What would we like to see in VR? Horror? Here They Lie and demos seventh Resident Evil at your service. Adrenaline racing with a view from the cockpit? Driveclub VR trying to cope with this task. Space? EVE: Valkyrie, seems to close the topic for the near future. Porn? Well, here we have to do it ourselves.
What is the situation with traveling to other planets? This is also one of the mandatory points of the minimum program for virtual reality, because almost every player contains a little astronaut-researcher. Isn’t this what the incredible hype around was based on? No Man's Sky? See with your own eyes the landscapes of other worlds, watch strange animals like Grandfather Drozdov, find traces of ancient civilizations... Yes, almost everyone suppresses this desire while sitting in a stuffy office, auditorium or classroom.
That is why, almost at the very start of PS VR, two projects were released dedicated to traveling to other planets. Well, or one and a half.
Robinson: The Journey from the studio Crytek was one of the most anticipated VR projects, along with Batman: Arkham and the already mentioned “Valkyrie”. As you know, graphics are the Achilles heel of virtual reality helmets, but who better than the German visual masters to correct the situation? And the Crysis trilogy, and Rise: Son of Rome could raise questions regarding the gameplay or plot, but the picture in them made up for, if not all, then many of the flaws. Therefore, in the case of Robinson, gamers hoped to receive the most beautiful VR game to date from Crytek. And they got it.
The title, of course, refers us to Daniel Defoe's famous novel about the misadventures of Robinson Crusoe. The plot is about the same: the ship crashes, and the main character finds himself in an uninhabited area, where he tries to survive. Only instead of the sea there is space, instead of an island there is a planet inhabited by dinosaurs, and instead of a world-wise traveler there is a little boy named Robin. Well, the role of Friday is shared by the flying spherical robot HIGS (judging by its design and behavior, a distant relative of the Phantom from Destiny and Whitley from Portal 2) and the tame dinosaur Laika (seriously, that’s her name - Laika). The goal of the heroes is obvious - not to be eaten, broken or trampled and to get out of the nameless planet.
Robinson: The Journey looks as good as technically possible on the current generation of VR devices. When you turn your head for the first time and look around the tropical forest, the very first viewing immediately pops up in your memory "Avatar" James Cameron. It seems like nothing original, the jungle is just like a jungle, but it’s breathtaking. Perhaps the awe of the primitive environment, like two drops of water similar to the earth’s, is inherent in us by nature. The picture at the same time almost completely clear and almost not blurry at all. Unfortunately, even Crytek is not yet able to get rid of this “almost”, but the results achieved are still impressive.
If you have not previously had experience playing in virtual reality, then we strongly do not recommend getting acquainted with the technology through Robinson. Why? Yes, because you have to walk in it. Using this extremely stupid-sounding phrase as an example, it is very easy to explain why talking about VR is a thankless and unhelpful task. Everything feels different in a helmet, especially moving in space.
Our brain, as it turns out in practice, is very easy to deceive. Even if you never doubt that everything happens only on the screen inside the plastic helmet on your head, the vestibular apparatus categorically refuses to believe it. And if we are talking about transport like a car, a tank, a starship, or even a combat robot, then everything is more or less normal, but as soon as you start moving “on your own two feet,” the ground immediately disappears from under your feet - at least, in the first five minutes of the game. Perhaps this is why Robin walks at the speed of an eighty-year-old woman and is completely incapable of running - you never know, the player will start to feel sick. Even the descent along the rope is slowed down - out of harm's way.
You can scan local wildlife, much like in No Man's Sky, but in return you will only receive encyclopedia entries.
As for the gameplay, everything is exactly as the developers promised: 60% exploration of the world and 40% solving puzzles. Moreover, everything will have to be examined very carefully. There are no hints or pointers in sight, except that HIGS can advise something, but for this you need to listen to what he chatters there while flying next to you.
