The Grand Canyon VR Experience

Not a bad VR experience. It may be on the shorter side, but the environments are highly detailed and very animated. My only real issue is that it should have just been called "Canyon VR" as it seems very small in scale in comparison to the real Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon is a fun and inexpensive VR experience that will allow you to really showcase your VR set up to all your friends, relatives and whoever else happens to drop by and can spare 10 minutes trying out VR for the first time. This is not a game, it is an experience and, therefore, has no replay value except after updates as more "Experiences" are built into the simulation. With an HTC Vive, the immersion is quite good. You can almost feel the sun beating down on you as you make your way down river. With 3rd gen VR rigs including the Valve Index, HTC Vive Pro 2 or Meta Pro, the realism goes up several notches.
I have found Grand Canyon to be the perfect introduction VR title to use with those who can be, let's say, a bit put off by the experience VR offers, which can be disorienting to some. Not so with Grand Canyon, even my most VR skitish female friend loved Grand Canyon and has broadened her horizons with Google Earth, which when she first tried it, caused her to sceam in terror and tear off the headset! roflmao
Final word: Face it, we all love showing off our stuff and for a measly $2.99, you can own the ultimate initiate experience to gently ease neophytes into the brave new world of VR. Buy it! (No - I don't work for the Devs - lol)

Don't get this if you're on an Index. The controls are broken and the application crashes to desktop 2 mins after starting.
Doesn't work.

Although this is not a game, I still really enjoyed it.
I just put on some calm music, put the boat on a slow pace and relaxed.
This helped me cheer me up after feeling down and I am pretty sure I will cheer my up sometime again.

No, it is not very interactive and I wish it had the possibility to use paddles to add some more interaction.
Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the view and the water sound. The breeze I felt that came in through my window when I went through the waterfall made it really feel nice and magical, like I was really there. I haven't been in the Grand Canyon myself in real life, so I can't tell if it is accurate or not.

The possibility to go out the boat on certain places and just enjoy the view is also something I like. It gives another perspective and feeling.

It is not a long experience, although it is possible to experience this in day mode and night mode which give it an entire different feel.
For the €2,99 I payed, I can't complain and I would probably use this for someone to eighter cheer them up or for someone who hasen't VR at all to show them what it can do.

Thanks alot!

I enjoyed this game. The ride was peaceful and you can pick the speed at which the boat goes. As I get travel sick easily in VR it was nice to have that slow speed setting. The only issues I had was I could not pick up the fish food to feed the fish, and I also had a feeling that the cliffs looked like all the old cartoons I ever saw of the grand canyon and would not have been suprised if willie coyote ran past.

Having been to the bottom of the canyon (Bright Angel Campground / Phantom Ranch area)..... this doesn't look anything like the grand canyon to me. Maybe there's a side creek/canyon somewhere that looks kind of like this? The rocks, the vegetation, the sense of scale & awe are nothing at all like the GC. Maybe some sandstone canyon elsewhere in the southwest. What you can see pales compared to even the inner gorge of the real GC.

I'd have been more positive if this weren't marketed as a grand canyon experience, but that would only upgrade it from "annoyed I spent $5 on it" to "meh". I realize it's an interactive experience, not a game, but I was hoping for something that transported me to another place and made me feel immersed in it. Some other, better done VR experiences have done that.... this really didn't.

A very enjoyable VR experience, but definitely not a game, but I am perfectly happy with that. I just wish steam offered a VR Experiences category, that way those people that only want games would stop being disappointed.
Firstly, lets address a few of the complains people seem to have firstly price, play time: I have now had 2 full play throughs sessions of this game trying both day and night modes taking my time and stopping from time to time to soak up the experience and I have clocked up 1.5 Hours of play time for £6.99 so from my point of view the price seems fair as its about the same price as downloading a movie. But I also except if you rush round and only play this ones or miss the night or day modes and just play one time off day going at full boat speed you can finish this much quicker, but I think you would be missing the point.
Secondly, I would say the graphics are quite good for a VR game, but live all games and experiences the resolution is limited by the current generation of high end graphics cards and VR headsets.
The only thing I do feel a Grand Canyon VR experience could do with is a second view from above to give a better feeling of scale.

I have played this "Game/App" through multiple revisions and am extremely impressed with how it has evolved and improved. Both the Day and Night experiences in the Kayak are excellent and each quite different. The range of living creatures now experienced is quite large. I have seen a Deer, a Hare (Jackrabbit), two large Lizards (Gila Monsters?), many different Birds, many Bats in the tunnel to the Waterfall, many Fish and many Frogs. Also there are Fireflies, Butterflies and other assortd Insects. I hear Coyotes at night; wish I could see them! The Fish can be fed with pellets from the Can on the floor.

In addition, the Rendering of the Rocks is superb, especially close up with Flashlight illumination, and the clear Water with ripples is impressive. Little touches such as noise and vibration when the Kayak rides over rocks or branches in the water adds greatly to the realism. Flowers, plants, trees are all impressive, especially when they sway realistically in the wind.

