Guardian of Realms came in early access on September 17th, 2024. But we've actually gotten a new update last week with a lot of new additions that we'll be talking about today. The game is available on Meta Quest 3 and 3S which are perfect for the mixed reality experience. The developers are Sinn Studio who are well known for their game Swordsman VR and are also currently working on an online PvP fighting game. Alright lets dig into the game.

Gameplay / Survival

Today we'll mostly be digging into 3 modes that the game has to offer among other things. The main one is a mode called survival. What you need to do first is place a crystal that you need to defend. You can place it wherever you feel like it's best for you. You are then tasked to heal the crystal to its fullest. As soon as it's fully healed, the game starts and waves of enemies will start spawning.

You'll get regular human enemies, they can be from just having a sword up also having a shield and a bunch of armor pieces, which makes it harder to hit. They take about 3 hits before they are completely down.

You also get those flying balls from hell that can either spit out a green gew at you or your crystal or go ahead and take a bite out of it when they're close.

You lose when either your crystal is completely drained, or you run out of health. What's nice is that while there's no enemy, you can put both your hands on the crystal and regenerated it a little so you can last longer, and your health does regenerate slowly automatically.

Sandbox

Sandbox is a mode where you can just do whatever you want in the game. It's great if you want to use your imagination and play around with things. You get some nice options in there.

You get to select how many enemies you want to fight with up to 2 human and 5 flying enemies. It gets pretty crazy when you just have a bunch of these balls flying around your head. They feel like flies that you just want to swat with your hand.

And that's a nice thing that you can do here. You have an option called "Doomfist". And the higher you slide that bar, the more damage you will do for punching and swatting enemies. So if you feel like brawling them. There's that option.

You can also set the difficulty of the enemies and make them spawn in waves instead of continuously. I didn't touch those options much. I did touch the Invincible Player option though. It's great if you don't want to be disturbed and just play around.

I kept the best 2 options for last guys. You can enable an ability called "Chronokinesis". When this is enabled and you press the trigger, you go in a slowmotion mode and it's pretty cool for certain moments of the game. I could see some people doing some pretty cool stuff with it.

Last option is the gravity. Basically you can set the gravity to be none, and all enemies that dies will just fly around in the air as you continue your journey.

Mods

The last big thing that was added recently are the mods. Here you can browse in this section and modify some stuff in the game that was created by the community. For the moment, it looks like there are 3 things that you can mod: Your sword, your shield and the environment outside of your room. For example, it was pretty trippy fighting in a minecraft-like environment with captain america's shield and a sweet katana. But I have to say what I enjoyed the most was when I had a baseball bat, went into sandbox mode with zero gravity and only flying enemies, and I was trying to do homeruns with them haha.

But yeah what's also cool is that you don't need a PC to install these mods. It's all included in the standalone headset and super easy to install and activate with the press of a button.

Last Thoughts

So guys this is what you get from Guardian of Realms! First, I want to say that I find it pretty cool how the game adapts the whichever environment you're in. It'll add doors and windows where it's best suited, and I think that you can get a better experience with the more that you have. I set my outside up in a way that all guardians would come out of my baby barn as you can see it here and it was just silly and fun.

I've also learned that the game has long term support. So as time goes, we'll be seeing some better features out of it. Make sure to join their discord and give you're feedback if you'd like to help shape the game.

Now, I do like my games when there's progression in it. Just know that this one doesn't have any campaign or story. It's mostly just a sandbox, or try to achieve your own personal best score in the survival section. But something to also keep in mind is that the game is only $14.99 Canadian. I think that it's a good entry for anyone who wants to try a mixed reality experience with the new Meta Quest 3S, but there won't be a lot to keep you going for hours. So hopefully the developers can add some kind of progression system in the long run. That's my biggest want.