However, the puzzles themselves are quite simple: find where the wires lead, insert the generator, find the missing parts of the mechanisms. Sometimes you have to attract Laika, who follows you everywhere. In general, this little dinosaur can easily win the title of the most adorable companion in the history of video games. Yes, Elizabeth BioShock: Infinite she is beautiful and helps in battle, but she is no match for the big-eyed t-rex!
Sometimes you take to the skies to redistribute energy between generators. At such moments, it seems as if you are looking at a phenomenally detailed miniature.
If we evaluate Robinson: The Journey as a simple video game, then six or seven points is its ceiling. This is a good “walking simulator” with a couple of dynamic episodes and not particularly difficult riddles. Another thing is that in VR it feels completely different. If you have already purchased a helmet from Sony, then Robinson is currently one of those few projects that justify the purchase.
But with the “game” based on Ridley Scott’s “The Martian,” the situation is different. Evaluate it as a simple video game or as a VR project - the result is still disappointing. On Steam and PS Store, they are asking almost one and a half thousand for The Martian VR Experience, but in a good way, the key for it should be included free of charge with the Blu-ray with the film.
The total duration of the game is half an hour, and a third of it is taken up by inserts from the film, which are completely not adapted to the format. No one really wanted to rack their brains about any cut scenes - everything was in the best traditions of the good old games based on films. There is no plot as such - we are simply told “The Martian” from beginning to end, only some episodes are turned into short gameplay scenes.
There are seven of them in total. In each of them it is necessary to perform a sequence of actions. Again, we are not talking about riddles, but about fairly obvious tasks. For example, here is a crane in front of you, here are batteries, here is a truck. What need to do? That's right - load the batteries. A five year old will figure it out.
The novelty of sensations should be given, apparently, by manipulations with the PS Move (or HTC Vive controllers), by the way, not used in Robinson: The Journey. But in the process it turns out that Crytek made the right decision by leaving the gamepad controls. What happens to poor Mark Watney's hands while driving is truly terrifying. They bend at unnatural angles, pass through objects, disintegrate into components - in general, they show the imperfection of technology in all its glory.
Everything about graphics is also very sad. For example, if you look at the sleeve of a spacesuit, instead of a patch you will see something smeared, and instead of the surface of the Red Planet there is a brown mess. And in general, the project gives the impression of a demo from the Oculus Rift version DK1, and not a full-fledged game, released after the mass launch of VR.
It’s interesting how projects on almost the same topic can be released almost at the same time, but with such different levels of implementation that they seem like games from different eras. One pushes VR forward, squeezing the maximum out of the technology and successfully adapting the usual gameplay to it, while the other remains at the level of an attraction that can only impress those who have never seen virtual reality. We can only hope that there will only be more of the first over time.
After it was published on our website, I began to receive numerous requests from readers to talk about video games developed specifically for virtual reality. I promised to start publishing reviews of such games in the very near future, and now I’m finally keeping my promise.
Today I would like to tell you about new game Robinson: The Journey for the PlayStation 4 game console, the creation of which is the well-known German studio Crytek, which gave the world the Crysis and Far Cry series.
Virtual reality is a relatively new technology, even though the first attempts to bring it to life were made quite a long time ago. At the moment, numerous developers are exploring the possibility of implementing various ideas, approaches and mechanics inside virtual reality, and players are interested in trying out everything they can do. And some people turn out better projects, while others turn out worse.
Here, a lot depends on the existing experience in development, the size of the budget (at the dawn of the development of VR, publishers are afraid to invest a lot of money in the technology), on the presence of a talented team of specialists, and on much, much more.
In the case of the game Robinson: The Journey, it was immediately clear that this project was very important for the Crytek studio. Even from the early trailers, it became clear that decent amounts of money were invested in developing the fantasy world, and the game itself will not become an hour and a half technology demo, as happened with some works of other studios.
The game takes about 5-7 hours to complete, depending on how quickly you solve the puzzles offered to you and look for a way out of various game situations. What is 5 hours for virtual reality? That's a lot.
