own studio.

Gameplay-wise, players will wield weaponry and ape-arms alike, even swinging their arms to move around and climb - a method of video game locomotion sure to generate some hilarious YouTube videos. Weapon handling and cover will be handled via motion controls, too: in-game objects will be able to be picked up and used as cover, and pretty much everything seems designed in an analogue way. Which, as anyone who’s ever played a VR game can tell you, is the best way to do this kind of thing.

Crisis On The Planet of the Apes launches April 3rd for Oculus, Vive, and PlayStation VR. If you're VR-enabled, get ready to go ape, and do other things the marketing is likely to tell you to do.