Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition is free in December for PlayStation Plus subscribers, but you might be disappointed with the other PS4 game. The new lineup of six games will be free starting December 5.
The post ‘Darksiders II’ leads the charge for December’s PlayStation Plus lineup appeared first on Digital Trends.
Did you know Sony has its very own PlayStation Awards? We didn’t, but they apparently took place today in Japan, and some of PlayStation VR’s (PSVR’s) best games picked up awards.
This year’s show featured a PlayStation VR Special Award category, which recognized games that have made a special contribution towards the headset over the past 12 months. The winners aren’t super surprising for the most part.
First up is Farpoint, the PlayStation Aim-enabled shooter set on an alien planet. It’s one of the first stabs at bringing a full first-person shooter (FPS) to PSVR, and the Aim controller makes it more immersive than ever, so we’re not surprised to see it pick up an award. The same goes for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which remains one of the best — and easily the most terrifying — games on the platform today despite only have optional PSVR support.
Finally, we have a quirky one: Summer Lesson: Allison Snow. Only released in Japan and China, this bizarre little game has you mentoring school girls and taking them out on trips. Still no word on if this one will ever make its way west, sadly.
Elsewhere, Resident Evil 7 picked up a Gold Prize for selling over 500,000 copies in Japan (both at retail and digitally) as well as a Users Choice award.
You can watch the awards for yourself in English below.
You there! Yes, you! Get your head out of Skyrim for a moment; there’s a new VR game on the block, and it’s got all the action you could ask for.
Yes, Bethesda’s Doom VFR is arriving tomorrow on PlayStation VR (PSVR) and HTC Vive. We’ve just published a lengthy review on the former version (Vive impressions are still on the way). It’s got some issues but, if you still haven’t made your mind up on if it’s for you or not, we’re going to be hosting a lengthy livestream showing the game off today.
Check back to this very post at 7am PT/10am ET/3pm GMT for yours truly running and gunning his way through hell. Warning: it’s going to be bloody.
Black Friday is a period that publishers, developers and hardware manufacturers pay very close attention to. The week-long period around Black Friday has been a positive one for the PlayStation VR this year.
Though Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has been cagey about its official sales figures for the PlayStation VR, but many outlets and retailers have been reporting that, overall, PlayStation VR has been doing very well in terms of sales, even beating out the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift and hitting the top spot on Amazon’s Black Friday Top Seller lists.
SIE decided to capitalise on this success for the Black Friday period by offering a number of Black Friday bundles, dropping the price to £249.99 (GBP). There are three bundle variants, all of which contain the headset and PlayStation Camera, along with either a digital code for PlayStation VR Worlds, or The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR, or Gran Turismo Sport. These bundle offers offered a tempting prospect for those shopping for Christmas presents.
Many retailers, including Smyths Toy Store, sold out of the Black Friday deals, leaving customers searching for retailers who still had the bundles in stock. The inclusion of PlayStation VR Worlds in one of the bundles meant that that title’s position in the UK Gaming Charts took a huge nine-place jump up to No 11 in the charts.
GFK Chart-Track also confirms that sales of the PlayStation VR overall were impressive, almost matching the figures achieved during the PlayStation VR launch week in 2016. With a number of hotly anticipated PlayStation VR titles still awaiting release in 2018, such as Golem and Xing: The Land Beyond, with others expected to be announced at the upcoming PlayStation Experience event, leading many experts and analysts to forecast that the PlayStation VR sales success will continue into next year, at least.
VRFocus will bring you further news on the PlayStation VR as it becomes available.
If you enjoy the odd virtual reality (VR) boardgame or two then you’ll have probably been keeping an eye on developer Experiment 7 and its upcoming title Catan VR which the studio announced work on in September. Scheduled to launch this holiday season, the studio has now opened a call for players to sign up to a closed beta.
