Swing, Fly, and Dash into Battle Against Giant Robots in ‘Titan Isles,’ Available Now on Meta Quest

One of the joys of virtual reality is the freedom it can offer, immersing us in incredible experiences like soaring through the air or swinging across vast distances. And that, combined with intense action as you battle against immense robotic adversaries, makes up the heart of Titan Isles.

Developed by Psytec Games, the studio behind fan favorites Windlands and Windlands 2, Titan Isles is a first-person shooter with a twist on the classic formula. You don one of four Exo Suits as you leap into battle, and each carries a different gameplay experience, with its own slate of weapons and particular means of locomotion. One suit gives you wrist jets to fly around as you control your direction by aiming your hands. Another provides you with grappling hooks to fling yourself around the battlefield. And another is all about high-speed dashes that let you blink in and out of reality to avoid incoming fire.

As you explore the world of Toska, you’ll face robotic adversaries, including colossal Titans. Luckily, you don’t have to face them alone — Titan Isles lets you play with up to three friends, each taking on a different Exo Suit. You can either fight through the game’s campaign on your own, with different Exo Suit options that change up gameplay, or you can work together with other players and use your different abilities to complement each other.

To celebrate the release of Titan Isles, we sat down with CEO Jon Hibbins and QA Lead Callum Hurley of Psytec Games, as well as Composer Danai Kokogia and Sound Engineer Sam Jones, to talk about what it took to nail the game’s variety of approaches to movement and gameplay and how the team approached bringing the world to life through sound and music.

Callum Hurley: Titan Isles is a fast-paced, bullet hell, action-shooter title that throws you and up to three friends into Toska, a world shattered by the awakening of mysterious, colossal Titans. Using ultra-powerful Exo Suits that arm you with one of four unique traversal equipment and weapon combos, you’ll track down each Titan with the aim to annihilate them and any robotic enemies that stand in your way.

CH: Each Exo Suit in Titan Isles provides a unique gameplay experience. It’s almost like playing four different games! Let’s break down each suit:

Storm — Equipped with a jet pack and highly maneuverable wrist jets, Storm is primed for a highly freeing experience with a great deal of physics-based control. This Exo Suit also features a unique weapons mechanic. On each hand, you’ll find a plasma pistol, allowing you to fire fast shots at enemies from both hands. But the real trick lies in its transformative capabilities: By holding your hands as if you were holding a rifle, the plasma pistols will transform into the Longstrike Rifle, a powerful, fast-firing, long-range weapon with deadly precision.

Hunter — Players of our Windlands series will find some familiarity with this Exo Suit. Hunter equips the player with two long-range grappling hooks for fast swinging gameplay. Unlike Windlands, however, these hooks are strong and allow you to hook onto any part of the world, providing the ultimate freedom of swinging. Hunter’s weapon is a trusty bow, powered by Kyros laser arrows. It may require more delicate aiming, but it delivers a powerful punch.

Goliath — This heavy-hitting Exo Suit uses burst jets on the wrist, similar in design to those for Storm, but propelling players into the air with large bursts of force! Goliath also houses a unique defensive capability: a large shield designed to block the Kyros laser weapons used by Toska’s mechanical enemies. For offensive play, Goliath is rigged with a powerful Kyros cannon that converts the planet’s energy into a toxic, explosive substance that sticks to enemies and can be detonated remotely or on a timer.

Blink — Our more advanced mover, Blink, is an Exo Suit that provides great speed and maneuverability, with the ability to air jump high into the sky and utilize a specially developed Phase Dash ability, which lets players phase directly through enemy attacks that may otherwise be impossible to dodge in time. Blink is also fitted with Viper Bolts: a high-tech projectile with homing capabilities that allow players to reliably aim at and destroy enemies, even while dashing through the world at full speed!

Each Exo Suit has its own upgrade tree to improve both the weapons and traversal equipment. We can’t wait for you all to see how these suits evolve and grow throughout the game.

Jon Hibbins: Trying to balance a four-player game to four completely different playstyles. They each have subtly different benefits against certain enemies. So the challenge is really to make sure you’ve got a team of superheroes that feel like different characters, while maintaining that sense of threat and danger where none are more overpowered than others. It may feel that way as players will naturally feel more comfortable in one Exo Suit than another.

JH: There’s a certain amount of pacing to the game where we give you enough space and time to manage those things like bullet firing speed, the aiming, and the slight sloppiness or read-ahead, depending on the difficulty level and the AI. Everything is fine-tuned to give players time to react to what’s going on between jumps, bursts of flight, or swings, with a large enough world space for you to spend that air time focusing on enemies, knowing that, when you switch back to focusing on a landing area, you’re within a comfortable distance from a safe landing. Then dealing with another enemy from the ground, you’re given time to scope out your next move.

JH: We had Titan Isles as a plan before Windlands 2 shipped. We’d started talking about what to do next and the direction that we wanted to go in as a studio, what type of things we wanted to do, and there were quite a few things we wanted to improve over Windlands 2, mostly in terms of replayability. Because if you were playing Windlands 2 in multiplayer, you would most likely have to complete the campaign multiple times or just not replay it. So we wanted to make sure that we made a game that might have infinite replayability, at least in the end game, but still has the actual narrative adventure you saw in Windlands 2.