Simply because when you are just starting to get acquainted with this technology, you are unlikely to be able to play for more than half an hour or an hour a day for reasons of comfort and safety. And the emotions received during these 5 hours will cover the brightness of impressions from any other game not for VR, the plot of which is stretched for 50 hours or more.
It seems that inside virtual reality even time flows differently than in the outside world. Personally, the passage of Robinson: The Journey seemed like a whole little life to me, since I literally walked in the shoes of the main character, whose name is Robin (direct association with Robinson Crusoe by the writer Daniel Defoe). This teenager was the only survivor of the crash of the spaceship Esmeralda, which arrived on the planet Tyson III to colonize it.
Together with a spherical robotic assistant named HIGS and a tamed baby Tyrannosaurus rex named Laika, Robin builds his own camp, a food farm, and does not even think of despairing, despite his unenviable situation. And everything would be fine if the planet were not inhabited by creatures that in many ways resemble the prehistoric lizards that once dominated the Earth.
The gameplay of Robinson: The Journey can be described as a first-person adventure game. You explore the world around you, interact with various objects, solve puzzles, try to find an opportunity to get to the next location or get to a certain place in the current location. An important component of the gameplay is collecting data about the local fauna. In the hand of the main character there is always a certain “multi-tool” with which Robin can scan life forms still unknown to him.
The scanning process is as follows. You turn on the appropriate mode of the device, and green and red dots appear on the living creature. By directing the device with your head movements in the PlayStation VR headset, you must collect all the green dots without touching the red ones. As soon as you hit the red one, the process will have to start from the very beginning.
It is incredibly difficult to catch and scan some animals. Take the alien mole for example: as soon as he sees Robin, he immediately dives back into his hole and hides there until he realizes that he is not in danger. Each studied creature is included in a special electronic catalog, where you can read important information about it and see a funny animated 3D model.
Another important part of the gameplay is the search for other HIGS robots that, as a result of the disaster, were out of order and found themselves scattered over a large radius from the crash site of the Esmeralda ship. Inside each robot, Robin will be able to find a memory module and learn something new about the mission that became fatal for most of the crew.
It is in these modules that the answer to an important question for a boy may be hidden: does he have a chance to escape from this prehistoric hell? But finding and assembling broken robots will not be so easy. Every now and then you have to wonder how to get to them if, for example, they fell on a huge tree and got caught on a branch. Or suddenly the flying lizard decided that the HIGS memory module was an egg that had fallen out of its nest, after which it took away the valuable object in an unknown direction. Robin will have to use all his ingenuity in the process of discovering and collecting valuable information.
From time to time you will have to climb various vertical surfaces, which I think is a refinement of the technology that Crytek showed off in The Climb demo. You see in front of you your two hands in spacesuit gloves and, in turn, they cling to the rungs of the stairs, ledges on the rock, large mushrooms on the surface of a tree, or to thick vines. A kind of VR simulator of a rock climber.
Everything looks quite harmonious, and you will very quickly get used to the controls. But the only frustrating thing in this case is the fact that the game does not yet support PlayStation Move controllers, which are so similar to the multitool in the hand of the main character. You have to control your hands with the movements of the DualShock 4 gamepad, which somewhat interferes with complete immersion in the game. The developers promise to release a patch with support for Move controllers in the very near future, so you can only hope and believe.
You need a multitool not only to scan dinosaurs, but also to interact with the world around you. With its help, you can lift various objects into the air from a distance. The main thing is not to forget that the charge of the device is not infinite, and if it runs out, everything you hold will fall down.
After this, you will have to wait until the batteries are recharged. Robin placed special power units in some places, allowing him to lift and carry especially heavy and large objects when he is within their range of action using a multitool. But before power plants can operate, they must be supplied with electricity.
To do this, you will have to solve a simple puzzle with the distribution of electricity coming from the generator to various electrical appliances.
