Song in the Smoke is available for Oculus Quest, but also for PSVR and PC platforms. This review is from the Quest 2 version.

Song in the Smoke is a prehistoric fantasy themed survival game, and developer 17-bits debut VR outing. It’s moody and atmospheric, takes some patience, and has a few of its own quirks for better or for worse.

Launching the game for the first time you’re greeted, rather startlingly, with a giant 3-headed, human-faced raven. Okay then – It’s clear at this point we’re in for a trippy experience.

The game starts out in a fairly linear fashion, designed initially to corral you through a series of rudimentary tutorials before loosening the rope and allowing you explore a little more freely.

What’s immediately striking about Song in the Smoke is its aesthetic style. Not quite the cel-shaded ubiquity of many VR titles, but more a distinctly limited colour palette sort’ve posterisation, as if it’s been run through a photoshop filter. This style likely economical for rendering, but also adds to the unsettlingly ‘other-worldy’ atmosphere the game is clearly pitching.

Despite this treatment though, it does feel like concessions have been made elsewhere due to the Quest 2’s hardware. Foliage is very lean and patchy, flat surfaces and hard edges are everywhere, and there’s a lingering haze that tends to silhouette geometry from near-distance. However, once the gameplay loop settles in, this becomes negligible and essentially accepted as character.

And the gameplay is actually, surprisingly good – but it takes some patience to get there.

Firstly – It may be reassuring to know that as a survival game, there is seldom a stone unturned here, if you excuse the pun. This is a survival game without compromise, and the interactivity that only VR can really provide is put to great use, enhancing the experience when engaging with its broad survival mechanics.

You’re first introduced to your ‘cloak’ inventory – and it’s clear that management of stock is going to be absolutely key due to the limited slots available.

There are plenty of rudimentary crafting resources scattered about; stones, branches, bones.

You can use a billet for shaping stones into knife blades, then attaching it to a bone handle. Now you have a whittling knife for shaping branches into arrows, torches or club handles.

All of this pre-prepping and combining resources is done using actions similar to those you’d use in real life.

Various tonics can be crafted from gathered berries using a mortar and pestle. Each berry type creates a tonic with distinct physiological properties, such as reducing fatigue or increasing vitality. Again, these tools are intuitively interactive, allowing you to first place the requisite tonic items into the mortar bowl, manually crushing with the pestle, then bringing the bowl up to your mouth to consume.

It’s impressively engineered, and from this survival game novice begs the question how survival games can be entertaining outside of VR with mere button presses.

Campfires also need to be crafted, and serve as both save and sleep spots. This is where I found my first issue.

You can only save at a campfire, and crafting a campfire requires scavenging for resources.

The resources aren’t hard to find, but if you move too far from an existing campfire and you haven’t crafted a new one – all progress in between will be lost. For me, this created some undue tension when it came to exploring as I was reluctant to wander too far, or do too much casual adventuring before returning to camp.

The day nigh cycle felt very short too, so the shorter jaunts initially makes the game feel small and very contained.

In the initial stages, this isn’t too bad as he game presents very little threat, only having to worry about eating, resting, and the elements. But as you progress further into areas where there are greater living threats, I found the catch 22 of being defenceless from predators while scavenging for weapon materials to protect myself from them frustrating.

At campfires you can build tanning and drying racks. These allow you to prep gathered resources from animals for clothing and weapon parts.

Admittedly. I’m not a veteran of the survival game and I initially found some tropes annoying, but soon found the rhythm the game was setting up.

The yo-yo-ing back and forth, having to clear inventory slots so I could store one more large branch felt like aimless busy work initially, but the game establishes a cadence before too long that allows you to manage and plan efficiently. Once it clicked, it became enjoyable – and the ‘while I’m here’ opportunities became a more thrilling part of the risk / reward tempo, with failure mostly coming down to poor judgement.

Song in the Smoke isn’t open world so much as it is a series of interconnected sandboxes you successively open up and move between.

Each area contains its own mysteries to discover and threats to face, but largely feels like extensions of the same environment. There isn’t an enormous amount of biodiversity to each area which is somewhat disappointing, but the elemental and creature variety in each section helped compensate.

New areas are unlocked by finding and collecting three purple stones scattered about the map, which provides some narrative purpose for latitudinal progress rather than just existing and enduring in the world.

Adequate clothing and weaponry become increasingly more vital in each area as you face creatures that will lay you to waste very quickly if under stocked. And you will on occasion be ill prepared, which can lead to frustrating altercations.

Some creatures demand a lot of arrows, or can survive full degradation of a melee weapon. So, on one hand you have to be sparing with your inventory, but you also need to be well equipped to deal with the unpredictable. If you get the balance wrong, back to base camp.

The HUD for survival indicators is clear but unobtrusive, which I appreciated. There’s nothing worse than a jarring firework of effects to indicate low health, or similarly instant death because you didn’t check your watch to see how hungry you were.

