GUNGRAVE VR
What a load of shoot
Amazing; innovative; beautiful; compelling. These words and many more are entirely inappropriate when describing this thing. Perhaps you have fond memories of the original PlayStation 2 games, and/or the anime that followed. If so… stick with those. Trust me. This is just a shoddy shooting gallery crowbarred into PS VR in an unsuccessful attempt to hide how terrible it is. Alarm bells start ringing before the tutorial is even over, when a bug appears to prevent i working on V1 DualShocks (helpfully, this is the allimportant ‘shoot’ button). Fortunately – or, on reflection, perhaps not – I have a V2 to hand to plough on.
The idea of a PS VR shooter that offers both third- and first-person perspectives is fine and dandy. It can be helpful to change the way you view a scene according to the situation, after all. You don’t get to choose in Gungrave VR, though; sometimes you see your character, sometimes you don’t. Playing in third person, you can move (with all the speed and enthusiasm of somebody who’s soiled themselves), dodge, and reflect projectiles. Playing in first person, you’re inexplicably rooted to the spot as though struck with the sudden realisation that you spent real money on this garbage.
GRAVE MISTAKE
There are only five levels to the game, and they’re all rubbish. Dumb, low-resolution enemies appear in waves – occasionally in numbers too large to effectively defend against – and shoot at you until they’re dead, and are replaced by more of the same. Rinse and repeat until a dumb, low-resolution boss or mini-boss appears.
The bosses are in fact the one positive(ish) thing about the experience. The designs are great, and they really ought to grace a much better game than this. The actual fights, sadly, are awful. The firstperson ones are by far the worst; firing your guns pretty much blinds you, making it impossible to aim with precision at many targets.
It’ll take you more than 45 minutes to whip through the five tiny stages only because they’re made to artificially drag, especially the last two. Gungrave VR even manages to make piloting an armed flying bike tedious, which is a staggering achievement in all the wrong ways.