The Unspoken

The combination of VR and excellent gesture tracking makes you feel like a powerful spell caster as you fend off monsters and opposing wizards alike with your bare hands. Much of the success of The Unspoken lies in its control scheme and its gestures: Your right hand is used for launching or charging up attacks, while your left hand is for blocking or reflecting incoming strikes. More powerful attacks and defensive postures, triggered by crossing your arms, bringing your hands together, or raising your hands above your head, can be cast once you've collected orbs around the arena. What's more, you can also collect powerful tokens and artifacts to launch devastating blows on enemies. It sounds complicated, but it's shockingly intuitive, and in minutes, you'll be flinging spells at targets and opponents as if you've been doing this for years. That heightens the immersive nature of the gameplay significantly, and when you're facing off against a rival who's firing strikes at you, you'll feel like your inner Gandalf or Merlin is engaged in a mythical battle.

Acolytes, which is the single-player mode, does a decent job of extending the tutorial elements while drawing you into a murder mystery surrounding wizards. The story is fine, and tries to give you a sense of the world that The Unspoken is anchored in. The weakest part of this mode is that it's way too short: You can easily fly through this in about two or three hours at most, and that's assuming you take the time to search for the hidden unlockable items to give you new classes to try or spells to launch. It's obvious that multiplayer duels are where the game excels, especially with its focus on season play and ranking boards. These matches are fun and fast paced, and are designed to help you pick and choose the spell caster class that best fits your play style. The only negative here is that the community seems to be a bit small, so you won't always find an opponent to face off against. But if you don't mind searching for opponents, and you're interested in testing your inner magician against other players, The Unspoken is waiting to be summoned to your Rift.