This work is exactly why I enjoy VR and it is impressive how the product has evolved. I would like to draw attention to a few, albiet minor, flaws or possible improvements that are noted to help the Developers:

1. At night the Moon changes from a half Disc to a quarter Crescent to a very thin Crescent, all in a single run. This cannot be in the real world; this evolution follows a 28 day cycle and should be fixed during the experience. It would be clever if it were to be Full or different Crescents on successive trips but this might be a hardship for the rendering of the illumination of the rocks.

2. I fed a Fish and it then swam right through the Kayak as if it were full of water and not an obstruction.

3. I wish the Frogs would swim a bit longer and not just blink out of existance.

4. I can find the Gila Monsters at night but wish that there were Eyes reflecting the Light, not necessarily with a visible Animal.

5. The Flashlight is very good but there is a somewhat unrealistic distance cut-off of the illumination. This conflicts with the real life experience. Also it would be nice if, when selected ON, it were to stay ON without holding the Trigger, perhaps toggle ON/OFF with successive Trigger pulls. Also I found a mode where it is a Head-Mounted light but this (I think) requires the PC Keyboard Control Key to be pressed. The Motor's Speed Control does not require to be held; if released it stays at the chosen setting; the Flashlight should do the same.

6. I have commented before that the Waterfall, although very good, does not interact with the Lake water, which would in real life be very turbulent.

This is one of the two Apps (The Blu is the other) that I use to introduce new Viewers to VR and I am hoping that further evolution can be anticipated. Very good work everyone!

At $2.99 this would be a semi-reasonable purchase. For $9.99 I expect a measure of artistry, and that artistry just isnt here. this basically feels less like the great outdoors than it does one of those rides at a cheap amusement park. ohhhh look, theres some sort of styrofoam cactus. huh, theres an animatronic lizard. oh there is a bird projected on the ceiling (which i cant move my head to look at or the game jitters).

pros:

if i put the game on absolute highest quality and dont ever move my head, there is a measure of immersion.

i appreciate the effort to put wild animals in the game

the ambient sounds are lovely


cons:

guys seriously $9.99? its one scene and it lasts less time than it took for me to download it.

gtx 1060 card, when i move my head in the game the jitter is very, very bad. moving my head in TheBlu however has no jitter. perhaps a better card might not have this problem but its not like this has a lot of moving pieces to render.

the trout are a nice touch but the decision to layer a second 'shimmering' image over them only made me honestly think 'oh ok, so the trout are all paired up with mates or something..?' until i realized this was an attempt to emulate water refraction. it doesnt land, that effect.

why are there massive iguanas here? no such animal in the grand canyon. if you want gila monsters, open up blender and alter your iguana assets to make gila monsters. or go ba77s deep and throw in some dinosaurs and krakens. but commit, either way. you shouldnt be phoning it in with vanilla Unity store assets in a $9.99 game.

'artificial intelligence' in the animals? stop. just knock it off. frogs jumping off lily pads when youre X feet away doth not AI make.

the quality of the visuals on the absolute highest level is only slightly better than what i 'experience' in a vintage Road Runner vs Wil-e Coyote cartoon.

and again im sorry if this feels nit picky but a) its really not and b) when youre charging $9.99 for an experience game, you need to come correct.

So I've used this thing for a while. It's not a game, it's an "experience" because that's something you can do in VR... experience things. I really want to give these guys a thumbs up but I can't... Why not? I've never been to the Grand Canyon so I can't say for sure whether or not it's authentic... What I CAN say isn't authentic is that the resolution is crap and it detracts from the experience when you look at the scenery and see this jagged pixellated crap. Apparently there's a tweak you can do that might wind up adding some much needed smoothing to those pixellated edges, but it requires a really beefy card to leave it turned on for everything.

So the aliasing is a big problem for stuff in the distance, but it's also got some problems with walls being way too "flat" with sharp corners up close. Am I going through the Grand Canyon or is this the lego recreation of the Grand Canyon?

Things I liked:

• You get to experience what it might be like to paddle down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
  
• You get a flashlight, paddles, and a way to teleport yourself in cases where moving would take you out of the room scale play area
  
• paddling the little canoe thing doesn't make you sick but still gives that sensation you're moving
  
• if you lean left and right over the seated area you will see the sides of the "canoe" thing dip into the water as it reacts to the shifting weight.
  

• Crappy resolution
  
• Crappy water textures (They're working on it I guess?)
  
• I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to do other than paddle around
  
• There's no map or anything so you're not even sure how far you can go
  
• Nightfall comes pretty quickly so without the flashlight it gets pretty hard to see, and what there is to see isn't that interesting.
  
[*] You can use two paddles (each controller being a paddle) but there really isn't a good way to make it feel like you're actually rowing. I wound up most of the time using one controller as a paddle and the other as a flashlight/teleport thing most of the time.

Short Review:
The boat locomotion is terrably slow and unrealistic. Giant waste of time. The graphics are about what you'd expect from a VR game, and the gameplay is nothing special.

