SAN FRANCISCO—That real-time strategy battling is a solid fit for virtual reality seems like a foregone conclusion. RTS games like Total Annihilation and Starcraft already force players to gaze at their little fighters, armies, and fortifications from high above. So why not let us use VR systems to control all of those battles with our hands, like wartime puppeteers, with greater speed and accuracy than a mouse-and-keyboard could ever give?

The developers of Brass Tactics, the first major RTS for the Oculus Touch platform, say that there’s a reason gamers haven’t seen a major game in the genre in VR’s early days. “Real-time strategy is already hard to make,” Hidden Path Entertainment co-founder Mark Terrano says. “Virtual reality only adds more challenge.”

But, by golly, Hidden Path may very well have nailed the formula with its still-in-development game Brass Tactics—and well before any other game developer has launched anything remotely as slick.