That’s not the case here. Clear animated icons pepper your field of view to indicate fatigue, cold, hunger, bleeding, or whether you’re hidden. This provided visual representation of instinct that would ordinarily not require visual cues, so worked as a diegetic compromise, and therefore helped with the immersion.

All in all, Song in the Smoke is a fully featured and satisfying survival experience, despite having no real contemporary on the Quest platform.

With some patience and perhaps some knowledge of the genre, there is a surprising amount to enjoy here.

The post Song in the Smoke (Oculus Quest 2) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

If there’s any genre of game that has saturated VR to the point of drowning, it’s the time rhythm game genre. It feels like many VR developers are trying to cut their teeth on experiences that have brought continued success and acclaim to the likes of beat saber – perhaps the most ubiquitous of the lot.

Beat Saber, arguably the pioneer of the VR rhythm game genre, was a phenomenon that has proven time and time again to be queen bee, whose reign at this point feels almost impervious to threat or competition. It just seems to know how to do everything right.

SoundArt VR by Mercury Studios feels distinctly similar in many ways, but where it differs in an effort to carve its own niche identity is also sadly where it feels inferior – which makes it feel like a bit of a “me-too, but not quite” – rather than being elevated by its own innovation.

So it plays a bit like this:

Imagine if you will, a large, stylised 8-petal flower in front of you, arched inwards so as to act as a series of “drums”, arranged in a gaping ring formation. Much like many rhythm games, this is the point of interaction that marks the business end of a tunnel-like “track” stretched out into the distance.

As often house, techno or electronic dance music thumps away (at least from the stock track library) patterned configurations of “cubes” rocket towards you, and your job is to hit or swipe the corresponding petal as the cube passes through it. At certain intervals there are also specific multiplier “moves” that require parrying or thrusting forward, often at moments of crescendo in the music, and often resulting in a cascading flurry of neon to indicate success.

To perform these hits, you have an elongated baton or jousting rod in each hand that function as a sort’ve drumstick or wand. These can be selected from a number of designs, but ultimately don’t affect the gameplay.

The problem is, there’s a bit of a margin of error provided for accuracy to compensate for a lack of clarity over when a perfect hit is made, making the game feel a little less precise and a little more chaotic than other games in the genre. Furthermore, you are sort’ve dynamically scored by the nature of your interactions, though it’s never really clear what you are being scored for, or how to improve on a second pass. This may be a personal choice thing, as perhaps it allows greater access for those more, errr, rhythmically challenged, but it just felt a little less graceful than it perhaps should during the busier moments.

It’s beautiful though – if you like the neon future-punk aesthetics of say, Tron, but perhaps a bit less retro and a bit more late 90’s trippy media player visual equaliser, akin to a kaleidoscope of pulsating neon. It definitely has that club-vibe, but could be a little busy for some. Thankfully, adjusting the graphic settings can reduce this effect if need-be.

Music will come down to personal preference – I would’ve loved to see some more contemporary tracks included, but the game does allow you to configure your own tracks much like other rhythm games on PC – though whether people will bother with this is another thing. The tracks I could appreciate for their own merits, but none I played really had the dance along toe-tapping catchiness of many of the licensed Beat Saber tracks – in my opinion an impeccably curated library.

I also found the “shattering glass” sound for a successful hit just created too much filler noise and interfered with the music track a bit. I would’ve preferred to have a short, sharp hit indicator so each successful hit was more pronounced, and the music therefore not muddied by the constant shattering.

But criticism out of the way, that’s not to say the game isn’t fun – as the rhythm genre game is perhaps one of the most accessible in VR. It’s just at this point the benchmark is so high it’s hard not to make direct comparisons. SoundArt VR is fun, frantic, and may be an absolute joy to those who find incentive in the likes of leaderboard competition, or improving on personal bests etc. Also, your mileage will vary based on whether you enjoy the music itself.

I enjoyed playing it while I was in the headset, but I never felt myself wanting to extend beyond short bursts before feeling there was nothing further to be gained from longer play sessions.

If you like this genre – it definitely wouldn’t hurt to check it out, and you may even find the things it didn’t quite do right for me, it does a lot more right for you.

The post SoundArt VR (PC) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Concrete Genie is a PS4 exclusive game from developer Pixelopus, and is as ambitious in it’s style and aesthetic as it is audacious in it’s storytelling.

It tells the story of a teen named Ash, who is one of the few remaining residents of Denska, a port town blighted by a recent environmental disaster.

Consequently, Denska is rendered a ghostly and drab hue, and Ash’s escape is to get lost in his imagination of drawings and paintings of Genie creatures he renders in his art book.

That is, until a group of misfit bullies, satiating their boredom, rough him up one morning and cast the pages of his artbook asunder.

