[PC Game] VR Game Reviews

Dave

Staff member
Well, I now have 45 or so VR games and I thought I'd start a thread where we discuss them and any games you have. My list is as follows (installed on my desktop):

  • Acan's Call: Act 1
  • AltspaceVR
  • Bigscreen Beta
  • Cloudlands: VR Minigolf
  • Cmoar VR Cinema
  • The Cubicle
  • Elite Dangerous
  • Fantastic Contraption
  • Google Earth VR
  • HALP!
  • Holopoint
  • Job Simulator
  • Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
  • The Lab
  • NVIDIA VR Funhouse
  • Poly Runner VR
  • Portal Stories: VR
  • Quanero
  • QuiVr Demo
  • Realities
  • Rec Room
  • Skeet: VR Target Shooting
  • Spell Fighter VR
  • Tabletop Simulator
  • Tilt Brush
  • Trials on Tatooine
  • Trickster VR
  • The VR Museum of Fine Art
  • VRMultigames
  • Waltz of the Wizard
  • SOD
Installed on my laptop but not my desktop:

  • The Brookhaven Experiment
  • Climbey
  • Dota 2
  • DUO
  • The Golf Club VR
  • HoloBall
  • Project Cars
  • Space Pirate Trainer
  • SportsBar VR
  • Vanishing Realms
I'm not going to review all of them at once. That would be crazy. I'm going to pick a couple each day and review them, then strike them out so I don't repeat. And if there's one you want to see reviewed that I have I'll do it sooner rather than later.
 
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Trails on Tattooine review: That's it?

Extended review: Ok, all that other crap was just to get the lightsaber, but now I have it and... oh, it's over.

Extended extended review: I get to swing it around during the credits and make the lightsaber noise! Alright, I suppose this was worth the price of free.[DOUBLEPOST=1484090310,1484090263][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, you don't have Accounting. Go download Accounting, it's free.
 

Dave

Staff member
I'm going to start off with one that is fairly new and is still in early access. Well, most games are still in some form of development, so this isn't a surprise.

The Golf Club VR ($24.99)

Just as it sounds, this is a golf game. I've been waiting for a golf game, in fact. I got a mini-golf game to bide the time until one was released and finally The Golf Club VR was put on Steam.

I love golf but I rather suck at it in real life, so I figured that this would be a good way to discover how real the stuff is. And it's not even close. I mean, I can actually hit the ball and it goes more or less where I was aiming to begin with. In real golf I aim and then swing and do something small wrong, then I get to watch the ball sail majestically towards the nearest patch of sand, trees, or water like some kind of infuriating hazard-seeking missile. Not so here! So this is a lot more forgiving than real life when it comes to golf swings...so far.

The Good
  • There have added "a few thousand courses". You read that right - a few thousand.
  • The same company has a game called "The Golf Club 1". If you have that you can make courses there then have them ported into VR.
  • The interface is very clean and easy to understand. You look at your watch and it shows the course, wind speed, and distance to the pin.
  • The clubs keep a running tally of how far you've hit with them. So eventually you'll have an average of how far you hit with a 6 iron or 3 wood. The more you play the better your club selection will be.
  • There are multiple ways of navigating the course. You can either teleport freestyle or you can teleport right to your ball. Which comes into affect when you get to one of my Bad points.
The Bad
  • The game does not yet follow full golf physics. I guess this can be either bad or good depending. But if you are expecting the same experience as going out on the course this game is not for you. I can see people being good at this then thinking they can transfer these skills to the course. Uh...good luck with that.
  • The greens are OMFG fast. I was on a course where the greens were labeled as "slow". I hit the ball like I would when golfing in real life and the fucking thing took off like it was shot out of a cannon. I was okay once I got used to it, but the greens are always fast. I didn't play one that was labeled fast yet, but I can only imagine that it'll be like hitting across a frictionless surface.
  • The flag can be really, really hard to see. To be fair, I wear bifocals now (yes, I'm old, I fucking get it!) and sometimes this can have an effect on my visuals. Still, there are times when I just plain can't see the flag. And when you are on the green and they take the flag away sometimes you have to teleport around to find the hole.
The Ugly
  • Nothing.

So all in all this is a pretty decent game, especially for early access. Of course, this does come from an established company, HB Studios. And they have been very responsive and have made many updates to their program already. Their site says that there are 4 difficulty levels and I wonder if I'm only hitting so well because I'm on easy mode. I'll have to go play to find out!