JH: Titan Isles does take quite a lot of inspiration from the Windlands 2 movement mechanics, but it builds upon them to branch out into all these different playstyles. So I feel like Titan Isles is a very different game. It’s like a completely different beast and its own unique entity.

But, yeah, there were things that we learned through the Windlands 2 locomotion. In theory, it sounds cool, you know, when you can jump against the wall and climb up and over it. But in practice, it changed the gameplay too dramatically. You lost your flow or you were face-planted against a wall and it felt like you weren't getting the awe of the world. Our games are known for being able to see across the huge world, far in the distance, and you lose that when you spend so much time facing a wall.

So a key learning for us going into this game was maintaining a sense of flow in the movement and how the locomotion fits in with the rest of the gameplay mechanics.

Danai Kokogia: I think one of the most interesting and unique aspects of the game is the contrasting elements of its world; the gigantic size of the Titans versus the tiny player, the colourful nature versus the gritty machines. From the very earliest talks with Psytec Games, it really felt like that contrast should be represented in the music as well, which is why I opted for a hybrid score — a battle between the orchestra and the synthesizers, in a way.

Sam Jones: Pretty early on, when discussing the overall game vision and narrative with the team, I found myself drawn to the world’s blend of technology and nature, and wanted to create what I ended up terming a “Bioelectrical Soundscape.” To support this, I added a lot of organic sound design to the more traditional sci-fi elements. I wanted the machines to “breathe,” and it definitely helped give the game’s sound a distinct signature that matches the visual aesthetic.

While Titan Isles shares a lot of the DNA of Windlands, it’s also more frantic and kinetic — and I also wanted the sound design to reflect that. I wanted to lean towards a slightly more angular, harsh soundscape that feeds into the chaos — while still avoiding being overly “moody” or dark.

DK: This is by far my most electronic score to date and, listening back, I can definitely hear the influence of composer Chris Christodoulou and the band M83, two artists that I listened to a lot over the last couple years and who majorly inspired the way I designed and programmed the synths in this score. My biggest orchestral influence when it comes to epic action/adventure, I think, will always be composer John Powell.

SJ: I'm a huge fan of the way games like Horizon: Forbidden West and Returnal made their environments, equipment and monsters feel "alive" in multiple senses. Films like Annihilation and Edge of Tomorrow were also a big influence. From a VR perspective, it's impossible not to acknowledge how much of an impact Half Life: Alyx and Asgard's Wrath II had on my approach to some of this game, even when I made entirely different decisions to my sound design approach. One of my favourite things about working in the virtual reality space is that there's still a lot of room for expression and experimentation with how you create sound.

DK: I loved the challenge of composing in such a huge variety of styles and moods; from pure orchestral to electronic and a mix of both, upbeat disco, race tracks, threatening boss fights, elevator music, ambient soundscapes… It just never got old!

I was also incredibly lucky to work alongside Sam, who took such great care of the score with his fantastic implementation and was an invaluable teammate and friend over the last couple of years.

SJ: I hugely enjoyed the challenge of trying to create cinematic, player-driven moments through Audio within a space that's both randomized/run-based, and grounded in virtual reality. When you're wearing a headset, a more limited field of view and slower overall head movement result in the player getting less visual information fed to you than, say, when playing a more traditional first-person shooter — so the audio design has to help compensate for that as its top priority. I tried to make sure that each enemy had its own distinct signature and "pattern" that the player could lean on and help to identify, even if they were outside of their vision at the time. Similarly, you want to know where the projectiles are headed, if your co-op partners need a helping hand... All of this has to be accounted for and prioritized, and it was a really interesting challenge to make work. I feel as though I could've kept iterating on this for another year!

Otherwise, by far my favourite thing about working on Titan Isles was working with Danai on molding her wonderful compositions into these action-driven, dynamic music systems that we built especially for this game. I'm very proud of how the music turned out, and I hope others enjoy it as much as I do!

DK: I would likely answer something different if asked another day, but right now I'll go with the track "We Used To Live Here."

SJ: I think some of our boss fights have ended up super chaotic and exciting, and we've done our utmost to make them sound fantastic for the Meta Quest headset. There are some fights later in the game that match you up against some very intimidating foes and force you to meet them head-on, but I don't want to spoil anything!

JH: We're a very small company and it’s been an amazing journey getting this game to market. I really hope you can enjoy it. I feel very strongly that I'm proud of it. I'm proud of the team and the effort we’ve put in. I can't wait for people to play it and give feedback. It's an exciting time for us, and hopefully enough people buy it that we can carry on making awesome action adventures. That’s really what we want to do. We still love making games and we still love VR.

You can fire up your Exo Suit and take the fight to the Titans alone or with friends today in Titan Isles. It’s available on the Meta Horizon Store right now for $29.99 USD.