ZONE OF THE ENDERS: THE 2ND RUNNER – MARS
Retro recall
As it’s a remaster of a remaster of a 15-year-old Hideo-Kojima-produced mech shooter you’d be forgiven for ignoring this one. But closer inspection reveals a tiny w in the bottom corner of the main menu, which, once clicked, turns this game into a PS VR mini-masterpiece. You can now play the entire game in virtual reality, sitting inside your mech’s cockpit. 1 Better still, you can swap between traditional and VR modes at any point in the game.
Whether in VR or playing traditionally the action is identical and ‘of its time’. Each mission is a simple corridor filled with cannon fodder and shows its age; the eventual boss battles, however, are brilliantly inventive. These grand puzzle fights demand you discover the villain’s exploitable weakness, and they’re worth wading through the fodder for.
Your mech comes with homing lasers and a giant sword, and an auto lock ensures you never need to track enemies. As the game progresses you earn sub-weapons, special upgrades that include shotgun-like blasts, homing rockets, and machine guns.
It’s fun and twitchy, and it really shouldn’t be as good as it is in VR. The game runs at a chaotic pace (this remaster in traditional mode is 60fps in 4K) as you zip around the screen and zoom up close for melee strikes. But it does work, as it’s effectively teleporting you from enemy to enemy if using melee, and playing out like a classic arcade shooter if using homing lasers. 2 If you’ve never played the series, it’s time to start; if you have, then there’s no better reason to own PS VR. Ian Dean