I give this game a solid 6/10, which is pretty damned good for an early access title. If they fix some of the vision issue that I and a lot of other people are having, this could be a must-own for golfers who are jonesing for the real thing during the cold, dark winter months.
 

Dave

Staff member
This post will be a bit different in that I'm doing two games instead of only one. Why? Because the first one is way too short and there's pretty much nothing to it.

Trials on Tattooine (Free)

I thought @Ravenpoe was being snarky, but I fired it up for the first time last night and found that he was right on. It starts with an unskippable crawl sequence which you put up with because Star Wars, then it goes dark and you find yourself on Tattooine in kind of a supply area. But you can't move or do anything but stand there and look around. Nothing. And then the Millennial Falcon comes and lands nearly on top of you. You hear some dialogue between Han & Chewy, then the door opens and R2 comes out. Then there's an attack that you stand there and just watch. Soon after you have to push a few buttons to fix something on the ship. FINALLY you hear Han say something about R2 having something for you, which turns out to be a lightsaber, which you get to use to deflect blaster shots from a bunch of Stormtroopers who attack. You have to deflect the shots back into the troopers to kill them, but even if you deflect none of them it doesn't matter because none of the shots ever hit you. Once enough troopers go down the rest run away and...that's it. It's done. Roll credits. Total time is about 5 minutes and most of that is just standing there. So if they ever make a game it might be interesting, but until then I can't even give it a rating.

HoloBall ($14.99)

So in the arcade here there's a game called Curveball. It's basically Pong but with curving physics added in with an AI opponent. HoloBall is exactly the same, except it's in VR so you're shooting backhands and forehands. The AI is pretty barebones but it gets the job done. There are two game types - arcade and campaign. Arcade gives you different AI levels, so you can make sure it's not just hitting everything every time. Or making sure it does. You let the ball go past you three times and that's game over, man! game over!

Campaign is a competition between you and the computer. Every time you get it past the computer you get a point and every time the computer gets it past you it gets a point. Easy goes to 3 points, Medium goes to 5 and I have no idea how hard goes because you have to beat one before you get to the next level. I did not beat medium. Maybe if I'd started playing it earlier I would have, but as it stands I ran out of my allotted playing time.

The Good
  • Very, VERY good workout game!
  • Easy to learn, difficult to master.
  • Different game modes means that everyone can make the game go their own speed.
The Bad
  • A few times I KNOW I hit the ball with the paddles, but the ball went weird ways that I did not expect. This could be my fault, though, so I'm not completely sure it was collision issues. Yet. More testing to come.
  • Single player only.
The Ugly
  • Man, you have to have a LOT of room for this game. You are swinging hard because the movement determines how fast the ball goes. So the faster you swing, the more oomph you get on your hit. You're flailing around like mad. I didn't hit anything, but this is the game that I think is most likely to cause damage.
This is a great little game. For $15 you get a fun game and a GREAT workout. The graphics aren't exactly next-gen, but in the context of "futuristic pong" it works quite well. I'd like to see this as a multiplayer game, and it may someday go there. But for now, $15 is the right price point for this fun little game.

8/10

 

Dave

Staff member
Okay, so I've dropped the ball a little. Turns out that I may have been a bit ambitious. Still, with some prodding I think I can start this back up again. So why not another golf game? This time it's...

Cloudlands: VR Mini-Golf ($19.99)

I've already talked about "regular" golf, but what about the type of golf where you hit a ball through little windmills and can chuck it into a clown's mouth? Well wait no more because Cloudlands is here!

This was one of the first games I got in VR and as such it's one of my most played. My son-in-law likes it, too. It's about what you'd expect from a mini-golf game. It's got obstacles you have to overcome, strange and differing pathways you can take to get to the hole, and different environments in which to play. The greens are about perfect with reacting to the power of your swing and the direction you hit is not as forgiving as the other golf game, so you better know how to line up a putt. This is a very casual game that has just added multiplayer. I have not done multiplayer online yet, but I do plan on it in the future.

But what makes this game apart is not the course itself (which I'll talk about in a second) but the fact that you can make your own holes and upload them to the Steam Workshop. Right now there are 770+ courses on the workshop (of various quality) so if you download even half of them you would never have to play the same course twice! The game has a randomizer that will build a 9 or 18 hole course out of your available holes. So you might start with a difficult hole and then get an easy one. Again, it's totally random. But for replayability it's pretty sweet. The trouble comes in when people make holes that are hard for the sake of being hard and if you don't practice them you'll never get good.

