Quar: Battle for Gate 18

Quar: Battle for Gate 18 is a turn-based strategic VR experience set in the grimmsical world of Alwyd, where the insectoid Quar species has been locked in a 700-year-long stalemated conflict known as The Long War. Players command forces in a pivotal battle between Alykinder’s Crusade and the Royalist Coftyran Crymuster, utilizing cavalry, armored tractors, and troops armed with weapons ranging from rifles to heavy-automatic shotguns. The game combines tactical depth with a unique setting, focusing on a single, lengthy campaign that plays out like a virtual tabletop wargame.

Quar: Battle for Gate 18: A Forgotten Pioneer of VR Strategy

In the annals of video game history, certain titles are destined not for blockbuster acclaim, but to become cherished cult classics—passion projects that, despite limited commercial reach, exemplify ambition, innovation, and a profound love for the craft. Quar: Battle for Gate 18, developed by Steel Wool Studios and released in the nascent days of consumer VR, is one such game. A turn-based tactical wargame built from the ground up for virtual reality, it stands as a bold, deeply charming, and tragically overlooked experiment that dared to ask: what if a tabletop wargame could truly come to life?

Development History & Context

Studio and Vision
Steel Wool Studios, prior to finding later success with titles in the Five Nights at Freddy’s VR universe, was a smaller developer known for the 2D platformer Flyhunter Origins. Quar: Battle for Gate 18 represented a significant and risky pivot. Published by HTC Corporation, the game was a flagship title designed to showcase the potential of their new Vive headset, one of the first commercially available room-scale VR systems.

The developers’ vision was not merely to port a strategy game to VR, but to fundamentally reimagine the experience of miniature wargaming. They drew direct inspiration from the award-winning tabletop system “This Quar’s War” by Zombiesmith, a niche but beloved miniatures game. The goal was to translate the tactile, physical presence of moving painted miniatures across a diorama-like battlefield into a digital space where players could not just see, but inhabit that diorama.

Technological Constraints and the 2016 VR Landscape
Launching on April 4, 2016, Quar arrived in a VR landscape that was a veritable wild west. The hardware was nascent, expensive, and demanded powerful PCs. The audience was small, and the conventions of VR game design were still being written. Most early VR titles were tech demos or short experiences; Quar was an ambitious, full-fledged campaign-based strategy game.

Built in the Unity engine, the game was designed explicitly for room-scale VR, requiring players to use motion controllers to teleport around the battlefield. This was a time before many now-standard VR control schemes were established. The development team had to invent an interface from scratch, mapping complex tactical commands onto the Vive’s trackpads. This pioneering spirit is central to the game’s identity—it is a product of its time, brimming with the optimism and experimental growing pains of VR’s first dawn.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

A World of “Grimmsical” War
Quar is set on the world of Alwyd, home to the Quar, a race of intelligent, humanoid anteater-like creatures who speak with a distinctive Scottish brogue. The lore is remarkably detailed for a strategy game, painting a picture of a civilization with a 5,000-year history whose only constants are “the changing of the seasons and the threat of war.” For the last 700 years, the Quar have been locked in “The Long War,” a bloody stalemate reminiscent of the trench warfare of World War I.

The player leads the Crusader Army of Alykinder, which believes that the only path to lasting peace is to conquer all rival Quar nations, culminating in the titular Battle for Gate 18 against the Royalist Coftyran Crymuster. This premise—a war to end all wars by making it worse—introduces a subtle, grim irony to the otherwise charming aesthetic.

Humanizing the Conflict
The narrative’s heart lies not in grand cutscenes, but in intimate, fully voiced letters exchanged between a Crusader soldier, Uncle Armitage, and his young nephew back home. This correspondence, accessible in the player’s upgradable headquarters between missions, is a masterstroke of storytelling. The child’s genuine voice acting sells the innocence of the home front, while Armitage’s reflections reveal the personal cost and complex morality of the crusade. It serves to profoundly humanize the alien Quar, making their struggle feel tangible and their losses meaningful. Every unit under your command is given a name, ensuring that when a soldier falls and a flower blooms in their place on the hex grid, the loss carries emotional weight.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Core Loop: A Digital Tabletop
The core gameplay is a faithful adaptation of hex-based, turn-table tactics. Between missions, players return to a fully realized VR headquarters—a living diorama where Quar soldiers go about their business. Here, Victory Points (VP) earned from wins are spent on upgrades: improving the mess hall boosts unit morale, building a hangar enables airstrikes, and enhancing the mechanic’s bay unlocks better armored “tractors.”

