Ian explores space in the dizzying Detached for Playstation VR
It's one small spew for man, one giant spew for mankind.
Blimey, you wait an age for a space-based sci-fi game to come along on Playstation VR and then two show up at once! What are the chances of that? Astronomical, I'd say!
On this week's episode of Ian's VR Corner I dive headfirst into the PSVR version of Detached, a space exploration game that was released on the very same day as the wonderfully scary and highly recommended, The Persistence.
Detached is probably the most intense VR experience I've featured on IVC so far and, by its developer's own admission, it's a game for experienced VR users only.
The entire game is set in zero gravity, meaning the player character in Detached has a full, six degrees of freedom control scheme; similar to standard 6DoF games like Descent or Sublevel Zero.
What that means is you won't just be walking backwards and forwards, or left and right, like in normal VR games. You'll also be moving up and down as well as pitching, yawing and rolling, and quite often you'll be combining all of these motions at the same time.
Now, I consider myself to have a pretty steady set of VR legs but even for me, some of the movements here had my stomach lurching. The yawing especially sent my inner-ear into meltdown and I felt rather peculiar for about 5 hours after removing the headset, even though I'd settled into the control scheme after about an hour of play.
Detached is a gorgeous looking game and it captures the beauty of space magnificently, so when you're not trying to hold your dinner down you'll certainly be able to take in some truly magnificent views.
It's a shame then that the gameplay seems almost as sparse as space itself. The puzzle solving and exploration elements are fine, but it's very slow paced and there's hardly any real interaction with your environment beyond activating monitors and colliding with objects in the forced action sequences.
The biggest letdown for me though was the much championed PvP multiplayer mode that, despite it being cross-platform and launch week, featured lobbies which were almost completely empty. I did manage to get into one PvP race though, but, as you'll see in the video above, it was hardly the most thrilling of online encounters.
If you enjoyed this episode of Ian's VR Corner, you can catch up with my previous adventures over on YouTube in our VR playlist, where I get silly with Kona VR, Salary Man Escape, The Exorcist: Legion VR, Killing Floor: Incursion and The Persistence.