I had the pleasure of reviewing header goal by Codemodeon, I want to thank Yagiz Hatay for his time and Nicklas Rassmussen from VR today Magazine.
What is Header Goal VR?
Header Goal VR is a sports game experience created by Codemodeon, an award-winning, Istanbul-based creative technology company specializing in Game development, Virtual reality, Installation-based experiences and Human-computer interaction. Header Goal VR has won VR Indie Pitch in Pocket Gamer's PG Connects Helsinki 2016 and it was selected for Indie Prize Showcase 2017 in Berlin.
In Header Goal VR you play the role of the soccer player Axel Rix, who due to losing his last games became pretty unpopular and is now seeking to redeem himself. The game is simple and yet complicated, you have to hit balls by heading and trying to hit various objects but in order to be successful, you need to have a plan.
I was really looking forward to reviewing Header Goal for 30 days and see if I could use this game experience as a fun workout and burn some calories.
The results
Calories burn every 10 min: 45
Bpm: 109
Overall I would consider Header Goal more of a warm-up experience than a workout, yes you burn calories and it gets your body moving but I found that my biggest issue with this game is that if you play for too long it takes a toll on your neck. This is not the first game where I've found this problem and I really hope that we can start addressing it as soon as possible.
Adding squats in between soccer balls was the perfect addition to tone and get some core exercise in.
I had the chance to interview Yağız Hatay from Codemodeon and here's what he had to say:
Mindfully Augmented (MA): What's the mission behind creating Header Goal?
Codemodeon: "HGVR aims to offer both physically and mentally fun experiences using the immersive, fresh features of VR with effortlessly easy to grasp controls, beautiful visuals, and challenging levels. We wanted to take the act of heading a ball, wrap it with an interesting and fun story while providing very natural and realistic interaction in VR".
MA: What's your favorite part of Header goal?
Codemodeon:"It’s hard to find a visible story in these type of games. The story behind Header Goal and the protagonist Axel Rix are our favorite things about the game".
MA: What was your biggest challenge?
Codemodeon:"Physics was the most challenging part. After a really long time of research and development, we achieved quite natural and accurate interaction between the player and virtual balls".
MA: What's next for Header Goal and Codemodeon?
Codemodeon: "Header Goal is currently in its Early-Access phase. Now we are developing a whole new episode containing 10 different chapters. The theme of the new episode is completely different than the first one. It’s full of zombies and very interesting type of balls. We have two DLCs in our plan but first, we need to see the reactions. Codemodeon will continue its adventure on developing VR games. Header Goal is our first attempt to the market. We are building know-hows and this experience will be very helpful for the next projects".