Skydiving is a sport not for the faint of heart but for those with no regrets, no fear, and the no looking-back attitude. Many people have taken the jump only to show this newfound version of themselves. While those who would think two or ten times before even attempting, the select few will jump like there is no tomorrow. But for those who dare not try it in real life, you can try it at home thanks to Virtual Reality. But does the developer, V Axis Studios, give us the Skydiving experience we have been looking for? Let’s find out with SkydiveSim for the Quest 3.
SkydiveSim brings the thrill of skydiving and BASE jumping to your Quest headset. No more waiting on the weather on bad weather days. Put on your headset and choose from our gorgeous levels. Jump from a plane 10,000 feet above ground. Challenge yourself to go through the free fall rings. Then pull your ripcord and fly under the canopy and finally work on your accuracy and land on the target.
So before you go jumping out into the sky, there are a few things that you should be aware of. First, this is a seated experience, so find your favorite chair or place to sit. You could stand, but the way gravity works, you may not want to try or before you know it, you or something might become broken. Second, if you have acrophobia, then you make sure someone who can make sure you are ok or at least have a wet washcloth just in case surrounded you. Third, please remember to charge your Touch Plus controllers fully. Nothing says praying like free falling to your death all because you forgot to charge them. And finally, just have some fun. With all that said, let’s continue…
When you first start, you have the main hub ahead of you and the leaderboard to your right. At the top, you have the music, the Main Menu, Options, Controls, and Tuturiol. If you go into Settings, you also have a couple of choices to select from. You can go solo or party up in Multiplayer. There are also controls for the audio that you can adjust and to the right, you have the Quality. Set this to High as it’s Medium by default. You can also adjust the wind speed and direction and even select your skill level. You may want to go with the lowest skill set in the beginning so you can get a feel for things. Also, keep a look on your left wrist as your watch as it will show how many feet you are when you are free falling.
Of course, before anyone ever decides to jump and free-fall, you should probably get some practice in and this is no different, as you will want to go through the Tutorial. Here, you get to learn how to move forward and backward and speed up or slow down while in the air as long as when to pull your chute and how to control that to have a successful landing hopefully.
Once you have put your skills to the test and have gone through training, it’s time to jump. You will need to select if you want to jump from a plane, helicopter, hot air balloon, or base jump and then select where you want to jump. There are a variety of places to jump from and land. Places such as jumping both day and night and seeing the Statue of Liberty up close like never before to trying to land near a lighthouse during the day or night to even more challenging landings near the side of the mountains. Keep in mind that there is a selection of landing targets that you can try to aim for.
Jumping out of a plane has you with other jumpers in the plane, however, they are there for either moral support or because you lost in rock, paper, and scissors and the loser or winner, depending on how you look at it, must jump. For my jump, I decided to test my luck and land on the open-air field.
After landing successfully, I decided to go for the helicopter jump. Before the jump, I was looking around and saw one jumper who was thinking about their life choices and another who was just lying down as if at any moment, the helicopter could turn and they would be the first one out. I went with the open field and with my jump; I am not sure how I did not hit the helicopter blades, but as I was falling and seeing the winding roads, I could land anywhere instead of the closest to the target as possible. The goal here is to score the most amount of points and survive your jump.
If one can jump out of a plane and a helicopter, then one can jump out of a hot-air balloon. With this being a shorter jump, I wanted to make it to be the one where the crowd would cheer me on. And nothing says an entrance like landing in a stadium.
One of my last jumps was the base jump. With this jump, I decided to mix things up a bit. I considered myself an expert at this point and even though the weather forecast called for some high winds, that would not stop me. So I suited up and started my day off my jumping tour from the top of a crane well, the top of the crane was too slippery, and landing in 3ft of water caused me to fail. I am not sure what kind of American Gladiators scoring system this is, but I moved on. The next stop of my tour was jumping at night on a full moon and we all know what that means. I tried to go back into the elevator, and the buttons didn’t even work. How is going up the only option? With no other option, I jumped. Thanks, full moon…thanks. So I tried again. I should have known better. After what should have been my death by the sounds of the broken bones, I saw the golden gates. But this turned into elevator doors into the daytime of the city as my final stop on this jumping tour.
I wanted to check out the multiplayer, but at the time of my trying, no one else was jumping. But in looking at the leaderboard, I am happy to say that my 9th-place reign is still standing today.
Let’s talk about the graphics and sound. With the graphics, some parts look great such as being up close with the Statue of Liberty as you are passing by and I recommend trying this jump along with the lighthouse and city levels at night as you get this sense that it’s just you and the world. That is until you smack yourself against Liberty herself or fall into the water. Just keep in mind that each level gives you different markings to try to land on. Seeing the view from very high up and looking above as what just jumped from is growing smaller by the second as you are free-falling looks good as well. Of course, the closer you get to things, the more things start to populate for a better view, such as the mountains.
With the sound, there were certain things I wanted to listen for such as what it would be like if I was free falling or if I broke some bones as I crashed. Hearing the wind go by at a fast speed and even the chute pulling out of my backpack sounded just like I thought it would sound. There is, of course, the music selection of 4 music tracks. In my jumping tour with one of my jumps, I selected the faster-beat song and decided to dance along with it in the air. That’s just part of the fun. I can only imagine what would happen in multiplayer with everyone talking and what things might sound like as they explore after landing.
There are some things that I would love to see. First, graphics. While there are things that looked good, I wonder how things would be if the headset was pushed to the limits. For example, we have all these wide open areas and some feel like they could be lived in. With any water, it would be fun to see fish or even sharks and whales. Just imagine jumping at night and landing in the water with a shark nearby or landing on the side of a mountain with bears nearby. Second, my landing targets. Sure, you can land almost anywhere and there are landing targets to try to land on. What about adding additional crazy targets to try to land on? For example, for the level with the winding roads, it would be great to see moving cars and if you can land on those cars, how much more of a bonus you would receive? Third, air crafts to jump from. Let’s jump from a space shuttle launch or a UFO just for the fun of it. Fourth, more levels. From the first irritation of CanopySim to now SkydiveSim, there is an improvement of levels to select from. It would be fun to have levels of actual places from different states and countries to select from. Fith, weather elements. We already get to play with the wind, but let’s see how well we can do when there is rain, a blizzard, a tornado, a hurricane, or even an earthquake as you try and land. And finally, more in multiplayer. Even though I did not get a chance to do multiplayer, I have seen footage and it looks like a lot of fun. It would be fun if you could have other players judge your jump and landing from below like it was the Olympics to even being able to scuba dive in the water. There are just so many things I can see happening here, that I can’t wait to see what updates will be coming.
SkydiveSim allows us to live out our skydiving fantasies without the wait. It shows that even when we may face our fears and truly have a dream, to not let anything stop us. Sometimes we keep trying and it seems like we fail every single time. But sometimes if we keep trying and believing in ourselves, we never know when our dreams can become a reality.
SkydiveSim is out now for the Quest, 2, 3, & Pro via App Lab and Oculus Rift/S on the Meta Store and Steam VR. A review code was provided.
To learn more about SkydiveSim, please visit the site.
To learn more about AV1 Productions, please visit the site,
In case you missed the trailer, please enjoy. Until next time, I have some more jumps to make.