The game's base course of 18 holes is about what you'd expect, but the last few are just beyond fucking insane. The last hole, for instance, is a par 42. You read that right - par 42. And I can tell you for a fact that the game stops counting at 99. The first 50 were trying and the other 49+ were frustratingly hitting the ball as hard as I could or tapping it just a little to move it along.

The movement in the game is pretty much what you'd expect. You teleport directly to the ball by pulling the trigger or you can point/click to teleport to where you want to go. You do this when you need to look around corners and stuff to see what's coming up. The biggest issue I've found with the game (besides a TERRIBLE local multiplayer mode) is that you are turning so much that you can trip over the Vive cord. Once the wireless comes out this is one of the games that will benefit the most.

The Good
  • Realistic swing physics.
  • The Workshop has holes and you can download all of them for massive selection and replayability.
  • Casual and fun.
  • Immersive.
  • Music and scenery is spot on and adds rather than detracts from the game.
The Bad
  • You tend to get a little tangled with your cords.
  • The quality of the downloaded holes varies wildly and you don't know necessarily which ones they are to delete them unless you are carefully paying attention or play them individually to test them.
  • Some of the holes have hazards in them like fans. I fucking hate fans.
The Ugly
  • The local multiplayer SUUUUUUUCKS. Here's how it works. Person A puts on the headset and starts the hole. Person B gets a turn once Person A finishes said hole. One normal par 2-6 holes this is okay because it goes quickly. On holes that are much longer than that and Person B is just watching and watching and watching. Of course, it would also probably be a pain in the ass to switch the headset each time you shoot on a PAR FUCKING 42 HOLE, but that's because IT'S A PAR FUCKING 42 HOLE!!
  • Pars are not capped so hole designers can make any par they want. You know, like PAR FUCKING 42 HOLES?!?
I wish I'd tried the online multiplayer before I started this review. Last time I played it that feature wasn't working. So it might be good, might be bad. But this is one of those games that you should definitely pick up if you have a Vive. It's not much of a workout, but it's not a wave shooter, either. There's a lot of lazy wave-shooty games out there right now and Cloudlands stands out because it's different, it's polished, and it's still fun.

But par fucking 42? Come on, man.

8/10
 
Batman: Arkham VR

I probably paid too much ($20), considering how short it is, but I was too impatient to wait for a Steam sale. I didn't feel ripped-off, though. I had a lot of fun with this.

It's set in the Batman: Arkham universe, and definitely has the feel of those games. There's no combat (I think that's going to be a big hurdle to get right for more complex Batman VR games), but you do get to be The World's Greatest Detective. I love puzzle games, so I'm fine with that. The puzzles are very well done, there's one where the Bat Computer reconstructs some shrapnel, and you have to put the pieces back together as a 3D puzzle. Very cool.

The game is creepy and disturbing. In a 'good' way, but still very disturbing--there's a reason it's rated M. A non-spoiler example is that they let you relive your parents' murder as an Origin section at the beginning. Going through that from a child's POV in VR was disturbing enough, but then they have Joe Chill talk to you and that was the creepiest part of all. No wonder Bruce is fucked up.

There's definitely an element of horror to it, but I think they pull it off. I'm not really a fan of horror, especially cheap and lazy jump scares, but I'm going to forgive them the usage of (sort of) jump scares because it made sense for the situations and they don't overuse it.

The game is short (I think it's estimated 90 minutes?), but Riddler comes along at the end and gives you a reason to do a replay. I was a little confused by the ending (however, it was very well executed--wow!), but apparently it's supposed to lead in to Batman: Arkham Knight, so if you're caught up in the game series, it will probably make more sense (I've only managed to get halfway through Batman: Arkham Asylum so far).

The controls are pretty straightforward. You have a grappling hook, batarangs, and a forensic scanner. They require the 'squeeze' control on the Vive controllers, which I tend to have trouble with, but after a little practice I was grabbing batarangs off my belt like a pro.

My only real complaint is that it's extremely linear. There's not a lot of opportunity to explore your surroundings (which are very detailed and immersive), and rather than pushing you forward, the story more drags you along for the ride. The NPCs have a strict script, no matter what you do. You can throw batarangs at Alfred all day long and he just stands there and takes it. Which was frustrating in a few areas, because you just end up standing there watching a bad guy hurt someone, unable to use your batarangs or grappling hook to try to defend them because they just pass through the NPC. If you can accept this is more of a proof-of-concept of "Can we make a complete Batman VR game?," you'll enjoy it a lot more.

