Pocket Lands offers a promising new sandbox for building digital worlds. Early access is currently available on Quest. Read on for the full review.
People with creative minds always find a way to express their individuality, regardless of the means at their disposal. Pens, paintbrushes and digital tools. Video games like Minecraft have exploded in popularity by allowing you to freely shape the world of voxel art, allowing people to craft futuristic spaceships, vast cities, and medieval towns. The old quote applies: If you build it, they will come. Pocket Lands aims to provide a world-building sandbox and give inspired people new ways to channel their imaginations. Even if the content in Early Access leaves a lot to be desired, it points to a promising future.
There are pre-built landscapes from which you can start working.
A full-fledged playground for designing complex architectural ideas isn’t a new concept, especially as we’ve seen it before with the likes of cyubeVR and RealmCraft, but Pocket Lands stands out with some small but distinctive features. The first is a flexible approach to working with a blank canvas. The diorama can be viewed from three different perspectives. One is a resizable island in mixed reality, wrapped around you as the same fragment of the world, and the other is a vast, fully immersive mode where everything is rendered into a voxel world, including the day/night cycle. With snappy hand tracking and controllers, you’ll quickly see how expansive your imaginative kingdom is.
The second is the fact that you can drop into your world at any time and walk around next to your creations from a god mode perspective. This feeling is a great awe-inspiring addition, especially when focused on more elaborate structures. This is helped by the ability to jump and, most importantly, the ability to fly around the map and see the environment from different areas. This might make you want to add new towers to your castle, masts to your airship, or adjacent skyscrapers to your skyline.
The day/night cycle is quite amazing when building skyscrapers using lamps.
Finally, no creative sandbox is complete without accessible construction tools. Onboarding to pick up and play is super easy, with a 17-slide tutorial that concisely explains how everything in Pocket Lands works. Grabbing a rectangle from two opposing sides can produce figures as long, wide, or short as desired. A convenient menu with over 25 types of full block and half block types accommodates all types of buildings. Concrete, sand, wood, and lampshades are just some of the foundations for building unique pieces. From medieval Oblivion-esque melodies to soothing piano sounds, calming music adds a relaxing vibe to the creation process.
However, hand tracking feels a bit hit-or-miss so far. Tapping your thumb on your hand lets you “scroll” through the map, just like you would on a smartphone, and there’s a nifty feature where the map turns yellow to indicate your selection. Close your fist to move around the map, pinch to move the edges of your mixed reality diorama, or grab blocks to add new ones. But Pocket Lands doesn’t always register when I stop making fist gestures, and it just ends up moving me to a completely different side of the map. Even worse, the diorama itself may move to another area of the room.
Mountainborn Studios is aware of these false positives, but the only solution currently is to be gentle with movement so it can register properly to avoid such annoyances. A small comical remedy to these problems is the addition of an arm-waving movement motion. This isn’t much of an addition, but it’s definitely fun to do that basic behavior while exploring. For the avoidance of doubt, artificial stick-based locomotion is also possible.
An unexpected but welcome addition.
Now I want to do more with Pocketland. Yes, this is a great early access release with all the aforementioned details. However, I would like to see more items, block types, and creatures added. Thankfully, the latter is in development along with new biomes and multiplayer. This is a great playground for creative minds hoping to fill the void after Microsoft abandoned VR support for Minecraft. We hope this strong foundation will build a lasting legacy.
Pocket Lands is currently released in early access for the Meta Quest platform.
