The Therapist Gamer

PlayStation VR Worlds consists of five short games that were originally designed to demo virtual reality to the press.  Most of them are pretty well developed and all together they offer a wide variety of experiences. However, some of them feel pretty much like demos and it's a shame that there isn't more to them. You can play all of them with a standard Dualshock but the London Heist works best with the Move motion controllers. Below I've included gameplay videos for each experience.

 

The London Heist is probably the best experience on offer.  You are placed in several different scenarios, including tied to an interrogation chair, making a (criminal) business deal in a pub, rifling through someone's desk in search of a diamond, and a highway shootout. I thought the shooting was fun even though the situation was somewhat standard.  It just feels very cool to duck behind a desk as bullets fly towards you, and fire at bad guys through holes in the desk. I think it serves as a great example of how a fully fledged game could work in VR.

 

Scavengers Odyssey is probably the next biggest experience.  You play as an alien piloting some sort of six-legged spacecraft.  You jump around a structure in space and crawl through space stations.  There are enemies to shoot at but they're pretty plain.  This is the first VR game I played where I felt motion sick - it was mostly from jumping long distances.  I think that this is another good example of how a fully fledged VR game could work, but the designers probably need to address a few things first.  For example, there were a few points where you are temporarily transported to a mysterious void, and during the transition the screen goes completely white.  Imagine literally everything in your field of view, and everywhere you look, is bright white.  Oh man, it's horrible.  I don't know what they were thinking.

 

I was really excited to try out the VR Luge game - you zip down city streets while lying on a longboard.  You control by tilting your head - if you were lying down as your character is then the body movements you'd make to move in real life would move your head in the same way that the game tracks your movements.  In short, you just make tiny movements with your head left and right.  The game is pretty fun, but I was disappointed with it.  There are four races but they are all on essentially the same track - just with a few variations.  Additionally, the graphics are really poor.  I'm not sure why they aren't as good as the other games in PlayStation VR Worlds, but the graphics are problematic.  When you are flying down a city street at 100 miles an hour you'll want to look ahead and anticipate obstacles or the curve of the road.  But things are just blurry.  Part of this is inherent to the PSVR headset (one 1080p screen for two eyes), but I think they could have addressed this to minimize the problems.

 

Danger Ball is like pong, but you are at one end of a square tube with your opponent at the other end.  You control a paddle by moving your head around.  It sounds like an awkward way to play, but it actually works really well.  Of all of the games on the disk, it's probably the one that could independently be called a game. There are a variety of opponents that each have different abilities, and you play through most of them with only a few lives in order to complete the game.  It's pretty hard!

 

Ocean Descent was the first glimpse journalists got of PSVR. It has three short demos (each one consisting of the prior one plus a bit more) where you stand stationary in a shark cage and look around at the ocean life.  Since it is so tame it's the perfect thing to show someone who has never tried VR. I showed my wife the five minute demo and she was saying "whoa" pretty much the whole time!  It's pretty cool but after you've played it once the main enjoyment you'll get from it is showing it to other people.

 

All in all, I think PlayStation VR Worlds is a good game for people new to VR.  After some time with VR has passed, I imagine this collection of games will not be particularly compelling to customers, but it's pretty good for what it is.