A wacky bug filled experience, aimed at younger VR users.
Grab your umbrellas and make you way up in a new game from Monstarai.
Umbrella Up – released June. 12 for the Quest series of headsets – is a virtual reality (VR) game that tasks you with navigating a skyward obstacle course, using only a pair of umbrellas. You take on the role of a snowman – one with a wheel instead of that bottom snowball – as you use your umbrellas for everything from movement, to climbing, to fighting.
The game takes its cues from other titles like Gorilla Tag or Crowbar Climber, creating a mashup of mechanics and gameplay that is meant to fully engage your arms as you endeavour to make it through the course.
Umbrella Up is simplistic in nature, and there isn’t a whole lot to do besides work to continue going up. Sure, as you climb, glide and navigate yourself around, you’ll come across things like a “mini gym” or a place to use those umbrellas for some golf.
Mostly though, these sections are meant for kids to goof off, as there’s nothing mandatory or interesting about interacting with these areas.
Mechanically speaking, Umbrella Up tries to do something interesting. If you want to move around, you have to hold the umbrellas with the top down and use them almost like canes as you plant them into the ground, before moving your arms backwards to pull yourself forward.
This style of movement is very akin to how those with polio would have had to move around – heavily dependant on the crutches on your arms.
While the kids who enjoy games with mechanics like this may not care, this is probably the buggiest movement system ever experienced in VR.
Moving almost never works well here, as it just doesn’t feel natural. Even if you try and take your time to properly plant the umbrella on the ground and move, it doesn’t want to work – you’ll often find yourself going the wrong direction; or more often not going anywhere.
There is also no smooth turning option – in fact when testing the game there was absolutely no ability to turn your character in game, not even via snap turning. This means that a VR player picking this up needs to ensure they have ample room to be able to physically turn themselves.
This issue of having no turning made the game much more difficult as you climbed around, as the jank of the game mixed with the lack of turning, to glitch your way back to the last checkpoint.
Speaking of climbing, most of the game will see you flipping your umbrellas with the triggers, so the handle is facing up. You’ll then use it to latch onto things to get around.
Whether it’s a hook on the wall, a pipe to slide, or another object in your path, chances are you’ll need to use the handles to navigate. You can also open the umbrellas completely with the push of a thumbstick, this will help you catch some wind and glide your way around.
Beyond this, there isn’t much to the game.
Graphically, there isn’t anything really to write home about. The world is colourful and blocky, and the textures are low. The graphics are consistent with a game that costs $12 but considering the target market probably doesn’t know any better, this works heavily in the developers favour.
Overall Umbrella Up is rife with bugs and has a lot of work to do to before it can be considered a viable game. In its current state, Umbrella Up plays like it was hastily created with AI after seeing games with similar mechanics rise in popularity. There are so many issues with even the simplest core mechanics, and the game feels incomplete and broken, to the point that it would be hard to recommend playing this even if it was free.
One might consider this game’s existence as a bad omen for the future of the VR industry, unless they already knew that this kind of experience is just par for the course in today’s market.
At the very least, it would be best for the game to receive a massive patch before picking up.
Umbrella Up, was reviewed on the Quest 3 after receiving a discount code from the developer.
