A unique game that mixes VR & MR, to make you a crime solving detective.

Fulfill your fantasy to become a police detective in a first-of-its-kind game.

Detective VR – the first release by developers Studio Chipo y Juan & Valem Studio – blends virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) to allow you showcase your Sherlock Holmes skills. The game is set to release Feb. 27.

In this game, you visit crime scenes, collect evidence, uncover witness testimony, and solve the case before you, all while never having to leave your living room. This is the first time in a while that MR has been used in a unique way, to blend the game world together with ours – Shattered and the concept of pulling items into your space to solve puzzles was another recent example of good concept.

You’re a new officer with a what one can assume is some form of futuristic crime solving unit that has access to cutting edge technology. Once you put on your in-game glasses, your investigation begins.

You’re taught the basics of how things work: your crime board appears in your space and you need to collect clues to fill it, before tying those to your suspects. To collect clues, you’re taken to the crime scene where you can teleport around to examine the space and collect your evidence by taking photos.

You do all this, via hand tracking as well. In fact, the game was built with hand tracking in mind, and is the best way to play this game. It’s intuitive the way you need to take a picture of the crime scene, and while not everything works instantaneously – more on this shortly – it all comes together well enough to create a cohesive and enjoyable experience.

In other instances, you’re able to play back scenarios and watch them to collect evidence, rewinding time and being able to play as you need. In portions of the game like this, the studio opted to use motion capture with professional actors, adding a level of nuance to both performances and the overall adventure, that makes this a quality game.

From the moment you start the first part of your investigation there is a lot to be excited about here; and well before the end of the game you’ll note how stellar the experience can be.

Graphically speaking, things do look pretty great thanks to the motion capture used during the game’s creation. Whether it’s the murder board, visiting a crime scene, or having a witness appear in front of you as you break down testimony, the game has a nice look and should appeal to those who look for games with quality graphics.

The gameplay is intriguing, and while it would be nicer to have more ability to wander around and search for clues – this is a good start. Teleporting to search for a handful of clues does get repetitive if you end up just trying to snap of a picture of anything in sight. But, taking the time to look around and pay attention, does end up mitigating a situation where many less patient players will soon find themselves.

The ability to rewind scenes to look for clues, ends up landing about the same. Yes it’s interesting to play back these scenarios – and you will find clues by paying attention – but the time system could use a fix. More on this shortly.

Finally, the murder board you’re given, along with the fancy dock to analyze evidence are both done well, but do have their faults.

Speaking of, let’s discuss the issues here quickly. There are not a lot of things wrong here, but you may notice a hiccup here and there while playing.

The board allows you to add your photos of evidence and link it to suspects.  Cool right? See, you really do get to feel like a cop in your favourite TV show. Problem with the board is that after a while, your evidence lines get all wrapped up and it’s difficult to grab the video evidence tapes. These tapes appear when you make a connection between evidence and suspect, and contain snippets of testimony. Again, cool concept, but the abundance of threads means that sometimes the tapes can overlap and be difficult to pickup.

Oh and when teleporting around using hand tracking, you need to point to a teleportation spot and then pinch your fingers together. Sometimes this doesn’t pickup right away, and you need to wave your hand around to fix it. Not that big of an issue, but it does exist.

Overall, the game has a lot going on for it, and very few reasons why you shouldn’t give it a try. The only way this could be better was if they allowed the full crime scenes to be MR in your room so you could walk around with more freedom to analyze, rather than having the clues so in your face and stuck to one area.

Oh, and being able to interview suspects properly would be the ideal way to solidify this as the best VR experience to be a detective.

Here’s hoping that this game does well, because for a first release from this studio, the VR world can probably expect some pretty good games in the future. Hopefully their next release builds on the great work of Detective VR.

Until it’s release on Feb. 27, the Detective VR team is offering a 20 per cent pre-order discount to everyone who gets the game. See the game or pre-order here: Detective VR on Meta Quest | Quest VR Games | Meta Store.

Detective VR, was reviewed on the Quest 3 after receiving pre-release access.