Innovative VR Integration
The game’s defining mechanic is its revolutionary use of scale. Players command battles from a literal “god’s eye view,” looking down on the battlefield as if it were a tabletop covered in miniatures. With a button press, they can instantly “shrink down” to Quar-size, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their troops in the trenches, hearing the whiz of bullets and watching tanks erupt in flames from a first-person perspective. This ability to shift perspectives is not a gimmick; it’s the entire soul of the experience, delivering on the fantasy of making your toy soldiers come alive like never before.

Combat utilizes a hidden dice-roll system, where units exchange volleys of fire with chances to hit or miss. Terrain, cover, and unit positioning are crucial. The control scheme, which maps commands to the four quadrants of the Vive’s trackpad, is acknowledged as its greatest hurdle. Reviews from the time note a steep learning curve and occasional imprecision, a testament to the uncharted design territory the developers were navigating.

Content and Progression
The game features over 12 missions, offering a reported 6+ hours of gameplay across diverse environments—forest outposts, night raids, and sprawling trench networks. With 18 unique unit types, including Bogen rifle infantry, cavalry, snipers, commanders who can call in off-map artillery, and the hulking Baeliog armored tractors, the game provides a solid tactical depth that will feel familiar and satisfying to fans of games like Advanced Wars or XCOM.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Aesthetic: “Grimmsical” Perfected
The term “grimmsical”—a portmanteau of grim and whimsical—perfectly encapsulates the game’s unique art direction. The Quar themselves are beautifully designed, with a touch of Brian Froud-like fantasy, set against the muddy, industrialized hellscape of a WWI-inspired war. The low-poly art style, a necessity for the performance constraints of 2016 VR, works to its advantage, giving the world a stylized, storybook quality that ages gracefully.

The sound design is equally thoughtful. The soundtrack leans on somber, martial tunes that evoke the period, while the battlefield is alive with the crack of rifles, the roar of engines, and the distinct Scottish-accented shouts of the Quar. The death of a unit is handled with poignant subtlety: rather than gore, a simple flower blooms on the hex where they fell, a respectful and touching nod to the human cost of war.

Reception & Legacy

Initial Reception and Cult Status
Upon release, Quar was met with positive but limited critical attention. It holds a 75% critic score on aggregate sites (based on a single professional review from The VR Grid) and a “Very Positive” user rating on Steam from over 60 reviews. Critics and players alike praised its charming world, innovative use of VR scale, and satisfying tactical depth, while universally critiquing its initially clunky control scheme.

It was, by all accounts, a commercial niche within a niche. Yet, within the small community of early VR adopters, it developed a fervent cult following. Reddit posts from the time carried titles like “a game that deserves more attention,” with users championing its ambition and quality.

Lasting Influence and Historical Place
While it did not spark a wave of imitators, Quar: Battle for Gate 18 stands as a foundational text in VR strategy. It was a proof-of-concept that complex, thoughtful strategy games could not only work in VR but could use the medium to enhance the genre in ways flat screens never could. Its DNA can be traced to later, more successful VR titles that play with scale and god-game perspectives.

Its legacy is that of a pioneer: flawed, perhaps, but courageous and immensely creative. It proved that VR could be a home for more than just wave shooters and tech demos—it could be a platform for deep, heartfelt, and strategically rich worlds.

Conclusion

Quar: Battle for Gate 18 is a time capsule from a more optimistic, experimental era of VR development. It is a game brimming with heart, evident in its painstakingly crafted lore, its charming audio design, and its revolutionary gameplay hook. While its control scheme marks it as a product of its time and its lack of skirmish or multiplayer modes limited its longevity, its ambitions far outweighed its constraints.

For historians and enthusiasts, it remains a crucial artifact—a beautifully executed adaptation of a tabletop passion project and a bold vision of what VR strategy could be. It is not merely a good game for VR; it is a game that is fundamentally about VR, using the technology to realize a fantasy that hobbyists have dreamed of for generations. In the vast and varied history of wargames, Quar: Battle for Gate 18 earns its place as a forgotten gem—a poignant, peculiar, and pioneering testament to the art of the possible.