WINDLANDS VR
With great power, great queasiness
You might be using grapple ropes rather than slinging webs, but as you fasten onto a tree and hurtle forward, the wind whistling past your ears, Windlands offers an exhilarating sensation that might just make you imagine you’re Spider-Man. Unfortunately, for me it’s more like SpiderMan with a raging hangover. Having safely negotiated most of the PS VR launch titles with only the occasional wobbly moment, I scoff at the intro screen warning that recommends five-minute play sessions for those who haven’t yet found their VR legs. Within 15 minutes, I come perilously close to seeing breakfast again.
Ostensibly you’re tasked with collecting crystals and tablets across a series of floating archipelagos, but these goals come second to the natural desire to probe the world’s crannies, to swing to its furthest reaches and ascend its tallest peaks. 1 On the standard difficulty, the grapples (activated by the triggers) can only latch onto shrubs and trees; I find it more fun on the easy setting, which lets me grapple onto other objects, cutting out the frustration of falling just before a checkpoint.
Though you can tweak several settings to make things more comfortable, 2 I still struggle to last more than half an hour before needing a break. Counter-intuitively, one of the default settings makes things worse – turning is handled in jarring steps, which not only makes it difficult to line up jumps, but proves more nauseating than the “smooth” option. With bland art blunting the impulse to explore, Windlands struggles to build upon its robust swinging mechanic. For all that grappling, it has too few hooks.