While attempting to retrieve the pages, Ash finds himself bestowed with a magic paintbrush that possesses the ability to paint living neon artwork across the many brick facades in Denskas.

And this is the core mechanic and indeed conceit of Conrete Genie. With brush in hand, you’re tasked with guiding Ash to bring colour and life back to Denska by sufficiently decorating areas of the town, marked by string lights. You do this by using the DualShock4 Sixasis motion controller to paint from a pallet of preset “stickers” that can be customised in length, size, direction and spread.

It’s a bit of a pity there aren’t any freeform options, but as your library increases by collecting pages dotted about the world, it’s remarkable how many uniquely fascinating compositions you can begin to make, and therefore spared from what could have easily become a monotonous chore.

But, the real gimmick here are the Genie creatures Ash can paint that when activated, will burst into life and follow Ash from wall to wall, assisting him in solving light progression puzzles. The Genies have customisable “body parts” which can be added to the pallet library by collecting artbook pages across the world. It’s truly a delight watching these weird creations animate and emote, really feeling like living companions through your adventure.

There are three elemental Genie types; fire, electricity and wind, and each one contains an ability unique to clearing road blocks, such as charging gate switches, moving large boxes and burning down barriers. Once you spot which Genie is required, the solution is little more than summoning your recently conjured creation over and watching it solve the problem for you. I had wished a little more inventiveness and challenge to these puzzles, as they really amounted to merely activating contextual mechanics, rather than actual problem solving. This was a bit of a missed opportunity.

Furthermore, you have a “super paint” meter, which is used to clear dark matter sprawled across walls, preventing your Genies from moving. The super paint meter is charged by fulfilling the Genie’s constant requests to paint specific objects for them. It doesn’t take much to fill the meter, but these requests do get a bit irritating.

The bullies are a lingering presence in the game, and there are sections where you have to avoid being spotted by them as they go about the town getting up to light mischief. But a swift scurry to rooftop is enough to shake them so this doesn’t encroach too much on the games main function. It’s good that the game keeps them relevant without them being too much of a nuisance, because they become a more prominent component later in the story.

One thing that stands out immediately though, is Concrete Genies art style. Even though the locations are uninspired on paper, the art style and deliberate contrast between gloom and garish is impressive. The game takes an almost stop-motion, hand crafted approach to it’s design where the city could easily be a film miniature set and the characters sentient toys. It’s really breathtaking and is definitely the games biggest returning draw-card.

Audio too is serviceable, with quieter moments in the score punctuated by occasional sweeping crescendo when the action or spectacle picks up. The whole package compliments the storybook quality the developers have leaned heavily into.

What was a little jarring though, Concrete Genie shifts in tone and gameplay somewhat abruptly in it’s later stages where it introduces a combat system and new traversal mechanic then expands it seemingly within minutes. These work pretty well and definitely adds variety, but which makes it a puzzle as to why they weren’t perhaps included earlier and upgraded more gradually. It feels a little like an effort to extend the games play time without bulking on repetitive slog, but the sections are fun and interesting while they last, until the game ends.

Concrete Genie is an interesting experiment, and one that pays off in some ways and less in others. Including a PSVR component aswell, it’s pure magical storytelling and artistic design choices make it fun to return to in bites, and the painting mechanics are fun when they afford the most freedom. It’s subjective novelty makes it a hard recommend, but if you’re wanting an indie-seque game with a larger budget to nosh on until the next big release, you could do worse.

The post Concrete Genie (PlayStation 4) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

For those that don’t already know, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a horror puzzler anthology with a back catalog that has emerged on a number of platforms over the years, notably PC and mobile.

The latest iteration, Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted is mostly a repackaging of scenarios from the previous games reimagined for VR.

The collection of games is wrapped loosely in the conceit of you being an in a digital VR theme park of sorts run by “fazbear entertainment”, and tasked with reliving the experiences of the previous games from a VR perspective. The game sets this up by funneling you through an on rails “welcome” section while a smarmy Themepark PA announcer provides his disclaimer, positing the notion that events of the former games were “definitely a bunch of lies”. I thought this meta narrative was quite a neat way setting up what is essentially a ported collection.

For those uninitiated into the FNAF world, like I was, this game is both charmingly tropey, but also effective in its simplicity making it a very versatile and accessible game across these various platforms. VR is ostensibly the perfect home for this game.

The premise of the initial few games in this collection are simple. You play night security, restricted mostly to the confines of your often claustrophobic control booth where you have to survive for the night.

Making things tense is the fact that during the night, a number of animatronic puppets come to life and gradually close in on you. Your job is to prevent them from reaching you by cycling through security camera footage, then switching lights and door locks without fully consuming the limited amount of power required to do all of these tasks. It’s simple, but very very nerve wrackingly effective.

