Last week saw the arrival of the world’s least bank-breaking virtual reality headset, PlayStation VR (£349). To use it you’ll need a PlayStation 4 (£299) and a PS Eye Camera (£44.99), which – while not exactly cheap – is less exorbitant than buying a PC-based set-up. The technology itself uses a camera at the front of the room to track head movements, presenting its alternative view of the world via a very small screen mounted in front of each eye. Despite PSVR’s slightly fuzzier visuals, the feeling of being somewhere you’re not is extraordinarily convincing, if sometimes disorientating.
It’s also been a challenge for games designers, who have had to find new ways of guiding players around spaces that don’t literally exist. In Ocean Descent, one of the mini-games included in PlayStation VR Worlds, you don’t even have a controller: your sole movement in the game is to look around and experience your slow winching into the ocean depths in a thankfully sturdy shark cage. Initially a relaxing experience, watching manta rays, turtles and a flotilla of glowing jellyfish drift by, you of course eventually bump into a shark, your feeling of exposure enhanced by the fact that you’re stuck in a place with nothing to do but anticipate your future as a chew toy. It’s a scary concept in spite of the not-particularly-terrifying CGI shark; even with no control, you feel part of the action to a vastly greater degree than in a conventional first-person game.
That immersion is a sense that Arkham VR (PSVR) exploits to excellent effect to make you feel like Batman. Starting in stately Wayne Manor, you descend into the Batcave and begin by donning your suit, utility belt and cowl, eliciting a sensation that will leave a broad grin on the face of even the most moderate Bat-fan. The rest of your hour-or-so as the Dark Knight is spent investigating the grisly murder of sometime sidekick Nightwing, although some of its most impressive moments are when you can just spend time looking down at Gotham City, listening to the rain fall, just being Batman.
For a sense of VR’s present limitations look no further than futuristic click-and-point game Loading Human: Chapter 1 (PSVR & Oculus Rift). One glance in an in-game mirror shows the folly of attempting to draw in arms and legs, your character’s gangly, inhumanly-elongated form proving to be the stuff of nightmares. As you make your way through its mellow 22nd-century adventure you’ll also experience frequent moments of intense clumsiness brought on by the vagaries of the PlayStation Eye camera’s motion-sensing. The plot excuses your maladroit attempts to move or pick things up by casting your character as a practising alcoholic, his continual fumbling and walking into things supposedly the result of booze rather than the technology not quite working. Very convenient.
EVE Valkyrie (PSVR) gets around most of that awkwardness by sitting you in a cockpit, its scuffed, lived-in interior looking like a workhorse of the skies, giving the game more of a sense of history than its wafer-thin plot. Playing as a seated pilot is immediately more comfortable, and that’s just as well because you spend most of your time barrel-rolling and looping around asteroids and the broken hulks of old spaceships. The feeling of speed and motion is thrilling, but long sessions of gaming make for sudden moments of queasiness among the stars. More intrepid airmen and women may even welcome the slight giddiness, which adds an extra frisson – if you can keep your lunch down.
Lego Dimensions (PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One & Wii U) doesn’t need VR to lure you into its shiny polymer universe when it’s got the toy pad. Drop Dimensions-branded Lego kit on to this bit of gadgetry and its characters and vehicles bounce to life in the game, in some cases arriving with playable levels set in lovingly recreated Lego versions of their respective films and TV series. As well as Adventure Time, Mission: Impossible and Harry Potter, The A-Team gets the Lego treatment with a minifigure BA Baracus who can repair machines, shoot things, and morph at will into Hannibal, Faceman and Murdoch. Meanwhile, Ghostbusters comes with a perfect little recreation of their car, Ecto-1, and a tiny, plastic Melissa McCarthy, whose proton pack can destroy pretty much everything in the game. She certainly ain’t afraid of no ghosts.
