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Tower Tag

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Tower Tag
Information
VR/AR Virtual Reality
Developer VR Nerds (VR-Nerds GmbH); Steinfatt GmbH on the current Steam listing
Publisher VR Nerds; Steinfatt GmbH on the current Steam listing
Platform SteamVR, Viveport, Meta Quest
Device Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Rift S, Windows Mixed Reality headsets, Meta Quest 2
Operating System Windows
Type Game
Genre Shooter, Action, Sports
Input Device Tracked motion controllers
Play Area Standing, Room-scale
Game Mode Multiplayer, Single-player
Release Date VR arcades: 2018; Steam Early Access: May 28, 2020; Quest (App Lab and SideQuest): August 2022; Steam full release: March 13, 2026
Price US$9.99 (Steam, October 2026); free on App Lab and SideQuest at the 2022 Quest launch
App Store Steam, Viveport, App Lab, SideQuest
See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Tower Tag is a competitive virtual reality team shooter developed by VR Nerds, a studio in Hamburg, Germany. Players fight in an arena of towers with laser guns and move between towers with a grappling line instead of teleportation or stick movement, a mechanic described on this wiki as Shoot'n'Pull.[1][2] The game was built first for VR arcades, where each player stands in a small tracked area around a physical pillar that also exists in the virtual world.[1][3]

Tower Tag premiered at CeBIT in March 2017 and was licensed to arcades and theme parks, including Tokyo Joypolis in Japan, before a home version entered Early Access on Steam and Viveport on 28 May 2020.[1][4][5] It won Best Game Design at the 2019 Deutscher Computerspielpreis (German Computer Game Awards).[6] The Steam version left Early Access on 13 March 2026.[7]

Reviewed 11 October 2026. Developer and publisher, CeBIT 2017 premiere, Tokyo Joypolis launch and closure, SpringboardVR, SPREE and Tower Tag Pro arcade versions, 2019 Deutscher Computerspielpreis award, Steam Early Access, update and full release dates, Quest release, modes, esports events, current Steam price, listing and Metacritic status, and every cited source. About review dates.

Gameplay

Tower Tag is a first-person player-versus-player shooter. Teams fight across an arena of towers, try to eliminate the other team and capture towers.[5][3] To move, the player aims the gun at the top of a tower, fires and then pulls themselves across with a yanking motion; heise online described the movement as pulling oneself from pillar to pillar as if with a lasso.[1] Between jumps, the player moves physically within a small area around the current tower and can use the tower as cover.[3][7] The current Steam description says capturing towers gives cover and opens new movement routes, and that the game supports a "Small Room Scale" mode for smaller play spaces.[7]

The same gun is used to move and to shoot, and a 2019 press release for the arcade version said the entire game is based on a single button, and that features such as active reloading and a large weapon selection were left out to keep it simple.[8] In the Tokyo Joypolis version, each player had a life gauge, the handgun fired continuously until its gauge ran out, towers had to be charged to a team's color before that team could use them, and eliminated players could call out enemy positions to teammates over voice chat.[4] The developers present the tower-to-tower movement as a way to avoid virtual reality sickness; the Steam listing advertises it under the heading "Adrenaline Without the Nausea".[7][2]

Modes

The 2017 CeBIT build had a single mode for two or four players (1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2), won by capturing all pillars or by having the most kills when time ran out.[1] The Steam version has three modes:[7]

Mode Description (Steam listing)
Deathmatch Free-for-all or team against team
Elimination "Survival of the fittest"
Goal Tower Area control and objective capture

Matches on Steam range from 1v1 to 4v4. The game has Quick Match and Custom Match options, adaptive AI bots for practice and for filling matches, ranked play with global leaderboards, and support for BHaptics vests.[7]

Development

VR Nerds is based in Hamburg. Phillip Steinfatt, the studio's co-founder and CEO, is a former paintball player who won the Paintball World Games in 2009, according to VR Fitness Insider.[5] Steinfatt and Dr. Alexander Kutter of VR Nerds discussed the game on the ResearchVR podcast in April 2017, where it was presented as an out-of-home arcade game with a custom gun with an improved rumble system and added weight, and with a physical tower in the middle of each player's tracking space that is synchronized with the virtual one.[9] At CeBIT 2017, the gun was a self-built "laser" pistol tracked with an HTC Vive controller and fitted with force-feedback recoil. heise online reported that the Plexiglas pillar in the real play area appeared at the same position in VR, and noted that the game could also run on an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift without the pillar and special controller. The developers then planned to offer the game only to VR arcades.[1]

In 2019, VR Legion reported that the studio had been based since 2018 in a storage building in Hamburg's Speicherstadt, where its "VRHQ" had offices on the upper floors and a ground floor, still under construction at the time, planned as a public lounge with a bar, a VR arcade and a small cinema. During the visit, VR Legion played Tower Tag there on an HTC Vive Pro with a weighted gun controller, a haptic vest that signaled hits, and a tracked central pillar; the writer estimated each player's field at 1.5 to 2 square meters.[3]