A couple of additional game modes have you repairing the animatronic puppets while they’re in service mode, a particularly nail-biting experience as you desperately try not to screw up. Other modes have you repairing a series of vents through several mini-game tasks, while using your headlamp to ward off robotic critters as they come at you from the vents all around.

The game knows you can’t keep your attention fixed to any one place at a time, and uses this, as well as cleverly punctuated timing, to great effect.

You get to select these scenarios from a creepy selection menu, and can complete them in any order you wish, which is a great idea because some scenarios may be more entertaining for some than others.

Graphically, the game manages a lot with little. The lighting is minimal, but is used to the best possible effect, whether it be casting ominous silhouettes or providing jus enough light to be suspicious of whats around that hallway corner, or behind that piece of furniture.

The designs for the giant robotic plushies have a weird, demented nostalgia to them and definitely assist with the effectiveness of the creep-factor.

In saying this, the liberal use of jump-scares involving these critters can result in diminishing returns as the predictability sets into routine, particularly in some game modes such as the dark rooms. 

The sound in this game does incredibly well at providing a large contribution to the creepy, tense atmosphere.  You will be spinning in your seat to determine where that last clang came from – hoping that you’re not confronted up close and personal by a screeching demon-plushie.

There’s always a foreboding humming or tune in the air, punctuated at points by sound effects that have come straight out of horror audio library – be a music box, doorbell, creaky door, girl whispering and giggling, or the arching of faulty electrics etc. It’s cliched, but effective. 

This game is perfect for VR, but your enjoyment really comes down to whether you appreciate conventional horror tropes, albeit without the bloodletting.

I’m a baby when it comes to scary games in VR, but for those wanting a tense, creepy experience from a that is perfectly self-aware, you owe it to yourself to check out Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted.

The post Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted (PSVR) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Trover Saves the Universe is an absurd action platformer developed by Squanch Studios, and brainchild of Ricky and Morty creator Justin Roiland.

The premise is inept, but that’s the point. You are placed behind the eyes of a “chairorpian”, an eponymously named race of beings that are permanently consigned to telelporting, hydraulic chairs. This serves to explain the perspective and control of the game in such a ridiculously self-aware, 4th wall breaking way only a Justin Roiland property could.

You, as a chairporpian, are in control of your partner in crime – a purple, anthropomorphic creature with empty eye sockets named Trover. So, it’s first person perspective of a third person character that you control.

The story is something like this: Trover’s puppies have been kidnapped and placed into the eye sockets of the villainous “Glorkon”, granting him immeasurable power and a heightened level of universe-threatening nefariousness. Consequently, Trover is begrudgingly partnered up with you to rescue his puppies and to end Glorkon’s reign of terror. That’s more or less it.

But it’s less about the story and more about the delivery of it.

Trover Saves the Universe carries all the irreverent, almost improvisational, stuttered humour that is trademark of Justin’s humour. Fans of Rick and Morty will be in their element here. What’s remarkable is how long some of these NPC side-conversations will prattle on if you stay still long enough. There must be hours of recorded dialogue here. Much of it is hilariously nonsensical, but for me at least, the humour is unrelenting and does begin to grate in longer stretches.

Characters you meet along the way are bizarre, but generally well realised and there’s always an unpredictable, “I wonder how this is going to play out” moment each time you approach a new character.

Gameplay is a fairly rote affair, but that’s not to say it’s boring. It’s a lot of fun. The camera (or the in game chair you’re sitting in) stays fixed to teleport nodes which you can jump between, but Trover is freely controllable around you. Furthermore, you can elevate the chair to get an aerial vantage for some of the platform elements involving layered cartography.

Trover has a light-sabre as a weapon, and can hack’n’slash his way through a variety of Glorkon minions. He also has the ability to put … ahem… coloured “power babies” into his own eye sockets, granting him an increasing set of abilities. It would’ve been good to be able to swap these power babies in and out on the fly, but the abilities they grant are consigned mostly to Level design. One power baby grants you double jump, another a booster rocket, and another the ability to dive roll etc.

There are some sections in the game that feel like conceits to draw the run time out, and can be a bit frustrating. One section has you destroying waves of Glorkon minions to fill up a cauldron, and if you fail – you start all waves over. It means you also have to listen to the same assault of verbiage over and over again until you progress to the next section.

The graphics are akin to a Rick and Morty cartoon, and Squanch have done well bringing it’s style into 3D space. Colours are often bright but the simpler aesthetics of a cartoon lends itself well to the limited detail pallet of a VR platform. But the animations and effects here are well designed, and the level of polish is top notch, even if by no means a technical masterpiece.

Sound too is well rounded, if you can tolerate the endless bonkers chatter. It’s handled deftly and with unapologetic intent, and can be amusing to hear a sweeping “John Williams” – esque score underpinning two inept guards waxing irreverent on top of a fort rampart.

