Giant fighting robots typically aren’t spry in fiction or in real life (I’ve seen documentaries about Area 51 on the History Channel), but only the fastest mech suits are welcome in Konami’s latest PC port. Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner – Mars is an updated version of the 2003 PlayStation 3 classic, and it is heading to Steam this spring.
Zone of the Enders is a sci-fi fighter where players control a massive robot from behind. It was unique at the time, and we haven’t seen a lot of games like it since — although Nintendo’s Arms has some similar elements.
This isn’t just a straight port of the mech battler from developers Hideo Kojima and Shuyo Murata. Konami is updating it with support for ultra-high 4K resolutions. This means you can get crisp energy-sword swipes and rocket bursts at a high framerate. But the publisher is also adding support for virtual reality for players who want to jump into the cockpit of an Orbital Frame, as Zone of the Enders refers to its mechs.
Konami promises that the whole game is playable in VR, and the company is showing this feature off at the Tokyo Game Show in Japan this week. When The 2nd Runner – Mars launches in the spring, most PC VR headsets should work through Valve’s open SteamVR service. That means you can pretend to control a giant robot if you have the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or one of the other headsets.
