Jump scares feel much more effective when you’re in the immersive space created in a VR headset.
While designers generally haven’t cracked the best kind of gameplay for VR, more experiential content lends itself well, including horror. You can alter the distance between them with the thumbsticks, but it feels far clunkier than the one-to-one correspondence of the Move controllers. The gamepad still allows you to aim by moving it around, but both guns are locked facing the same direction. It’s also possible to play with the DualShock controller, but it’s definitely an inferior experience. Each of your guns also acts as a flashlight, which is both atmospheric as a way to explore your dark surroundings, and practical in helping you aim at distant targets. While the challenges of moving around have prevented designers from freely porting conventional shooters into VR, the act of shooting itself is categorically improved by the medium. Shooting at multiple targets with a PS Move controller in each hand feels badass, especially if you’ve never particularly gelled with gamepad first-person gunplay controls. As other VR shooters like Hover Junkers and Bullet Train have already demonstrated, shooting in VR with motion controllers is intuitive and fun, and Rush of Blood is no different.
With the cart setting your pace, you are free to focus entirely on shooting both the monsters that jump out at you and the inanimate targets dotting the landscape in between. Cockpit-bound games like Rush of Blood, which is framed as a literal rollercoaster ride, sidesteps the issue by creating an in-game excuse to take movement out of your control. Realistically you aren’t more liable to lose your lunch than on a standard roller coaster: Aside from a few stomach-dropping moments when the ride really picks up, it’s mostly smooth sailing. Controlling your feet with conventional controls can create a motion sickness-inducing dissonance between what you see and what you feel. Short of the HTC Vive’s room-scale experience, movement can be awkward in VR.
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, A VR spin-off of niche favorite PS4 horror game, Until Dawn, serves up a well-made if predictable on-rails shooting gallery for PlayStation VR.īy combining a lot of what we know works for sure, developer Supermassive Games has produced a solid, if not particularly ambitious experience for players who are new to virtual reality.
Until then, however, there are a few tropes that we know to work particularly well in VR. Fitbit Versa 3ĭespite the hype, virtual reality is still in its relative infancy, and we’re still waiting for the breakthrough design that justifies the medium with a new kind of play that couldn’t exist otherwise.