Since you can control Trover all around your stationed position, the 360 sound is handled well here, so if Trover is somehow behind you, you can locate him without necessarily having to turn around. This is also true of enemies, though generally action plays out in front of you.

Trover Saves the Universe is a lot of simple fun.

As an action-platformer, it’s not revolutionary and there’s likely not much here that couldn’t be achieved outside of VR. In saying that, being placed inside a Roiland universe definitely heightens the esoteric insanity, and so it’s really down to his brand of humour as to whether you’ll see this game as something more than just the sum of its parts.

The post Trover Saves the Universe (PSVR) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Ever wanted to know what the lovechild of “Ecco the Dolphin” and “Tron” might look like in the form of a VR game?

If you did, firstly – you’re an unusual person, and secondly, Tigertron’s Jupiter and Mars may be your answer.

Humankind has all but abandoned its place on the planet thanks to global warming and the oceans have mostly consumed and reclaimed what they’d left behind. This game implies good riddance, and tasks twin dolphins eponymously named Jupiter and Mars, to restore nature back to its former glory and order, albeit underwater. You know, because dolphins are the true altruistic brains of the sea.

These eco-friendly sentiments aren’t necessarily on the nose, but they are apparent throughout the game – especially when coming across recognizable sunken landmarks such as the statue of liberty.

The game is playable in flat or in VR, but other than offering a more immersive experience in VR it’s all the same, albeit with an expected fidelity knock.

You control Jupiter for navigation, and Mars for the action or interactive components, and since it’s open underwater traversal you have full 360 movement much like you would in flight. These controls work well and transition through axis smoothly enough to settle any potential motion sickness.

Most of the game involves you using echolocation to mark points of interest in your surroundings, such as trapped sea creatures or sunken remains of human technology to destroy. You do this by commanding Mars, who you aren’t directly controlling to rescue or ram, depending on context.

As you proceed through the game you can unlock abilities that help you access places that were previously unreachable, such as being able to dive deeper, or break harder objects that block alternative paths.

This may be precisely the sort of gameplay that adequately passes the time for some people, but I found myself bored to tears with the lack kinetics or regular spectacle often easily achieved through the goggles.

The graphics are very simple in VR, taking a bit of a knock to standard flat gaming as expected which already relied on simple geometry with stylized neon detail.

That said, there are occasional moments that stand out, such as when you’re sharing the space with an enormous whale or recognisable landmark.

A patch has been released now, but when I first booted up the game on PS4 Pro the neon visuals exacerbated the lack of edge refinement and it was a difficult game to look at, even though I could tell there were some nice visuals behind the mediocre post-treatment of it. Thankfully this has been improved via patch on pro, but assuming regular ps4 owners are out of luck.

The music is ethereal and somewhat inspiring, with diegetic blips and warbles of muffled underwater acoustics playing the soundtrack out like a soothing bedtime sleep inducer. It’s all quite pleasant.

There isn’t really too much to Jupiter and Mars, and really it’s just a relaxing, chilled-out ride through an underwater environment. You won’t feel like you’re achieving much or progressing through anything of substance but catharsis is mostly the point here.

Eve though this is definitely not my jam, others may appreciate its subdued quality – I’d only ask whether for this purpose it’s worth going through the untangling and calibration rigmarole of a PSVR unit. Just have a lie down and listen to Enya instead.

The post Jupiter and Mars (PSVR) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Japan Studio of Astrobot fame and Clap Hanz Games creators of Everybody’s Golf have joined forces to release a VR analog to the popular “Everybody’s Golf” series.

It’s about time a golf sim found its way onto Sony’s VR platform, and Everybody’s Golf, being proprietary, seemed an obvious choice. So naturally, I was interested to see how a game that relies on tracking distance, not PSVR’s strong suit, would translate to VR.

The transition to VR has seen a number of cosmetic changes, most notably leaning away from the big-head cartoony treatment of former entries and toward a more realistically proportioned look. The fact that you’re going to be spending a lot of time staring at the face of your caddy or down the shaft of your club meant that things had to be reworked.

But it works, and it’s good fun.

Instantly you find yourself on the driving range running through tutorials to set up your controls and calibrate your stance, height, gender etc. Here you get to work on settling into the controls before putting your newly acquired skills into full swing.

The controls are surprisingly responsive. Since the move controllers emulate the grip of a club quite well, it feels suitably natural in stance – albeit without the weight. So to any who has been on a golf course or driving range before, this feels immediately intuitive.

It’s important to note that the reactions to a hit are designed to be forgiving, and therefore have a more arcade than simulation feel. It’s almost impossible to flub a drive by clipping the top of the ball and have it wobble into the rough a few feet in front of you. You either hit the ball as hard as you swing, or you don’t. The skill comes into the pitch of the club as you connect with the ball, whether you slice or hook it, and some control over distance. This might disappoint some people who want full sim support, but this doesn’t hamper the enjoyment, and still feels pretty satisfying when you place that perfect drive down the center of the fairway.

