Golem Impressions (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Saturday, December 09, 2017, 22:00 (2541 days ago) @ CyberKN

My reaction was mixed.

First of all, the PSVR is probably the best VR headset I’ve tried. It’s comfortable, and the motion controls are not janky at all. It lacks the screen door effect, but the image appears much softer than the Occulus. I think that’s a good trade off.

Golem is probably the most comfortable, well working VR game I’ve played where your character can move through space. Moving through environments has always been a weak spot for VR games. Either you can’t control your character very well, or you can and you get sick. I didn’t have a problem with either in Golem. The movement speed is slow, so it’s not a fast action game. You pull the trigger on the move, and then lean in the direction you want to go. This makes backing up easy. Looking left or right while moving forward let’s you turn. It’s all pretty natural and I almost never felt like I was fighting the controls. Two buttons on the move quick turn your view, which blacks out the screen while turning. This prevented me from blowing chunks while using it, but also can be disorienting since the visuals are non continuous.

I can’t comment on the audio, because the headphones did not block noise and on the noisy convention floor I couldn’t hear anything. There were no subtitles.

The demo consisted of light exploration and sword combat. The one to one motion of the sword was pretty spot on. There was combat against golems, and skeleton archers. With the archers, you have to either block or cut their arrows as they fly. This probably works the best, as the action doesn’t ‘stop’. You can dodge and there are several you have to deal with at once.

The Golem combat was kind of lame. You basically block, then counter. I don’t know if the difficulty was just low, but the attacks come at you very slowly. Admittedly it took a while for it to click, and I was just not blocking very effectively. But even when I got it, it just wasn’t nearly as fun or as compelling at the other enemies. You break the guard by blocking - dodging and movement does nothing. This makes the fights feel really staged and static compared to the archers which move around the environment.

Movement is slow, yet I don’t feel like there is a lot of ability to examine and interact with the environment. The room you are in to start is pretty detailed, but you can’t really interact with it in any way. Look but don’t touch. Even when you get he sword, everything locked down. You can’t smash or move anything, and he city environment felt pretty bare. With the pace of the game being more chill, it’s off putting that the environment isn’t more exploitable. Even something as simple as being able to pick up and examine things such as in gone home would help a lot.

I also did not understand a specific visual mechanic in the game. You have a kind of double vision, where you can see through your Golem’s eyes, but your periphery is that of your character’s view in his bed. Sometimes it’s minimal, and sometimes it takes up a large portion of your field of vision. I didn’t understand what determines how much you see, and I also don’t understand how this is useful.

All and all, I had a fantastic VR experience, but I didn’t really experience a lot of fun. Nothing about the mechanics or the world really gripped me.