You can spin any object raised in the air in front of you the way you want. Thanks to this function, it will be possible, for example, to catch fish in a river using a round sieve, or take a piece of metal plating from your former ship and use it to build a bridge over an abyss.
In general, the player will have to interact a lot with his environment in order to survive in this world. The HIGS robot will give you valuable advice and even make fun of the main character at some points. For example, when you approach a lake filled with what appears to be oil, your assistant will advise you to be extremely careful, because if you fall into this black sludge, archaeologists will not find your petrified body until millions of years later. If they find it at all.
Take just one careless step, and the inscription “Planet Population” will appear on the screen, the number “1” next to which will change to “0”. I have to admit that the system for saving progress in the game is very stupid. The game saves automatically only when it wants to. And if you carelessly fell off a steep cliff into an abyss, and the last entry took place 20 minutes ago, then you will have to replay a long section of the game again.
The multi-tool can also act as a laser pointer, with which you will give commands to your pet Tyrannosaurus Laika (named after which space dog you know). You can order a friendly little animal to go to a certain point, you can feed it, or you can ask it to growl at some local inhabitant, thereby scaring it away from your path.
There will be several places in the game where you simply cannot do without the help of your comrade. In your free time, you can even play hide and seek with Laika. You turn away, count to ten and go look for her. But these are, of course, non-committal mini-games, like basketball or tic-tac-toe, also available in Robinson: The Journey.
As for the visual component of the game, I can say that it turned out to be very controversial. Everything looks very, very decent, but when you look closely at some of the details, you notice that the developers greatly saved computing power when developing the version of the game for the PlayStation 4.
From a distance you see dense, lush vegetation with beautiful multi-colored flowers, but upon closer examination it turns out that these flowers are completely flat, and the texture resolution leaves much to be desired. Here, however, it should be noted that if you don’t look at everything right in front of your nose, the game looks just great.
Of course, in the PC version, which will be released after some time, the graphics will be much better. Even in the version for the more powerful PlayStation 4 Pro console, there is already a noticeable increase in the amount of vegetation and details of the surrounding world.
In any case, Robinson: The Journey looks much more impressive than 80% of other VR games today. And here the enormous merit of the talented artists of Crytek is directly felt. You immediately notice the very high-quality anti-aliasing, which many other virtual reality projects cannot boast of. I would also like to note the good work with light, which creates an additional atmosphere in the game.
Looking at the magnificent alien landscapes, you simply forget that at the moment you are at home and sitting on your favorite sofa in front of the TV with an incomprehensible glowing crap on your head. When you first see a giant herbivorous dinosaur, you involuntarily open your mouth: everything is so real, as if you were transported straight to the Jurassic period.
This game is definitely worth experiencing in person, and not through screenshots or trailers, which do not convey even 10% of the delight that awaits you inside virtual reality.
Surely many people are very interested in the question: how is the situation with motion sickness in this game? Now I will tell you everything. Moving forward and backward in this case does not pose a danger to your vestibular system at all. But reversals are more difficult. The game offers several modes for rotating the character around its axis.
The most comfortable of them for me personally was turning by a certain number of degrees. Thus, by tilting the analog stick of the gamepad to the left or right, you will instantly turn 45 degrees in the chosen direction, while your brain will not directly see the process of turning. If you turn on the smooth rotation mode, you will see full movement around the axis, but there is a real risk that you will begin to feel nauseous.
However, in the first mode I played without breaks for 2-3 hours and did not experience any hint of discomfort. I don’t know how the developers managed it, but the game really feels very nice and does not cause physical rejection from the first minutes to the very end credits.
One of the serious disadvantages of the game can be considered its cost. With five to seven hours of gameplay, the price tag of 3,799 rubles seems simply outrageous. And no, not only Russian residents think so. Western players were also somewhat taken aback when they learned that Crytek was asking $60 for the game. Other developers look at the current situation with the VR market more soberly.
