PlayStation VR Game Lineup Springs Ahead This Season

Last year VR was the hotness. Oculus and HTC Vive dominated the high-price specs talk while PlayStation VR deftly positioned itself as the economical, plug-n-play alternative. New hardware launches are always precarious, let alone new genres of hardware, and all eyes in 2017 are on what, exactly, early adopters will be able to play on their shiny, expensive toys. The landscape is broader for PC VR fans, with 455 listings currently on Steam for VR-enabled titles. For PSVR users, the options shrink considerably. Around 175 titles have been confirmed for the PSVR, of those 75 still have no firm release date and only about 45 are exclusive to PSVR. But quality trumps quantity, especially on a platform where bad quality means you could literally end up riding the vomit comet.

We got to preview Sony’s PSVR spring lineup at an event in NYC. There were five titles on display, and if you’re a PSVR owner looking to make a purchase in the coming months here’s how we rank your options.

#1: Star Trek: Bridge Crew

Boldly go where no VR has gone before - the bridge of a United Federation of Planets vessel. Ubisoft and Red Storm Studios have created an addictive, immersive VR experience through smart licensing and practical game development. Star Trek: Bridge Crew puts players in one of four roles inside the Aegis, an all-new ship created for the game, or on the bridge of the original USS Enterprise. Each team has a captain giving orders to a helmsman, tactical combat officer and engineer. Players must interact with touch screens or analog toggles to perform various functions, like charging the warp coils or scanning escape pods for life forms.

In our demo we truly felt like we were on the deck of a starship making harrowing, life-or-death decisions. The strength of Star Trek: Bridge Crew is the way it emphasizes the things PSVR does well. The PlayStation Move controllers can be cumbersome, as game devs feel compelled to map lots of functions onto their many buttons. Star Trek: Bridge Crew wisely uses only two: the trigger lets you tap buttons and panels and the big PlayStation button in the middle of the controller shows an outside view of the ship for easier navigation and targeting. Exploring an open world in PSVR still feels clunky, but if your game sets out to simulate sitting in one place, guess what? It feels totally natural to sit in one place as you play.

Star Trek Bridge Crew accommodates 1-4 players, so you don’t always need a real-life crew to have a daring space adventure. And it comes with an “endless” mode of procedurally generated scenarios so you can continue to play long after you finish the campaign. No word yet on a Kobayashi Maru DLC.

#2: Starblood Arena

Non barfy VR is easier said than done. Starblood Arena , a new Descent- inspired FPS coming to PSVR on April 11, manages to pull it off. Players take their pick of nine pilots, each unique in an Overwatch- y sort of way. Multiplayer battles (4 v 4) take place inside sci-fi/industrial themed spheres, where the Z axis is your best friend and worst enemy. Ship controls are handled by the dualshock controller, but the actual aiming is done visually. Where you look is where you shoot. Like all things VR it can take some getting used to, but not all VR games are good enough to make this kind of thing intuitive. Starblood Arena does, though, and after just a few minutes in the game I was confidently aiming and maneuvering and blowing up bots (in Easy mode).

There are several game modes, including a quasi-sports based game similar to Halo ’s Grifball where players compete to get a ball into the opponent’s goal before being shot down and disabled. We didn’t get a chance to spend enough time with the game to know if the character control nuance is as strong as the character design, i.e. if each character feels markedly different from the others. But the overall level of polish and fluidity has us convinced that Starblood Arena deserves to find an audience on PSVR. If it can get a thriving community behind it (and a spectator mode for Twitch and Esports) then it has the potential to be a standout multiplayer experience.

#3 Statik

Do you like puzzles? If not, you won’t like Statik . But if you do, hoo boy. It is a very intriguing puzzle game and, like Star Trek Bridge Crew , a PSVR title that knows exactly where the technical sweetspot is for the hardware. Players are tasked with solving one of several puzzle box contraptions that, in the game world, are stuck onto your hands. You use the dualshock controller to activate various switches and levers and toggles on these boxes, and have to physically rotate the controller to turn the box this way and that in an attempt to discover what all the buttons do.

Things get a bit more interesting than just a standard puzzle game. The PSVR allows players to look around the room, which turns out to be the laboratory of an anonymous scientist who is testing you, somehow, as you solve the puzzles. Hidden among this dystopian vibe are often several clues to the puzzle box itself, many of them quite subtle. For example, in the puzzle we solved a grid of colored lights needed to match a particular pattern that could be discerned from the arrangement of some coffee cups on a nearby desk.

#4: The Persistence

Firesprite is no stranger to new hardware. The roots of the studio go all the way back to the original PlayStation, when members of The Persistence team worked on the smash hit Wipeout . So it’s no surprise that they’re diving right into uncharted development on the PSVR, launching a horror/sci-fi game that manages to bring couch co-op to PSVR by way of a clever app. While one person plays The Persistence with the PSVR headset, up to three others can get in on the action via a companion app for the game. It works on iOS and Android stuff and lets players do things like freeze enemies, open doors and highlight points of interest in the environment. There’s an added twist; sometimes it rewards players for working against each other so if you’re in the VR environs, you need to consider the possibility of betrayal and deception. Exciting.

In terms of gameplay, we didn’t get enough time to form a full impression of the experience. Like other first-person VR games, The Persistence relies heavily on a teleportation system that has you lilypadding from one spot to the next. The procedurally-generated levels were all richly detailed though, and combat involved using an industrial strength taser to shock and awe some space zombies. But first-person action games are the ones that tend to drag the most in VR, if only because the way you move is so different than what you’re used to from years of dual analog FPS controls. Still, if you’re in the market for a VR experience that can entertain other players as much as yourself, you’d be wise to check out The Persistence .

#5: Farpoint

Farpoint is the lone game in the PSVR line-up we can’t wholeheartedly endorse. It’s a first-person shooter, with emphasis on shooter. It requires the PlayStation VR Aim Controller, a $60 peripheral that mimics a rifle, and tracks both the gun and your body really well. Crouch in real life and you’ll crouch in the game, lean out from cover or blindfire over it and it’ll catch that too. The landscape is well-designed for VR, a sunlit spacescape full of boulders and blindspots to hide behind. Your job is to go through and annihilate a variety of sci-fi foes ranging from large AT-AT style robots to Starship Trooper -esque space bugs. On the surface it sounds awesome.

But, man, those controls are not easy to figure out. Unlike Star Trek Bridge Crew or Statik , Farpoint ambitiously goes for a full-on, 3D open-world immersion. But the tech just isn’t there yet. Trying to do things like turn around quickly became stiff and clunky. It didn’t feel open-world so much as it felt like rails to nowhere. We struggled through two rounds before being mercifully removed from the demo. Other players seemed to fare better, so it’s possible we just “didn’t get it.” But the other games on display in the spring PSVR showcase didn’t take getting used to, and with VR, that’s a big part of the challenge. If you’re trying to learn what the FPS genre is doing in the PSVR space then Farpoint (bundled with the Aim Controller for $80) is for you. But if you’re looking for fun titles that show off what PSVR does best, you’ve got at least four other options this spring.