Rival Stars Horse Racing: VR Edition is the latest installment of the gaming franchise that’s now available on Quest and Steam.
The VR edition features the same core features most horse game fans look for: raising horses, bonding with them through grooming and feeding them treats, and participating in races for money. I grew up with these kinds of games as a kid, so I’m thrilled to finally see a VR version available for people to enjoy.
Rival Stars opens with succinct exposition to get the ball rolling. A fade-in shows your new country home stretched out before you in warm reddish hues. In a visual novel-style text field, a shadowy silhouette named ‘Mean Boss’ bids you farewell from your previous job. You’ve quit your regular 9 to 5 to pursue horse racing exclusively.
The game then provides a short tutorial on how to get around and interact with things. Long-pressing the Y button on my Quest controller brought up the game’s main menu. Otherwise, pressing that same button while near a horse will bring up its individual menu and list the animal’s stats.
Rival Stars Horse Racing: VR Edition doesn’t have much in terms of comfort adjustments for motion sickness. In the settings menu, options include teleportation or artificial stick-based locomotion to get around.
Only snap camera turning is supported with select increments to choose from. There is no vignette or tunnel vision option. Like other racing games, we don’t recommend playing this if you don’t like intense movement experiences.
Trenton is the hilarious assistant who guides you through Rival Stars. He’s written as a sweetly inoffensive character that’s both a helpful guide and someone who snarks at you in a clueless way when you lose. Every time I lost a race, Trenton was right there to remind me of an accounting job I could go apply for instead. What cruelty!
Your first horse, Clumsy Charm, waits in the stable with a few interactive brushes and choices for food. On one side are three brush types you can pick up and use to groom the horse. There’s also a trowel at the front of the pen that contains four types of food: an apple, a carrot, and two types of horse treats.
The goal of horse rearing is to bond with each one for better racing stats. To achieve that, you also have to learn what their preferences are. Clumsy Charm ended up loving sugar cubes and having a body brush run over her back. The mare stomped her feet, made happy horse faces, and joyfully whinnied whenever I pet or feed her correctly.
Visually, Rival Stars is very pared-down for a PC title. While the game is likely optimized to work on every platform it’s intended for, the Steam version of this could benefit from a little more decoration. Horse hair looks over-sharpened and pixelated and the farm lawn is exclusively a flat plane. The atmosphere I read from the game’s design doesn’t convince me its sparse grass is intended as a cartoonish choice.
PC Specs And Headset Used
My desktop computer uses an Intel Core i7 processor, an RTX 4060 graphics card, and 32GB RAM. I evaluated this game using a Quest 3 headset connected to my PC via Virtual Desktop. You can find Rival Stars Horse Racing: VR Edition’s recommended settings for PC on Steam.
I’m also encountering problems with collision in petting the horse and getting too close to trees or walls. When petting the horse, my hands don’t quite land where I think they will and seem to float over the horse instead. Occasionally, when I approach a tree or wall, my hands will suddenly fly up and flail around in the game on their own.
Racing is also frustrating. Steering is handled by gripping the reins of the horse and then lifting your left or right arm. You move your hands up and down to charge up a sprint, and then motion towards yourself quickly to enact that sprint. Sometimes the sprint and charge won’t kick in despite doing the motions, which causes issues because your race strategy requires timing when to sprint and when to charge.
That’s all happening while defending your position on the track from other jockeys who are eager to jostle by you. This results in an arm workout that’s probably past what the developers intended for this racing game. If you’re a parent, and you buy this for your child, at least your kid will want a nap by the time they’re done playing this. I just wasn’t anticipating an extra arm workout day for myself.
Post-launch features are planned for Rival Stars Horse Racing: VR Edition, so this journey isn’t quite finished yet despite entering full release. Rival Stars provides a public roadmap that shows an upcoming horse market and trophy room, while PikPok has noted some known issues that are currently being investigated.
Despite playing this furiously since getting access, I couldn’t make as much progress as I expected in racing because of the game’s steering issues. I still like Rival Stars and I hope to see some improvements happen. I’m enjoying the strategic elements of racing and would definitely play this again should this get fixed.
Rival Stars Horse Racing: VR Edition Review – Final Verdict
Rival Stars Horse Racing: VR Edition is a flawed game that you can still have some fun with. Petting and feeding the horses proves enjoyable and there’s good strategy here, but the racing itself is let down by frustrating steering issues. It’s a difficult recommendation in its current state, so here’s hoping a few good updates can still make this title a winner.
UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.
