Playstation VR Demo

While we have talked about Playstation VR on our first official episode on iTunes, I figured I would throw down a few impressions here as well from my experience at the event.  I sat down with London Heist and Eve Valkyrie while I saw some other people experience other things like the deep sea game with the shark and Battlezone were you are in a tank.

First off, let's talk about the headset itself.  This thing is very comfortable.  Like, way more than I thought it was going to be.  On the back there is just a button you hold to extend the head strap and they have a separate one on the front to adjust the VR screen to the front of your face.  So not only can you fit it nicely on your head, but you can fix it to your viewpoint separately and get it as snug as you would like.  There were a few people there that had glasses, and I had asked if it felt uncomfortable or if it fit well (as you can get a little bit of light sneaking into the bottom) but they had nothing bad to say.  And the buttons to fit it the way you like feel snappy and nice.  Plus, this thing just looks pretty cool too haha.  Of course because of it also being that whole 2 HDMI set up were you have 2 different view points, it's important to get the fit right.


So typically when you watch a quick look of a game in VR, you get the experience that someone has viewed on the TV itself.  Of course that is obvious, but the reason I bring it up is because at first I was wondering if maybe I didn't have the headset adjusted right because it is definitely a rougher image when viewing it through the headset.  So it's a little bit of a thing to adjust to, but when you start playing, it's something you quickly don't care about.

Before I gave it a go, I watched some other people experiencing virtual reality with a few things.  The kid pictured to the left here was actually getting a little freaked out by the shark saying "it's right there!  oh no oh no."  He genuinely felt immersed in what was happening around him.  You can see he is clutching the side of his chair here.

This guy here was playing Eve.  This one you have full control over your ship with the Dualshock 4 but you can look around with the VR headset to assess the situation and aim missiles.  The odd thing about a lot of people playing the Dualshock Controller based games, is that a lot of them didn't look around at all.  Which to me, kinda defeats the purpose (unless you are just using it as a TV)

Let's talk about London Heist first though.  I think a lot of people gravitated towards this one because you got the full PSVR experience.  Not only did you get to look around freely with the Headset, but you also got to use the Move controllers to simulate your hands and aim guns and go nuts.  The crazy thing about this demo is that you can mess with almost everything in the car that you are in.  Open the glovebox to grab clips for our uzi (which are unlimited), grab an old soda and try and drink it (I think we all did), change the radio station, the AC, flip down the visor; a lot of stuff.  Before I was handed the gun, I even grabbed a clip and would toss it back and forth between my hands - it worked alright.  

Basically, this demo just has a getaway driver to your right as you play an on rails style shooter.  You reload the gun by grabbing another clip and making the motion to put it into the gun itself with your move controllers.  The cool thing here was that, while most people would look to their bag of ammo or the clips they through on the dashboard to grab and then reload, you could actually just reach over and snag them without looking while you continue to aim and tag guys off their bikes.  I was even able to grab the door with one hand, open it up, and lean out to shoot behind our vehicle to take dudes out!  Overall, this was a neat game to try everything out with. 

Up next was of course Eve Valkyrie.  This game is a great showcase for using the controller in conjunction with the Playstation VR.  Controlling your space fighter and being able to look around in dogfights is pretty rad.

You get to take your time before you launch out of the main ship and into the battle here, which was cool because it gave me time to just look around at the ship and try and do things.  You could look down and see your body, but of course you couldn't move your hands as they were just using the Dualshock.  But, it was still interesting to see that as well as having the avatar lean a bit with you to help simulate the correct feel.  And I won't lie; I could totally get some of that feel when launching out of the ship.  You shoot down this runway of sorts and jet out into space, and it's crazy to think about how your body can take that in.  The gameplay itself is sort of standard - you move around with the controller, shoot with R2 roll the ship with L1 and R1, but of course it's all enhanced by being able to view everything around you.  Missiles were set to L2, but their is a trick to it.  You hold L2 to start the lock on sequence, but you have to look at your target with the headset in order to set what object you are locking to.  It's awesome once you know because you can be chasing down one ship, look to your left and fling out some missiles without having to turn your whole spacecraft around and veer off target.  It's was a pretty cool game not only to play, but to look around.  I want to play more of this.

Also, like I said above, it was really odd to me that nobody would even look around with the headset in this game.  Even more so because that's how your locked on with your missiles (which I told some of those dudes that's how it worked).

All in all, I can't wait to give it another go in August.

-Eddie