The home version kept the tower movement. For its Steam release, VR Nerds published free 3D-printable files for a gun mount that the player's VR controller clips onto.[5] Project manager Christoph Spinger told Mogura VR that moving the game from high-end PC arcade setups to the Quest required redeveloping and rethinking many elements.[10]

Release

Arcades and location-based venues

VR Fitness Insider reported that Tower Tag was released in 2018 as an arcade exclusive and that VR Nerds had rolled it out to more than 1,300 VR arcades in 40 countries, with over 1,000,000 players.[5] On 9 February 2018, the game opened at Tokyo Joypolis in Odaiba as a 2v2 attraction with four play rooms, 3 by 3 meter areas per player and five-minute sets, priced at 800 yen per play.[4][11] Famitsu reported, citing Sega Joypolis, that the game would be rolled out nationwide as a "VR eSports" title, with DARTSLIVE cooperating on the competitive side.[11] Tokyo Joypolis lists the attraction, by then priced at 1,000 yen per person, as permanently closed on 13 January 2025.[12]

Until late 2019, only select venues could license the game, on an annual basis directly from the studio. On 22 October 2019, SpringboardVR, a content distribution platform for location-based VR, announced that it would offer the game to location-based entertainment venues with monthly and annual licenses; the release's headline named North America and Europe. The same release announced a Virtual Athletics League tournament starting on 2 November 2019 with 3v3 play.[8] SpringboardVR's marketplace lists the arcade version as "Room Scale / Standing" and notes that a separate "Tower Tag Pro" is not available through it.[13] VR World in Singapore describes Tower Tag Pro as a mixed reality version for up to eight players in two teams, in which players move around a physical tower platform and use it as cover.[14]

In February 2021, SPREE Interactive announced an exclusive licensing partnership to distribute an all-in-one, free-roam version of Tower Tag in its SPREE Arena, for up to eight players against each other or against AI bots.[15]

Home versions

Platform Release date Notes
Steam (PC VR) 28 May 2020 (Early Access) US$19.99 at launch; supported Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Rift S and Windows Mixed Reality[2][5]
Viveport 28 May 2020 (Early Access) Released alongside the Steam version[5]
App Lab and SideQuest (Meta Quest) August 2022 Free[10]
Steam (full release) 13 March 2026 US$9.99 as of October 2026[7][16]

During Early Access, the developers released regular updates. Version 0.2.6, "The Competition Update" (August 2020), added a global leaderboard based on the Elo algorithm and co-op play against bots.[17] Version 0.2.7 (18 September 2020) added Super Easy and Super Hard bot levels, made bots adjust their level during a match, and opened the existing maps to more modes.[18] In late September 2020 the team said it was working on a port for the Oculus Quest.[19] The Quest version arrived in August 2022 with up to four players per team, 10 maps and the three modes Team Deathmatch, Elimination and Goal Tower.[10]

After a period without announcements, the developers posted a "Minor Fixes Update" in February 2026 that prepared the code and servers for a larger update.[20] On 3 March 2026 they announced that the home edition would leave Early Access on 13 March 2026 with new maps, a new world, a killfeed and auto-skilled bots.[16] The launch post called the release a relaunch aimed at the problem of empty lobbies, added a new soundtrack, and described Steam as "phase one" of bringing the game to all major VR platforms, with cross-platform play planned.[21] The current Steam listing names Steinfatt GmbH as developer and publisher, says the game comes "From over 200 VR arcades worldwide", and lists SteamVR with standing or room-scale play on Windows 10.[7]

Esports

VR Nerds promoted Tower Tag as a VR esports game from its arcade period. The 2019 SpringboardVR release quoted Steinfatt as saying the team believed the game "has what it takes to become the new standard of VR eSports", and stated that recent Asian tournaments had budgets of more than one million euros and that the last tournament had over 1.2 million live stream viewers.[8] VR Fitness Insider reported that the game was featured at the 11th China Animation Expo's "5G+VR Esports" exhibition in 2019, where sixteen teams competed for a prize pool of about US$14,000.[5]

After the home release, the studio ran online tournaments. The Summer Cup 2020 offered US$2,700 in cash and prizes sponsored by VR-Nerds, LIV and bHaptics, with finals streamed on 5 July 2020.[22][23] For Gamescom 2020 the game was free to play on Steam for a weekend, with two tournaments (Europe and North America) whose prize pools totaled US$2,000.[24][17]

