TIME CARNAGE

A prehistoric shooter

Motion sickness has been eliminated in this shooter by taking away the root cause: movement itself. Initially this is disappointing, as each level is a static environment. Then from out of the shadows come the walking dead, dinosaurs, and mechanical death machines hellbent on putting an end to you, a snoopy time hopper. 1

The meat of the game comes from your need to juggle four weapons that sit on pillars around you. Using PS Move controllers, you can grab a gun in each hand to fend off the waves of enemies. To reload you release the PS Move button and your gun returns to a pillar. Each wave becomes a juggling act as you grab, spray, reload, and grab again. Shooting is accurate and the grab-and-gun idea works well – there’s even a hint of emergent strategy when it comes to judging loadouts and timing reloads. However, when a game plays this simply it’s easier to see the cracks: the creature models, AI that walks into your bullets, and repetitive attack patterns – zombie, robot, or ogre, they all shamble in the same way.

There are four time zones in the main campaign, each with multiple scenes, which reward you with new weapons on completion. There are points bonuses for headshots, and shooting temporal paradoxes slows time, 2 but when the action’s this simple, slowing it down feels criminal.

Once time itself has been defeated at the end of a smoking gun, you can dip into Arcade mode to test your accuracy, or tackle Challenge mode, which offers perkbuffed scenarios to overcome. But it’s all too simple, and a little basic, and aside from brief moments of arcade fun brings little new to PS VR. Ian Dean

FOOTNOTES1 You’re like a time-hopping Ernest Hemingway looking to score big. 2 You can even target exploding red barrels. Who doesn’t love an old-fashioned red barrel?