Long Review:
This game made me look up how to refund games on steam. I was only able to play for the first few minutes because I couldn't get anywhere. You can only teleport to certain locations, and then you're forced into a boat that you have to row yourself, which wouldn't be a negative if it was realistic. Here I am making these big broad gestures with my arms and I'm only moving an inch or two per swing. I swear it would have taken me a half an hour just to get to the other side of the lake. That doesn't even count the fact that I have no idea where to go. Is the starting area the only area in the game? I don't know, and I wasn't about to spend half an hour rowing accross a lake to find out. If the boat had some sort of automation or if you could teleport anywhere (like in other VR games) i probably would have kept this game, but the locomition system makes it unplayable. The graphics and gameplay are nothing special, and they don't make up for the horrible locomotion. Use your money to buy some other VR game...

I was looking forward to trying this out especially after the devs revamped the paddle system, so I picked it up during the Steam Sales. Unfortunately, it's rife with bugs and just feels unpolished. It needs a huge dose of anti-aliasing or just any graphics options. The paddle physics, while cool in concept, don't feel right. They're very slow, even paddling with 2 hands. There is some graphical bug which makes the water almost black at certain angles (like looking down), but it changes, which really takes you out of the immersion. I thought the kayak might fare better, but it is entirely on-rails. Why not give the same freedom as with the paddle board? That would be great. But I tried it and needed to re-center, only to find myself now underneath the boat! I really wanted to like this, but it's so buggy and almost unplayable as is. I would refund it, but it was so cheap I'll keep it so hopefully the devs will fix this up. It has potential.

Is this picture perfect? Is this action packed? Is it bug free? No, not at all. The graphics are slightly dated looking, I have gotten stuck while paddling, the paddling mechanic is a little tricky to get right. BUT taking some time and sitting on my floor in the middle of my paddlboard and watching the sun go down behind the cliffs and the stars come out....that was an amazing experience. Recommended for that reason alone.

I really enjoyed the trip. I espescially like the plans & flowers and the animals even if they (the animals) are rarely seen. But just watching a bird high in the sky fly over you makes the enviorment feel so real. the clouds and the lightning are vere well made so that the shift from day to night is really great.

But like already mentioned from other guys the are some cons:

- its quite short, in 15-20 mins you seen everything
- the thin lines from the leaves etc. look blury in vr (at distance)
- the paddle with vive is much to slow and to anoying. it would be very helpfull if with one "strike" you will float like 10 meters so you don't have to paddle all the time

All in all a very nice and relaxing experiance.

This was a fantastic experience. Really shows off what can be done with motion controllers in VR. The light and water effects look great as well as the physics and movement of the kayak and paddle. Not too much to do apart from paddle around the waters close to the canyon, but wow was that immersive and fun. A suggestion to the devs, if we could have the ability to leave the kayak and teleport to the top of the canyon I think it would add another level of awesome, being able to see from a higher vantage point and perspective.

Horrible controlls for the paddle board, on rails and the paddling just takes forever. Lots of the visuals are not great for VR (thin lines on grass and foileage). Might be a lot more fun if you could actually move around freely instead of on rails.

As an early access game, the developers have done an excellent job on the initial visual graphics.

It will be an interesting one to follow as it progresses into a full release, as there are various bugs at the moment that need to be ironed out, but I've played far worse early access games than this for a far higher price.

One thing that I do like (so far) about this game is that the developers appear to be very interactive with the community... I really hope that continues as the game continues to grow!

So, the bugs so far.

The first is with the DK2. Okay, if you're reading this in a few months time you may have the CV1, but the DK2 is almost impossible to run with the required runtime. There IS a way to use the game with the DK2 that works well, but it's a problem that a lot of DK2 users will have.

Secondly, it is very much geared up to be controller based. The keyboard commands don't currently work, which means that unless you have motion controllers there's very little to do...

BUT, don't let that put you off. They do seem like a great team and I'm really expecting these little issues to be solved as the game progresses.

For the price, it's worth it. Get a bargain while you can...

It is decently well made, but I can't say it was immersive or enjoyable. If I was to introduce somebody to the rift, this isn't one of the selections I'd pick to show.

Mostly you are a floating body on a kayak ride in a loop. Not much to do, the scenery is OK.. but that is about it. A lot gets lost as the try to use high details which don't translate well and make the experience feel dated in graphics.

Suspect this is just an early prototype before they make it a kayak fishing game. Then I could see it being pretty good with the HTC. (holding paddles, fishing rod, etc.)

But as now.. it is a 5/10 sorta meh. Pick it up if you want to support the developers and throw some money early on at the VR world.

Really good experience with oculus rift. Ran smooth as butter on epic settings with my i7 4790k and gtx 980ti and looked really nice to boot!

The water oh man so serene and relaxing. I really wanted to put my hand in the water and at one point i extended my hands outward in an attempt to do so lol.

Totally recommend to anyone who enjoys a vr experience that has to do with nature. Only gripe was that it's too short! But Im hoping they will add more seeing how it's early access. Worth 10 dollars as is imo.

Absolutely incredible. Now, to be fair, on my (pretty good) system I experienced a lot of judder and black smear / right eye vsync issues on my DK2, but I fault the young technology and my own setup, not the devs of this game, for that. This was a very impressive demonstration of the future of VR experiences. I may actually have my parents over and make them strap on my Rift to see this. 10/10.