You need to understand that not everyone has expensive VR headsets yet, so new games for them need to be sold at less than full price, thereby attracting an additional audience to the technology. When there is a significant user base, then you can raise the price tag for entertainment content.
But not every gamer will decide to start getting acquainted with VR games for such money, when for 20 dollars you can buy a Batman simulator and buy a couple more games in exchange.
I had extremely positive impressions from Robinson: The Journey. Yes, the game has certain problems. In some places, the graphical component leaves much to be desired; someone in the game will definitely get motion sickness out of habit, and I would like to get an adventure of at least twenty hours for such a price.
But this game allows you to be transported to another planet inhabited by amazing creatures, where exciting adventures and discoveries await you. And the full-fledged plot of the game allows you to feel what it’s like to be far from your home, alone with wild nature, when there is no one to talk to except a sarcastic spherical robot.
The game gets a rating from me 8 points out of 10 and could have gotten another half point if it had supported PlayStation Move controllers from the start. I really want to believe that this is just the first sign in a series of large-scale entertainment projects for virtual reality. I hope that the Crytek studio will please us with similar games more than once.
Panama for crab. We go left - to the oak tree. Panama hat with crab - on a vine. To the left - to the entrance to the cave. We select large and small stones. To the right - to a palm tree with coconuts. Small stone on coconuts. We select a coconut and a pebble. To the left - to the entrance to the cave. Coconut on a rock (stone slab on sand). A large stone on a coconut, we select the stone. To the right - to a palm tree with bananas. We take a branch from a dry tree. Rope for bananas. The end of the rope on a dry tree. Click on bananas. Go right to the wrecked ship. Rope onto the right log. The end of the rope is to the left. Stick on the raft. From the ship we take: matches, a newspaper, a net, a bottle, an ax (the ax handle sticks out from behind a barrel in one of the cabins). Don't touch the barrels - it's useless! We go left to the entrance to the cave - we close the circle. You can now navigate using the map (in the lower right corner, next to the floppy disk).
In the forest: Large stone on a crocodile. Ax on a pine tree. Ax on a livea. Bottle for resin. A bottle of resin on a stump (and it’s a children’s game, what kind of balls are these..?). At the entrance to the cave we select a large stone. We return to the forest: Rope on a log. The end of the rope on the crocodile. Large stone on a crocodile.
In a clearing with a parrot: Ax on a log. We are building a house. I'll parrot the newspaper. Near the coconut tree there is a bottle on the puddle. At the oak tree: Firewood on the sand under the hollow. Matches for firewood. A bottle of water on the fire. Click on the hollow (we now have wax). At the entrance to the cave we take a large stone and a pile of stones. We collect water from the puddle and take clay from the remains of the ship. In the house: Wax on the table. A pile of stones on the floor.
Clay on a pile of stones. Firewood for the hearth. Matches for firewood. We take more clay from the broken ship. In the house: Clay on the table. A bottle of water on the clay. Click on clay. Click again. A pot on the hearth. In the forest: Net on the river. A bottle for the river. In the house: A bottle for the potty. Fish for a pot. Panama for the potty. There is a bottle on a puddle next to the coconut tree. In the house: A bottle for the potty. Panama for the potty. Click on the table. At the entrance to the cave: A candle at the entrance to the cave. A small pebble on a willow tree.
Click on the prisoner. Cryptogram: "Thank you, stranger! You saved my life. My name is Zhtyglubnd. I will serve you faithfully for the rest of my life. My dad is the king on the next island. If we can get there, he will definitely help you return home!" Drag letters from the top row and insert them instead of symbols.
In a clearing with bananas: Click on a dry tree branch. In the forest: A bottle of resin.
A bottle of resin on a stump (well, you can’t do that, Friday is like a child...). We talk to the parrot all the way. At the oak tree: Friday click on the bird. Robinson - click on the nest. Firewood on the sand in front of the hole. Matches for firewood. At the entrance to the cave we pick up a pile of stones. At the oak tree: A pile for a basket. Large stone on a basket.