Reception

Tower Tag won the Best Game Design category of the 2019 Deutscher Computerspielpreis and was also nominated for Best Innovation and Technology.[6] Reviewing the CeBIT 2017 demo, Jan-Keno Janssen of heise online called the Plexiglas pillar the "große Star" (big star) of the game and wrote that he had previously seen mixed reality integration of comparable quality only at The Void.[1]

As of October 2026, Metacritic lists no critic score for the game, and Steam user reviews are summarized as "Very Positive".[25][7]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Jan-Keno Janssen (2017-03-21). "Schöner ballern mit Mixed Reality: Tower Tag macht einen Heidenspaß". heise online. https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Schoener-ballern-mit-Mixed-Reality-Tower-Tag-macht-einen-Heidenspass-3660146.html. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Harry Baker (2020-06-20). "PVP VR Shooter Tower Tag Available In Early Access For PC VR". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/pvp-vr-shooter-tower-tag/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Dennis Ziesecke (2019-03-04). "Besuch im VRHQ der VR-Nerds in Hamburg - Tower Tag ausprobiert (Update: Nominierung für den Computerspielepreis)". VR Legion. https://vr-legion.de/hintergruende/besuch-im-vrhq-der-vr-nerds-in-hamburg-tower-tag-ausprobiert/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Shigeru Iwaizumi (2018-02-07). "ヒト対ヒトのVR eスポーツ「TOWER TAG」が東京ジョイポリスに登場". GAME Watch. Impress. https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1105405.html. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 Sonya Haskins (2020-05-28). "Stay Home. Tower Tag is Coming to You!". VR Fitness Insider. https://www.vrfitnessinsider.com/stay-home-tower-tag-is-coming-to-you/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Tower Tag". Deutscher Computerspielpreis. https://deutscher-computerspielpreis.de/chronik/tower-tag/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 "Tower Tag on Steam". Steam. Valve. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1187330/Tower_Tag/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 "VR eSport Tower Tag Coming to North America and Europe". PRWeb. SpringboardVR. 2019-10-22. https://www.prweb.com/releases/vr-esport-tower-tag-coming-to-north-america-and-europe-819973163.html. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  9. ↑ ResearchVR (2017-04-15). "When E-Sports Become V-Sports - ResearchVR Podcast 40". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/when-e-sports-becomes-v-sports-researchvr-podcast-40/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 井文 (2022-08-05). "【Meta Quest 2】ワイヤーで高速移動しながら敵を撃つVRゲーム「Tower Tag」が配信開始". Mogura VR. https://www.moguravr.com/?p=190070. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Mamiya Tobe (2018-02-07). "狙撃！ クリアリング！ 裏取り！VRサバゲー『TOWER TAG』は、ゲーマーをヒーローにしてくれる". Famitsu. https://www.famitsu.com/news/201802/07151333.html. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  12. ↑ "TOWER-TAG VR e SPORTS (2nd Floor)". Tokyo Joypolis. https://tokyo-joypolis.com/language/english/attraction/towertag.html. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  13. ↑ "Tower Tag". SpringboardVR Marketplace. https://springboardvr.com/marketplace/towertag. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  14. ↑ "Tower Tag Pro". VR World. https://vrworld.sg/tower-tag-pro/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  15. ↑ Charlotte Blanco Coates (2021-02-04). "SPREE Interactive announces licensing partnership with VR Nerds". blooloop. https://blooloop.com/play/news/spree-interactive-licensing-partnership-vr-nerds/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 The Tower Tag Team (2026-03-03). "Tower Tag going full release on March 13!". Steam. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1187330/announcements/detail/534375749569743123. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 "The Competition Update (0.2.6)". Steam. 2020-08-19. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1187330/announcements/detail/4399407582984762623. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  18. ↑ "Map Merge Update (0.2.7)". Steam. 2020-09-18. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1187330/announcements/detail/2900837882291570513. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  19. ↑ "No.1 Challenge". Steam. 2020-09-29. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1187330/announcements/detail/2797255723723669457. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  20. ↑ The Tower Tag Team (2026-02-10). "Minor Fixes Update". Steam. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1187330/announcements/detail/502849284009363630. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  21. ↑ The Tower Tag Team (2026-03-13). "Tower Tag: The Relaunch Starts Now". Steam. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1187330/announcements/detail/535503548435137195. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  22. ↑ "Tower Tag Summer Cup 2020". Steam. 2020-06-12. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1187330/announcements/detail/2398677643347119965. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  23. ↑ "Tower Tag Summer Cup Finals". Steam. 2020-07-05. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1187330/announcements/detail/2524779700607874300. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  24. ↑ Harry Baker (2020-08-26). "PvP VR Shooter Tower Tag Is Free This Weekend As Part Of Gamescom 2020". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/tower-tag-free-weekend-gamescom/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  25. ↑ "Tower Tag Reviews". Metacritic. https://www.metacritic.com/game/tower-tag/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
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