The best part of the game... I'm Batman! :D
 
Awaken

Game premise is very simple: to awaken/free the Guardians, you have to direct balls of light into a cauldron. It's The Incredible Machine in a surreal fantasy setting.

It's still in Early Access, but doesn't feel like Early Access. It's very polished and gameplay/physics work very well. I think the "unfinished" is mostly in adding more of the planned levels.

If you love puzzles, physics, and building things, this is the game for you. There's no "correct" solution--as long as you get the balls into the cauldron, it's all good. You are given a set of parts (tracks, trampolines, fans, etc.) for each puzzle, but not all of them will necessarily be needed, depending on your solution. You are gradually introduced to new parts and the puzzles become increasingly challenging, with more obstacles and weird angles to deal with.

Controls are very intuitive. Press the pad to teleport and the trigger to grab and manipulate a part. Both controllers work the same.

Graphics are minimalist, but nicely done. While "cartoony", it's also very immersive. I kept walking out of my "safe zone" and into the couch while building things because I'd be concentrating on the puzzle and forget this was VR. And when the first Guardian leapt towards me, I actually jumped--good thing I knew it was a good guy!

They have added the ability to create your own puzzles and share them with others, which I haven't done. This section is not very intuitive. There are two pillars on the "create" island, and I had to look up what they were for (saving and sharing). But this is also a relatively new feature, so maybe it will get some improvements in a future update.

It's regularly $29.99 on Steam, which seems a little high for this type of game: I'd put it more as a$14.99-$19.99 sort of game. But it's on sale right now for 66% off ($10.19) until tomorrow (May 8), and it's definitely worth that price even in its unfinished state.

I've completed the first Guardian (30 levels) and just started the second. I've been having a lot of fun with this game. It's challenging and relaxing at the same time. If you like playing The Incredible Machine types of games, I highly recommend Awaken.

awaken-game.com
 
Rock hopes a movie will be made about his life, and that it will be exciting.
I want to see them taken back through with some mods installed. Thomas, bear, etc.

—Patrick
 
Star Wars: Droid Repair Bay

While it's another very short game (maybe 15 minutes?) and meant to be part of the hype for The Last Jedi, this one is far better than Trials on Tatooine. It's something I'd really like to see them develop into a full game.

The gameplay is very simple: pick up the droids (all BB-8 style rolling balls) with a crane, deposit them on a table, open them up, then find and replace the malfunctioning parts. Then you use a laser pointer to guide the repaired droid to do a run on a treadmill, then move to various points around the room. Some other things happen, too, but I won't spoil it.

Definitely easy enough that even a younger kid wouldn't have much trouble playing it. Once they calm down enough to play it, because I think my 8-year-old self would have completely lost her mind for a few minutes because I'm standing in a Star Wars ship with droids, omg!

Yeah, okay, that actually happened to my forty-something self. :D

There's a ton of achievements to get, which is funny for such a short game, but I suppose it gives it a bit of replayability.

It's a free game and definitely worth the download if you're a Star Wars fan. If you have kids who are Star Wars fans, my 8-year-old self says GET IT NOW!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
[DOUBLEPOST=1516925022,1516924720][/DOUBLEPOST]I gotta say, every day the temptation for me to break down and buy a vive grows a little stronger, even though I'm sure in 5 years it'll be sitting over there gathering dust with my guitar hero controller and my joystick.
 

Dave

Staff member
Do u no da waaay?[DOUBLEPOST=1516941633,1516941378][/DOUBLEPOST]I'm having issues with the Vive because I don't have any damned room to play it. I WANT to, but you need real space to take advantage of it.
 
More octagenarians playing VR games. This time, LA Noire VR.

I am intrigued by the movement mechanism. I hope the "swing your arms to move" thing actually works (and catches on), because movement is the most immersion breaking aspect of VR for me. Teleporting has its obvious flaws, and using the trackpad--besides not feeling 'real'--is often too fast and difficult to control.

*adds LA Noire VR to the wishlist*
 

figmentPez

Staff member
The title of this review is misleading:



I don't own a VR headset, and have no prospect of owning one any time in the near future, but I'm really digging this channel.
 
Ok, so not technically a game, but ever wonder what it would be like to experience a Björk album in VR? Well...

1568407238853.jpeg


Yeah, probably about what you'd expect.

--Patrick
 
I really wanted to break away from Oculus, but with the leaks about the Quest 2, and the Quest Link being a thing, I really want one.
 
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