A joint project between Catan GmbH, Catan Studio, Asmodee Digital and Experiment 7, Catan VR remains true to the classic, but optimised for VR. Gameplay involves players taking the role of settlers who need to establish colonies on the islands of Catan, acquiring resources to build infrastructure and roads whilst engaging in trade with other players, all with aim of growing large enough to get the ten victory points needed to win.
Featuring both single-player and multiplayer online modes, up to four people can play against one another, whether they happen to be on Oculus Rift or Samsung Gear VR. They are the only two headsets confirmed so far but Experiment 7 has said additional VR platforms will follow.
“The first time I saw Catan on the Magic Table, I was fascinated by what VR has to offer,”Catan creator Klaus Teuber previously said. “The game I made in our living room with my family 25 years ago in Virtual Reality? It’s incredible. I never imagined actually stepping into the world of Catan when we first started making cut-outs and dreaming about exploring new lands.”
The Catan VR closed beta is free to sign up to, simply head to the Experiment 7 website and enter an email address.
The studio specialises in VR boardgames having already released Dungeon Chess and Magic Table Chess for Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Catan VR and Experiment 7, keeping you up to date with the latest announcements.
Editor’s Note: A lot of the issues we encountered with Doom VFR on PSVR were down to the limitations of the headset and the controllers. As such, we’ve decided to assign a score just to the PSVR version for now and will update this article with Vive impressions (and potentially a change in score) once we’ve had a chance to try it out.
There probably isn’t a better barometer for how far gaming has come in the past two and a half decades than Doom VFR. It’s nearly 24 years ago to the day that the original classic revolutionized gaming with its 3D first-person view that rooted players in the center of the action and now id Software is bringing us closer to the demon-slaying than ever before with one of the first full VR first-person shooters (FPSs) based on an AAA franchise.
For all our fond memories of Doom 1993, though, it’s easy to forget that it didn’t have all the answers; you couldn’t look up and down, for example, and the game technically only provided the illusion of being in 3D with clever graphical trickery. Somewhat fittingly, Doom VFR is much the same story.
Rather than creating an original adventure from scratch, id has remixed the campaign from the excellent 2016 reboot for Doom VFR. It takes about a quarter of the locations and, from what I can remember, all of the enemies and weapons, dresses them up in a fresh but instantly forgettable story and tweaks the controls to make it as immersive and as comfortable as possible inside a VR headset. The result is a handful of levels forming a two to four-hour-long campaign depending on the difficulty you pick (I played on hard). Each of these will see you travel to different locations at the Union Aerospace Corporation on Mars, which is overrun by demons of all shapes and sizes. Without spoiling anything, you’ll later visit another location seen in the 2016 campaign.
It’s a shame not to be getting an all-new game or a full port of last year’s shooter (Bethesda has ported all of Skyrim and Fallout 4 to VR), though it’s certainly better than nothing. On the bright side, it means that this is a VR game already built upon a rock-solid foundation; Doom VFR’s enemy variety is unmatched in VR and every encounter has its own twists and turns, be it through the sheer overwhelming odds or the verticality of an environment that keeps you on the run.
You’ll blast baddies back to hell with one of three control setups. Firstly, the game’s seemingly designed for two handheld motion controllers (either Move on PSVR or the wands on Vive), which allow you to wield one gun with your right hand and a grenade/grenade launcher with your left. You can also play with a DualShock 4 or gamepad, which assigns aiming of both weapons to head-tracking or, on PSVR, you can use the new Aim controller to handle your right gun, while the left hand is still assigned to your head. Movement also comes in three flavors: a primary teleport mechanic (which can be used to teleport into stunned enemies to shower yourself in their blood), a quick dash to avoid incoming fire, and smooth locomotion for those that can stomach it on compatible controllers.
