At its annual fan convention, CCP showed off two things from Valkyrie: a playable multiplayer demo, and a gameplay trailer from a dynamic, truly gorgeous single-player training mission. If you haven't seen that video yet, you should watch it right now:

Leaving the single-player mission to one side -- CCP isn't letting anyone play it, unfortunately -- the multiplayer demo showcases the core of Valkyrie: dogfighting. Gameplay, at its simplest, involves flying around and shooting any ship that's flagged as hostile. Of course, there are variables and additional layers like turrets and drones that will aid you in battle, but the objective is almost always to destroy enemy spaceships. It's definitely not the type of game I'd usually be drawn to, but playing a few rounds of Valkyrie with a VR headset was enough to win me over.

OMG I'm in a spaceship

Valkyrie's strength is in its presentation. There's no real standard for what VR games should look or feel like, and CCP has put a lot of work into getting things right. You're given a first-person view, looking out through the cockpit of a spaceship. There are no overlaid maps or radar readouts crammed into the corners of your display. Instead, the interface is the spaceship. Shield levels and ship health are displayed through bars of light projected onto your ship's front window. Details on your chosen target can be found on a dedicated screen above the (virtual) flight controls. Readouts on additional, less crucial equipment sit elsewhere in the cockpit, at the periphery of your vision. It's a system that wouldn't make sense if this game wasn't played on a VR headset, but because it is, it works really well.

This is what you see looking straight out of the cockpit.

The carefully considered UI had me fully immersed before I'd even launched into outer space. Every battle starts with a countdown to launch inside a larger ship. If you want to, you can look all around your ship in relative safety, including what's directly behind you. There are some neat little details there, like a little "clean me" message etched into the dirt of one of the side windows.

Playing on a PC with the Oculus Rift and a wired Xbox controller, piloting the ship is dead simple. If you're even a casual gamer, you'll be flying around with ease in no time at all. Actually shooting and targeting ships takes a little longer to get used to. In the ship class I chose (Wraith, the standard fighter) I had two options for destroying my foes, both based on line of sight. The standard weapon is a machine gun, and because your crosshairs are centered, you need to move your head around while steering the ship in order to effectively target enemies. The secondary weapon is harder to use, as you have to keep the enemy firmly in your crosshairs for a few seconds in order for your systems to lock on and fire away high-damage missiles.

Here, the player is aiming at an enemy to the left of center, which puts half of the UI out of view.

Once I grasped this line-of-sight offensive gameplay, the interface turned from beautiful into genius. I was either aiming at a fighter or checking if my defensive turret was ready to shoot down an incoming missile. I was barrel rolling away, looking helplessly for an aggressive enemy I couldn't see, or keeping tabs on my rapidly depleting shield levels. Just like in real life, you can't focus on multiple things at once. It's captivating.

CCP wants to build the world's first AAA-quality game for VR.

Granted, I've only experienced a single game mode, and a single map, but for what's described as a "pre-alpha build," Valkyrie is ludicrously polished already. CCP is aiming to make the world's first AAA game for VR, perhaps not in budget, but certainly in terms of quality. Now that the core mechanics are in place, the task is to add all the progression and game modes needed for long-term success, and it's reaching out to eSports professionals to build in the addictive hooks and balanced gameplay necessary for competitive multiplayer games to thrive.

From demo to game

On its own, the demo is impressive. It's definitely the best VR experience I've had in the three years since I put on the first Oculus Rift prototype. But it still felt like just that: an experience, a fragment of a potential game (albeit a very good one) to add to a long list of cool stuff that VR can do. It wasn't until I saw the single-player footage, and talked to the team behind the demo, that I truly understood the potential for Valkyrie, and what CCP wants to achieve with this game.

The footage from the gameplay trailer is from the first single-player level that introduces the world and its characters. It's one of a number of training missions that are