Friday a ball on the fire. As soon as the balloon is inflated, quickly grab the net and click on the balloon. If you didn’t have time, go to the forest. A bottle for resin and stump. (just some kind of Bakovka!). Etc. On the way to the oak tree, we fill a bottle with water from a puddle. At the oak:
A bottle of water on the fire. Click on the cart.
On the ball: We work with the “up” and “down” keys on the keyboard. You'll have to suffer yourself.
Among the savages: Friday click on the king. While they are talking, click on the smoking pipe. Click on the man with the fan. Click on the tubes in front of the jukebox. Click on the jukebox. In the machine: From the 1st upper square, drag the tube to the second cell below; from 2nd to 3rd; from the 3rd - to the 1st; the rest, as well as the pen and tube, we simply move down directly. Click on the man with the hose.
On the ship: Click on the curtain. Click on glasses. Click on the green bottle. Friday click on the red bottle. We play checkers in such a way that the pirates play their checkers kings all the time. Until they get drunk and fall asleep.
Let's go right. Click on the captain. Pieces of the map: 1st - on the floor in front of the map; 2nd - smoking next to the pirates; from the pirates to the left: 3rd - plugs the barrel; 4th - on the shelf; 5th - on the top barrel (first clicked by Robinson, and then taken by Friday); 6th - On Friday, click on the barrel by the door, take a piece under the barrel; 7th in the toilet (it's Friday); 8th in the toilet (Robinson goes). Click on the map. We collect the map.
Alexey Volkov. Moscow.
From time to time you will have to climb various vertical surfaces, which I think is a refinement of the technology that Crytek showed off in The Climb demo. You see in front of you your two hands in spacesuit gloves and, in turn, they cling to the rungs of the stairs, ledges on the rock, large mushrooms on the surface of a tree, or to thick vines. A kind of VR simulator of a rock climber. Everything looks quite harmonious, and you will very quickly get used to the controls. But the only frustrating thing in this case is the fact that the game does not yet support PlayStation Move controllers, which are so similar to the multitool in the hand of the main character. You have to control your hands with the movements of the DualShock 4 gamepad, which somewhat interferes with complete immersion in the game. The developers promise to release a patch with support for Move controllers in the very near future, so you can only hope and believe.
You need a multitool not only to scan dinosaurs, but also to interact with the world around you. With its help, you can lift various objects into the air from a distance. The main thing is not to forget that the charge of the device is not infinite, and if it runs out, everything you hold will fall down. After this, you will have to wait until the batteries are recharged. Robin placed special power units in some places, allowing him to lift and carry especially heavy and large objects when he is within their range of action using a multitool. But before power plants can operate, they must be supplied with electricity. To do this, you will have to solve a simple puzzle with the distribution of electricity coming from the generator to various electrical appliances.
You can spin any object raised in the air in front of you the way you want. Thanks to this function, it will be possible, for example, to catch fish in a river using a round sieve, or take a piece of metal plating from your former ship and use it to build a bridge over an abyss. In general, the player will have to interact a lot with his environment in order to survive in this world. The HIGS robot will give you valuable advice and even make fun of the main character at some points. For example, when you approach a lake filled with what appears to be oil, your assistant will advise you to be extremely careful, because if you fall into this black sludge, archaeologists will not find your petrified body until millions of years later. If they find it at all. Take just one careless step, and the inscription “Planet Population” will appear on the screen, the number “1” next to which will change to “0”. I have to admit that the system for saving progress in the game is very stupid. The game saves automatically only when it wants to. And if you carelessly fell off a steep cliff into an abyss, and the last entry took place 20 minutes ago, then you will have to replay a long section of the game again.