One complaint though, if size and delivery of your meal is important, is content, and how you access and unlock it.

The main menu is at the reception desk of the clubhouse. It’s here you’re greeted by the cheerful receptionist each time you return. There is not much content here, and most of it is initially locked behind progress markers set mostly through play time. You start with one course, which randomly selects 3 of the available 18 holes to play before spitting you back to the menu. This eventually opens up to front 9, then back 9, then eventually all 18. It’s an unnecessary way of rewarding progress by arbitrary limiting access to a single full course.

Furthermore, there is no competitive mode, league or leaderboard. You play against yourself and yourself only making everything feel like practice. However, the sport of golf is one of few that can be played solo, so I never felt too let down by this. It’s possible that a patch may be released later to expand on these modes.

The other thing I felt was a little awkward was the handling of the caddies. Other than the receptionist, the game is devoid of other human life, so your caddy is your only companion. The game makes a point of reminding you of this. Repetitive unnatural small talk and in-your-face banter gets a bit annoying off the course, but your caddy is definitely helpful with tips and suggestions as you play, responding sometimes with hilarious optimism or euphemism to tragic shots or scores.

It feels like a golf-based dating sim at times – with longer games broken up by having to watch your caddy provocatively eat chocolates in front of you, or suddenly sharing a view on a balcony or beach before getting back to the game. Odd.

Other unlockables include 2 other courses, several other club sets and caddies to choose from, and new outfits for unlocked caddies.

The graphics are nice. The 3 courses have been well designed and have their own distinct flavours and detail. Even though there are a few jaggies here and there, the development team have done well to keep everything clear and viewable. There is a noticeable halo or vignette effect around the edge of your peripheral vision where detail and resolution drops but this isn’t intrusive.

Even small touches like wasps, or pigeons or blowing leaves and dust help create an environment you feel like you’re truly inhabiting.

The sound is equally impressive, with birds chirping, waves ebbing and flowing, planes overhead. It’s great how much care has been put into feeling like you’re out in nature – a large component of enjoyment of golf.

Your club will “swoosh” at a certain speed, and thwacking a ball sounds appropriate to the velocity hit. Similarly, scuffing the ground or sand will make the right impact sound depending on surface type. It really does add to the immersion.

So, Everybody’s Golf VR doesn’t have a huge amount of content, but what it does have is incredibly fun, addicting, and can be played on repeat to beat personal bests and overall scores. If you’re into golf, or even if you aren’t and just want to add something different to your VR library, you can’t go wrong here.

The post Everybody’s Golf (PSVR) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Right off the bad it’s clear that Immortal Legacy is a serious entry into PSVR’s VR collection.

It’s an action adventure shooter with nice graphics and fairly high production values. Crafted by Chinese developer Viva Games, Immortal Legacy establishes atmosphere like few other titles of this ilk on the platform.

As the opening cinematic plays out, setting the scene, you get a sense of what will follow will be a thrilling action adventure shooter.

Your character is a mercenary of some kind on a reconnaissance mission to recover an artefact of some kind in a military occupied archeological environment of some kind. Your voice carries the same distinctly raspy timbre of the Witcher’s “Geralt”, and a quick Google search confirms it’s the same voice actor.

The game opens with a flashback that serves as a movement and shooting tutorial and here it becomes distinctly apparent of the game’s first major flaw, it’s movement and control scheme.

Movement is handled by either move button and it’s cripplingly slow. Both move buttons pressed increases your movement speed slightly, but only to a standard walking pace which ends up becoming frustrating from escaping the chaos of gunfire. Furthermore, the left / right turn buttons are mapped to the lower, outer face buttons of the left / right move controllers which is incredibly unintuitive, and although does settle into muscle memory doesn’t really ever feel quite right.

There is smooth turn, but this is also slow and introduces thick vignette blinders that obscure too much of the screen, so incremental snap turning is oddly preferable here.

These quarrels aside, the game is routinely fun, pushing you down tight rocky corridors cordoned by cliffs, temples or cave walls and peppered with open areas wide enough to constitute the multitude of ‘uncharted’ style gunfights. These feel suitably arcadey, and although the best strategy is peak and shoot, as sluggish movement prohibits any kind of twitch gunplay, popping a headshot is satisfying every time.

Your weapon arsenal grows pretty quickly, and you can dual wield single-handed weapons or select from a variety of assault rifles, grenades, etc. Nothing too inventive here but it works within the more realistic aesthetic and context of the game.

There are also some light puzzle elements for moving through some areas, and these are challenging enough to engage another function of the brain, without being frustrating.

Aesthetically, the game is mostly washed out hues of brown and grey environments, but despite the occasional muddy texture, looks pretty decent – especially the gun models.