How much you enjoy Doom VFR is largely going to depend on what platform you play it on and with what controller. Though it was seemingly first designed with it in mind, the Move controls on PSVR are easily the worst way to play thanks to some truly woeful implementation. For starters, there’s no option to turn in increments on the controllers, instead only turning 180 degrees at a time. This gives you just enough freedom to navigate the facility with the teleport option (there’s no smooth locomotion for Move), but in circular rooms it’s incredibly awkward to use, especially in the rush of battle. PSVR’s limited tracking means that, if you fight an enemy off to the side you’ll have to deal with jittery weapons that are more difficult to aim. Vive’s 360 degree tracking, meanwhile, makes this much less of a problem.
Dashing on Move is assigned to the face buttons on the left controller, which themselves don’t actually represent a direction. I often needed to dash out of the way of a heavy hitter, only to press the wrong button and jump right into the enemy, leading to a quick death (though another button smartly pushes enemies surrounding you away by a few meters). When it works, the Move controller feels great, especially as you unleash a storm of chaingun fire into a crowd of shambling zombies, but there are just far too many speedbumps getting in the way of the experience. It’s clear the game was designed with the teleporting, dual-wielding setup in mind but, seeing as Doom requires you to be on the move at all times, smooth locomotion is much more preferable than having to constantly jump across a room (though I would use this mechanic to avoid enemy attacks).
The Aim controller fares just a little better, though it’s still stiff. Its implementation feels very last minute; I couldn’t aim down the sights of a gun without it clipping into my face, and it’s extremely off-putting to see your grenade hand lifelessly attached to the left side of the screen. It’s disappointing id didn’t go back and retool the game to work much more naturally with Aim like Vertigo Games did for Arizona Sunshine; holding a heavy assault rifle in your hands should feel empowering, but it instead comes off as clumsy. The dual analog sticks mean you can use smooth locomotion which makes the game drastically easier (and much more fun) than if you just rely on the teleporting.
In the end, I surprisingly settled on just the standard DualShock 4 controls for the PSVR version. It’s the most solid, dependable way to play the game, with full locomotion and a much better button layout than on either Aim or Move. It allows you to rediscover a bit of that satisfying combat flow that made the original tick, with a few new additions of its own. Teleporting behind a charging enemy, for example, and then quick-turning and firing a rocket into their backs is extremely satisfying. Playing this way gives the game an existential crisis, though, as it essentially means you’re not just playing a shorter, blurrier version of a great shooter from last year. Sadly, that’s about the best the game can muster on PSVR.
There are moments of VR awesomeness to be had, of course; blowing the head off of a Baron of Hell and watching its entire body slam down in front of you had me wanting to high-five the nearest person, while blasting enemies mid-air as you spring off of a launch pad will have you cackling with laughter. But these instances aren’t enough to overlook the far more common moments in which you’re fighting the game’s controls more than you are its demons.
(Editor’s Note: As explained above, this review is solely focused on the PSVR version right now. Additional impressions will be added here once we’ve had hands-on time with the Vive version.)
Whereas last year’s game expertly paced its action, slowly introducing one new enemy or a different weapon at a time, VFR’s short run time throws you in at the deep end from the start. The bulk of enemy types, which teleport into battles set in arena-style locations, show up within the first hour and you’ll find a new gun to play with every 20 minutes or so. It’s like a whirlwind tour of hell, and I often wished the game would take a little time to slow things down, though there are the same secrets and collectibles from last year’s game to hunt for. I also encountered a handful of glitches — one that forced me to reset and replay a 15 minute section — and the UI is somewhat poorly integrated. Objectives, for example, are suck to the left side of the screen and if you try to turn to look at them, they just move further away.
While Skyrim VR made a great case for the VR port, Doom VFR brings us back to the drawing board. On PSVR, the game has its moments, largely thanks to the foundations it was built upon with the 2016 original. In the end, though, the real fight is with its awkward control setups that eventually led me back to play with just a standard gamepad. Though the foundations of a hugely enjoyable shooter are intact, VFR’s struggle with the platform’s limitations makes it feel like the VR support is holding it back more than anything.