Iron Man VR Demo Impressions (PSVR)

See, my blog is not just a whimsical dance through videogaming's history, I can cover new releases too, right off the servers, like a million younger sources you might find on the internet, but with a middle-aged viewpoint.

Iron Man VR for the Playstation 4's VR headset, which I guess most folks call PSVR, came out with a playable demo a few days ago, and I got to sneak in a full playthrough of the demo this morning.  It utilizes the move controllers and from the first time taking flight, it immediately feels like they nailed it.

For the most part, anyway. In the tutorial area at the rocky shoreline near Stark's Malibu home, the player is given some targets to blast with repulsors, some hoops to fly through, and some other targets to rocket punch. The tool tip that popped up when it came time to rocket punch went away too fast, and I'm not exactly sure how to do that move. Nonetheless, I pulled it off during my clumsy attempts to figure it out and proceeded to the main demo level.

You get to play as Stark himself, chatting with Pepper and AI assistant Friday aboard the Stark  corporate jet before all hell breaks loose. The villain looked like the Ghost, sort of, and he/she hacks the plane into crashing, muttering the usual villain taunts and vague references to revenge. As Iron Man you fly around the jet, defending it from waves of drones, and sometimes flying close to broken parts of the plane to repair them. 

I don't think the level was on rails, but it took little effort to stay near the jet or get back to it after beating another wave of drones. The same ease came with the jet repairs that pop up during this chapter - I intuitively swooped in on those attempts to keep the jet in the air. Once you fly into the marker at the repair spot, the game goes into a mini-game where you move Reed Richards - sorry, Tony Stark's arms and hands to specific positions to initiate the repair action.

I slipped and said Reed Richards back there because Tony's arms in the game seem to stretch comically long when you reach out. I could not hold back a chuckle the first time it happened, and laughed even harder when I did it as Stark in the plane. I suspect that's just one of those VR things that have to be so the game works for players with all sorts of armspans.

So yeah, Iron Man VR controls beautifully, at least I think after taking it for a spin. Decent visuals and a good enough story for a demo make this a demo worth playing a few times at least, and should keep my interest in the July 3 release of the full game.