Some of the high-tech and “otherworldly” components of the games design contrast nicely against the drab settings when they appear, so that adds some variety.

The cutscenes I found unsettling though. The camera inexplicably removes itself from your perspective and starts cutting between shots, like in a film. Some of the camera positions are odd, and I’m assuming purposed to show off the artwork rather than make contextual sense. It can be jarring suddenly being thrust onto the lap of the antagonist as she’s delivering her monologue.

Sound and voice acting is decent, if unremarkable. The weapons feel suitable punchy and make up for the lack of sensory feedback, such as recoil, not afforded to the move controllers. Music crescendos to build anticipation in all of the right moments and compliments the tension or the action well.

All in all, Immortal Legacy – Jade Cipher requires some patience to get through its frustrating idiosyncrasies but once things start to feel natural, and you’ve accepted the developers peculiar design choices, there is definitely plenty of fun to be had here.

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You wake up in a prison cell, in some arid and orange-hued wasteland. A young falcon hatchling is perched on a nearby window ledge. Through the persuasive properties of a prison snack dispenser, you befriend it almost immediately – and thus you’re introduced to the games core mechanic; Falcon puppetry…or…Puppet falconry.

The first 10 minutes is slow, establishing prologue that has you repeating basic mechanics, labouring the point that you’re a slave prisoner consigned to banal prison duties under the occupation of a single robot prison guard. It could be just drab enough to make anyone requiring an instant hook to possibly concede defeat under the disclaimer of “it’s not for me”. But hang in there… it opens up.

Falcon age at it’s core, is an action adventure game set in a largely one-tone rock and sand, semi open world post apocalypse. It carries the tropes of a society attempting to re-establish itself through primitive means, while a rogue robot corporation holds it under duress.

Your character’s name is Ara, and with the assistance and allegiance of your feathery companion, you inevitably escape the prison and sally forth into this bright but barren world.

From there it’s mostly routine missions, but it’s the falconry mechanic that provides the point of difference.

Your falcon autonomously circles you in close proximity, but by bringing your left hand up to your mouth and hitting the move controller trigger to whistle, you can summon your new pet to your glove. Here you can interact with it in a number of ways, some for gameplay benefits, and some purely to establish a bond.  It’s immediately clear that outer loop games have put effort into making your companion, and the relationship you’re set to develop with it front and center. The animations and movements, from reacting to strokes and fist/talon bumps to the way he shuffles his posture as you move your arm around, is really, genuinely fantastic and makes the falcon feel like a real character.

However when these small details are so well crafted, it makes some of the typical VR immersion breakers, such as clipping, a bit more jarring. It would’ve been nice to have the falcon fly off your hand if you apply to much “pressure” rather than clipping through it. It’s not a deal breaker, but was noticeable considering the detail elsewhere.

Your falcon has a variety of useful gameplay tricks that you gradually unlock mostly through interactions with NPCs.  Initially, it can be ordered to retrieve objects that are out of reach, catch and kill some of the scurrying fauna for their meat, and stun enemies to make them vulnerable to attack.

Furthermore, you’re given an electrified night-stick / whip that provides a variety of functions such as opening gates, chests, breaking wooden boards and, as a weapon, bludgeoning enemies.

These all loop into completing missions that on paper are incredibly pedestrian, such as finding and retrieving lost objects, attacking specific enemies and harvesting their resources, finding ingredients for recipes. A core part of the mission structure has you decommissioning “robot” occupied outposts that are then reclaimed by the world’s displaced inhabitants, allowing you to then pick up new missions or farm for new resources in these areas.  

Shutting down these outposts is fine, but very rinse-and-repeat affair that can get a bit stale. Ultimately you head into the area, shut down “bird targeting” sentry dart turrets by hacking them with your electrified night-stick, then send in the falcon to help you clean up the robot overstayers.

If your falcon is hit with a dart, it will never die but will be injured and unable to assist until you call it back to you so you can manually pluck out the darts. It does feel weirdly cruel if you’re momentarily neglectful and end up having to apply emergency triage to your distressed companion. This a testament to the games ability to maintain a tangible bond with your bird.

Completing rewards earn you rewards that are cosmetic or useful in combat, and there’s some fun to be had dressing your falcon up in the various hats and scarves you’ve scavenged along the way, beginning the question – why has this oppressed society been stockpiling novelty apparel for birds? Meh – who cares.

You can also acquire recipes, and with the right ingredients, can be combined and cooked in specific cook stations, then fed to your falcon to replenish its health or other effects boosters. Outside of health, I never found these combinations useful enough to warrant a trip back to a cook station for a specific booster.

Graphics are a mixed bag. Everything in your immediate surroundings looks great, such as the textures on your glove, satchel and weapon holster and bag. All this including of course your bird all have high def polish. The environments themselves however can look very rough texture wise, despite the Saturday morning cartoon style. The rock edifices can look woefully under resolved in detail and some of the NPC’s look like the rejects from Santas workshop, all having a slightly unsettling elf-puppet conceit. But you learn to chalk this down to a stylised compromise of hardware limitations and settle into it.  

