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Arizona Sunshine is a new PSVR title and when it comes to games on this headset, I have been quite underwhelmed.
You may challenge me and talk about the Dirt PSVR review I published in February, and the amazing 10 I gave it. Then there was Fate, which was short and didn’t fully lure me in. For this one, it’s basically a zombie apocalypse shoot-em-up where you take out as many zombies as possible.
There really isn’t much of a story to this short 4-hour adventure where you take the lead of an unnamed hero who wakes up in a cave, deep in the heart of Arizona. Along your route, you find a series of radios which will eventually take you to your safety – after belting hordes of ugly zombies. Normally for a VR game, four hours would be about right. However, Arizona Sunshine will cost you £34.99 which is an expensive four hours. This game does offer you an online co-op mode which looks quite cool, but I wasn’t able to convince any of my PS4 friends to part with their cash.
Arizona Sunshine offers you three ways to play – using the PS controller, using two Aim controllers, or using the special Aim gun controller (which I don’t own). I started off my experience playing with the PS4 unit, itself, but after five minutes, I rendered it an unplayable experience. This is mainly due to the shooting being tricky and hard to handle, and that moving didn’t involve the standard movement of the analogue stick. I then tried the game with my fully charged Move controllers…. make sure you have plenty of room for this game as I nearly broke everything! Also, make sure your Move controllers are charged, and don’t play this game if you are stressed or anywhere near stressed.
Move made it all much more tolerable and at the start I wasn’t standing far enough away from my camera and the controls were awful. It took me 20 minutes to navigate the annoying main screen where you have to pick up an old school cassette and place it in the cassette player. Then you have to grab the gun and shoot the options…. All I wanted to do was play!
There are two areas of this game which really made me quite angry: Firstly, the movement is quite clunky and instead of what you would normally expect, it plays like a point-and-click adventure – you aim your controller, click the button and then you character will move there. This also works when you are turning; with two buttons moving you with a 90-degree turn, either to the left or the right.
This confused me so many times and was the reason for many of my deaths. You could also look other places by moving your head inside the VR, and the combination of them both had me feeling dizzy. The other thing which really annoyed me was how small the aim sight was on your gun. Of course, to shoot you have to point your Move controller where you want to shoot, but you’d hope for some consistency or a *big* sight. Sadly, this isn’t the case and throughout my experience playing this game, I never really felt like I got an understanding of where I was ever going to shoot. The problem is that while there is a sight, it is so small I could never really work out where it actually was.
This game won’t amaze you with its graphics or sound. You hear your character talk at times and he can be quite funny, but after he has repeated the same joke a number of times, you begin to get a little annoyed. The graphics resemble that of a PS2 title and are incredibly basic, but I guess that is where we are currently at with PSVR games. Even though I am speaking about this all negatively, it doesn’t annoy you too much. As I have mentioned in a number of reviews before, graphics don’t make a game but they do improve an experience. Knowing that this one came out on the PC a year ago, I thought I would check out how it looked back then. Videos online prove just how much of a downgrade the graphics are on the PSVR version. You are serenaded by monotonous colours and boring-looking zombies.
It probably seems like I have spent all of this review slating this game, but it really isn’t that bad. It is simple, it looks bad and it is in no way inspiring, but it does give you something the PSVR doesn’t offer you with any other games and it does start to show the capabilities and potential of the system. Sadly, it’s not quite the finished article yet and there still a lot of creases which need ironing out – a lot like my work shirts.
- Graphics: 5 – Mot at all like Advanced Mode on the PC
Sound: 6 – Nothing great. Funny in places, but at times annoying
Gameplay: 6 – Unplayable with the PS4 controller, not bad with the Move controller, but meant to be the best with the Aim controller
Enjoyment: 6 – You will find yourself having spates of fun – just not enough of it
Overall: 6 – A game which had a lot of potential but didn’t quite fulfil it. Also suffers from quite an expensive purchase price for quite a short journey.
Arizona Sunshine is out now on PS4 and , Xbox One and PC, and click on the packshot for the full-size version.
Important info:
- Publisher: Vertigo Games
- Developer: Vertigo Games, Jaywalkers Interactive
- Players: single player campaign
- HDTV options: up to 1080p
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
|
GRAPHICS SOUND GAMEPLAY ENJOYMENT |
5 6 6 6 |
| OVERALL | 6 |
I have been a video game player since 1993 and a music fan since I can remember. I studied Film and Journalism at university and ended up becoming a Primary School teacher. Video games changed my life and sent me on the right track and have stayed with me ever since.