You’d be forgiven for thinking that PlayStation VR, now a healthy six months old, had been all but forgotten by platform stalwart Sony. Sure, it had the healthiest set of launch games of any VR headset, but they suffered from a lack of longevity. The hope was that Sony, with its plethora of first-party studios, would create the first killer app for VR, the game that would sell a million headsets. Instead, bar the surprisingly good Resident Evil 7, early adopters have been left wanting.
Creating a VR game, let alone a VR game with the production value of an Uncharted or a Horizon: Zero Dawn, doesn’t happen overnight of course. But there are signs that a second wave of games will soon launch on Sony’s headset, which, if we’re lucky, will be far deeper than the first. Indeed, at Sony’s recent PSVR Showcase event in London—or, as I prefer, the “we totally haven’t forgotten about PSVR please look at all the fun things we have” event—Sony had a handful of upcoming titles to demo.
None of them was new, having made appearances at various trade shows over the past few months, including PAX. But they provide an interesting insight into how developers are tackling the many idiosyncrasies of the medium on the most mainstream of VR platforms, including the holy trinity of control inputs, nausea, and storytelling. And while I’ve no doubt we’re still some ways off seeing the elusive killer app, I came away impressed: some seriously good games are about to hit PSVR.
Statik
GAME DETAILS
Developer: Tarsier Studios
Publisher: Sony
Release Date: April 24, 2017 (WW)
Price: £16/$20
Links: PlayStation Store | Official website
Let’s start with the most impressive. Statik, created by Swedish indie Tarsier Studios, is described as “a VR game about solving puzzles in a place you don’t know, with a person you don’t recognise, and hands that aren’t completely yours,” which is about as succinct an elevator pitch as you can get for a game that defies description.
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What differs is the basic layout of the level, which consists of an array of bright, Tron-like squares you build on. Sometimes there’s a simple grid, other times there’s a more complex arrangement of squares that snakes across the screen. Either way, you start by building a base near an energy source, create a few workers to gather that energy, and then bide your time while you gather enough resources to build walls, turrets, and anti-aircraft guns.
Like other VR strategy games, the top-down view is reminiscent of hovering over a board game with lots of fiddly pieces, except the pieces move, shoot guns, and explode every now and then. While the game can technically be played with a DualShock, I’m told it works far better with the PS Move, which allows you to easily point to squares and place the various walls and units you need to defend your base. How best to place them varies wildly depending on the layout of the level and the strategy of the opposition, but laying down a solid defence of walls and turrets is a good start.
One particularly good strategy involves creating a meandering path of walls for the enemy to wander through before they reach your base, which gives you more time to gather resources and launch a counter-strike with soldiers, planes, and tanks. Said strategy depends on having a good number of laser turrets active, though, and instead I focused on gathering resources. My meticulously crafted walls were quickly destroyed. Not upgrading them to maximum strength, which requires resources, too, didn’t help either.
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The simple visuals make Korix easy to understand. But later levels and multiplayer are more complex.
Still, lesson learned. I tried again, building a maze of walls that the tiny troopers from the opposing team struggled to navigate until eventually they had enough resources to build tanks and planes and blew everything up. Again. On my final try I lasted longer still by building planes and launching them at incoming soldiers before they had a chance to reach my outer defence, but yet again I was quickly overrun and defeated.
Clearly Korix is not an easy game, but the simple visuals give it an air of clarity that’s missing from more complex PC games. And that makes it more compelling too, at least for an RTS noob like me.
The Persistence
GAME DETAILS
Developer: Firesprite
Publisher: Sony
Release Date: TBC
Price: TBC
Links: Official website
It’s been a long while since every man and his dog was working an a “second screen” experience involving a video game and a tablet (R.I.P. Fable Legends), but The Persistence picks up this most unloved of mechanics and runs with it. The premise is simple: one player dons PSVR and tries to escape a rapidly crumbling (and procedurally generated) space station that’s crawling with zombies. Up to four other players hold tablets that show the player’s progress on a map and compete against each other for points gained by either helping or hindering the VR player.
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Starblood Arena places you in a highly manoeuvrable spaceship and then asks you to shoot other spaceships inside large, cavernous arenas. It forgoes the exploration of Descent in favour of scrappy dogfights, which is to say that despite a robust set of bots, this is not a single-player game. Instead, Starblood Arena is all about online multiplayer, where the many missiles, mines, and counter measures of ships can be deployed on real players.
It’s great fun, with tight controls helping the ships to turn on a sixpence and thus keep the arenas compact. With all movement assigned to the analogue sticks, just like a first-person shooter, there’s no need to mess about with a throttle. Perhaps this is part of the secret sauce that makes Starblood Arena so much less nauseous than Rigs, but I suspect there’s a lot more going on underneath the hood to make that happen.
Starblood Arena won’t set the world of online multiplayer shooters alight—it’s too barebones to compete with the likes of Overwatch, for instance—especially given its high £35 asking price. But it’s a fun little shooter nonetheless and a surprising example of how 360-degree movement can work well in VR.
Source: Arstechnica