Sound is good – though oddly only SOME of the NPC dialogue, such as the first line, is audible spoken with the rest relegated to subtitle boxes. It was an unusual design choice and I’m left to wonder why they didn’t eliminate dialogue audio altogether if they couldn’t commit to it entirely.

The music is mellow for traversal but crescendos into sweeping soundscapes when the action cranks up. It’s fit for purpose, and despite the repetition doesn’t ever feel intrusive or unwelcome, which means it blends in perfectly to the general atmosphere.  

All in all, the game is fun, interesting and unique enough to be entertaining for a while. Though once this wears off, the repetition of missions and the largely uninspired landscape may not be enough to bear the slog. The bond you are encouraged to maintain with your companion though may be a fascinating enough mechanic on its own to overcome this.

The post Falcon Age (PSVR) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

The Wizards OG Edition was released mid last year for Oculus Rift and Vive, but has spent some time in incubation, awaiting the promised eventual release on PSVR.

Now that it’s arrived – it’s fair to say the port has been somewhat of a successful affair, albeit having never played the original version.

There are two modes, a three-act campaign containing a number of bite-sized Levels, and a fairly pedestrian arena “wave” mode that includes an online leaderboard.

The campaign has you play as a spellcaster and sends you through a number of locations fairly typical of a fantasy setting. You come up against a fairly paltry bestiary of ogres, orcs and goblins to slaughter as well as solving a few light puzzle elements, mostly involving pressure plates and matching enchanted doorways.

There are some collectables, namely red jewels for upgrading your combat tree, or chests containing modifier cards that can be used to assist, or add challenge to your experience.

But the real seller is not the conceit of what you’re doing, it’s in the act of doing so. Your attacks are assigned to a number of gesture-based movements that cast distinctly useful spells, each having their purpose among the different enemy types. And it doesn’t take long before you’ll have unlocked all 5.

Swipe both arms across each other with the move controllers and conjure an ice bow that can quickly dispatch distant or ranged enemies. Quickly flick your right forearm across your body and a light shield materialises, as per Dr Strange. Move opposing arms in a sort’ve Yin-Yang pattern and you have a ring of crystals appear that function as a flurry of enchanted mortar fire. It’s definitely fun, and keeps what could otherwise amount to uninspired “duck shoot” combat interesting.

And it might be uninspired, because if the enemies aren’t attacking you from mounted locations, they’re directly moving in on you or charging you down.

Whether the goblins scuttle quickly, or the ogres lumber slowly, they generally move in a direct line on your position, with little self preservation effort, making most battles a timed calculation of which enemies to pick off first. But not always, as in numbers you can quickly get cornered. Since there isn’t a melee attack, and under pressure conjuring spells at close range can amount to futile, panicked thrashing of the move controllers as they fail to register, the best exit strategy is teleport the heck outta there and re-orient. This is a shame, as the shield could’ve easily have doubled as a melee.

One other issues is tracking.

Both the head and hands have issues, both in technical limitation and design choice. If you want to hurl a fireball grenade at an enemy, you have to have your head trained on the enemy until a lock-on reticle appears above their head. If you don’t, or the lock-on disengages, the physics applied to your projecting has a mind of its own and could shoot-off in any direction if your head happens to wobble just a bit. This was frustrating. Furthermore, the two move controllers have some tracking issues when placed near each other, making the bow and arrow sometimes hard to steady. After a bit of practice, there were ways of getting around this, but the problem never disappeared.

Graphics are pretty good, if not particularly great. It’s a lot of masonry arches, rocks, wooden pillars etc, the staple of much geometry and texture work in many VR games. An aspect of the presentation that does stand out tough is some of the light destruction on objects like crates and statues. It’s fun to arbitrarily smash this stuff up and watch the rubble and splinters fly when otherwise wandering through nondescript hallways.

Sound is decent also. Your journey is guided by a storybook style narrator who acts like a dictatorial inner conscience, telling you where to go, where to look out for danger or just stating the obvious. It would be easy for this to get irritating but it never really does, and feels more like a disembodied companion.

The attacks sound like you expect them too, and some of the other non-digetic ambience such as panflute score or drum crescendos during action are routine but inoffensive for a fantasy game.

The binaural placement of player footsteps seemed a bit off though. They often sounded like they were coming from a character walking directly behind the player in perfect step. But this was only noticeable when I was conscious of it.

All in all, The Wizards – Enhanced Edition is a fun, yet unremarkable VR experience that never really outstays its welcome through its half-dozen hour play time.

Unless you’re just shilling for the absolute cream of the PSVR library, then this may be a satisfying itch to scratch until the next must-have drops.

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