The multi-tool can also act as a laser pointer, with which you will give commands to your pet Tyrannosaurus Laika (named after which space dog you know). You can order a friendly little animal to go to a certain point, you can feed it, or you can ask it to growl at some local inhabitant, thereby scaring it away from your path. There will be several places in the game where you simply cannot do without the help of your comrade. In your free time, you can even play hide and seek with Laika. You turn away, count to ten and go look for her. But these are, of course, non-committal mini-games, like basketball or tic-tac-toe, also available in Robinson: The Journey.
As for the visual component of the game, I can say that it turned out to be very controversial. Everything looks very, very decent, but when you look closely at some of the details, you notice that the developers greatly saved computing power when developing the version of the game for PlayStation 4. From afar you see dense lush vegetation with beautiful multi-colored flowers, but upon closer examination it turns out that that these flowers are completely flat, and the texture resolution leaves much to be desired. Here, however, it should be noted that if you don’t look at everything right in front of your nose, the game looks just great. Of course, in the PC version, which will be released after some time, the graphics will be much better. Even in the version for the more powerful PlayStation 4 Pro console, there is already a noticeable increase in the amount of vegetation and details of the surrounding world.
In any case, Robinson: The Journey looks much more impressive than 80% of other VR games today. And here the enormous merit of the talented artists of Crytek is directly felt. You immediately notice the very high-quality anti-aliasing, which many other virtual reality projects cannot boast of. I would also like to note the good work with light, which creates an additional atmosphere in the game. Looking at the magnificent alien landscapes, you simply forget that at the moment you are at home and sitting on your favorite sofa in front of the TV with an incomprehensible glowing crap on your head. When you first see a giant herbivorous dinosaur, you involuntarily open your mouth: everything is so real, as if you were transported straight to the Jurassic period. This game is definitely worth experiencing in person, and not through screenshots or trailers, which do not convey even 10% of the delight that awaits you inside virtual reality.
Surely many people are very interested in the question: how is the situation with motion sickness in this game? Now I will tell you everything. Moving forward and backward in this case does not pose a danger to your vestibular system at all. But reversals are more difficult. The game offers several modes for rotating the character around its axis. The most comfortable of them for me personally was turning by a certain number of degrees. Thus, by tilting the analog stick of the gamepad to the left or right, you will instantly turn 45 degrees in the chosen direction, while your brain will not directly see the process of turning. If you turn on the smooth rotation mode, you will see full movement around the axis, but there is a real risk that you will begin to feel nauseous. However, in the first mode I played without breaks for 2-3 hours and did not experience any hint of discomfort. I don’t know how the developers managed it, but the game really feels very nice and does not cause physical rejection from the first minutes to the very end credits.
One of the serious disadvantages of the game can be considered its cost. With five to seven hours of gameplay, the price tag of 3,799 rubles seems simply outrageous. And no, not only Russian residents think so. Western players were also somewhat taken aback when they learned that Crytek was asking $60 for the game. Other developers look at the current situation with the VR market more soberly. You need to understand that not everyone has expensive VR headsets yet, so new games for them need to be sold at less than full price, thereby attracting an additional audience to the technology. When there is a significant user base, then you can raise the price tag for entertainment content. But not every gamer will decide to start getting acquainted with VR games for such money, when for 20 dollars you can buy a Batman simulator and buy a couple more games in exchange.
I had extremely positive impressions from Robinson: The Journey. Yes, the game has certain problems. In some places, the graphical component leaves much to be desired; someone in the game will definitely get motion sickness out of habit, and I would like to get an adventure of at least twenty hours for such a price. But this game allows you to be transported to another planet inhabited by amazing creatures, where exciting adventures and discoveries await you. And the full-fledged plot of the game allows you to feel what it is like to be far from your home, alone with wild nature, when there is no one to talk to except a sarcastic spherical robot. The game gets a rating from me 8 points out of 10 and could have gotten another half point if it had supported PlayStation Move controllers from the start. I really want to believe that this is just the first sign in a series of large-scale entertainment projects for virtual reality. I hope that the Crytek studio will please us with similar games more than once.
