Sony Interactive Entertainment invites players to suit up and take to the skies as Tony Stark’s alter-ego, in Iron Man VR for the PSVR.

Back in late 2016, just after I got my HTC Vive VR kit, I downloaded a demo called HVR. It was a VR experiment by one man, Andre Le, that put players in an Iron Man-style armoured suit and allowed them to fly around. It was great. It really made you feel like Iron Man. Sadly, it was never made into a full game. But the demo is still available on the Steam store.

Almost four years later developers, Camouflaj, have released the official Iron Man VR experience that I’ve been waiting for. If ever there was a super-hero suited (no pun intended) to VR, it’s Iron Man.

By and large, the developer has succeeded in reproducing the feel of strapping on the Iron Man armour.

To play, PSVR owners will need to own a pair of Move controllers. I’d assume that most PSVR players will have, by now, picked up a pair of these curiously re-purposed relics from the failed PS Eye phase of the PS3.

If you’ve not got a pair of move controllers, you are missing out on a lot of what the PSVR system has to offer. Iron Man VR is available as a combo pack that includes the Move controllers along with the game.

The game starts with a tutorial sequence flying in the Iron Man armour and shooting targets above Tony Stark’s Malibu home.  After this brief sequence players, as billionaire industrialist, head outside the man with Tony Stark for dinner with his assistant, Pepper Potts. Tony tells her that he is quitting the arms industry and retiring his AI counterpart – based on himself – called The Gunsmith.

The game then jumps forward in time with Tony Stark now established as Iron Man.

The story is, for the most parts OK. Much of the exposition is conveyed using Tony Stark’s voiceover with a black screen with dust or something floating around. I don’t like black screens in VR, and I didn’t like this. The rest of the story unfolds by gimmicky VR “pick this up”, “open this”, press this button” sort of stuff that would have been OK when VR was just a novelty, but not OK now.

The game suffers from long loading times. Ridiculously long loading times for seemingly short sections of superfluous story elements. There is also a lot of waiting with a totally black screen. Another VR no-no in my book. Just to make those black screens more annoying, the scene’s sound starts up a good ten seconds before the image appears.

Waiting for ages for some throwaway story sequences is as annoying as hell, when all you want to do is fly around in VR as Iron Man.

The actual flight mechanics have been very well implemented. I really can’t fault them.

In the comics, Iron Man flies using rocket boots and fires his repulsers from his hands. That works in the funny pages, but doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. The movies take a more physics-based approach with Iron Man’s boots providing the thrust and is boosted by the palms of his gloves providing the flight controls. Look closely at the movies and the suit also has a load of moving control surfaces, as well.

In the game, the triggers of the Move controllers initiate flight, assumedly firing up the boots, which you can’t see, as well as the visible thrust from the palms of your gloves. The orientation of your palms and your head control the pitch and yaw of flight. Double tapping the triggers provides a very satisfying boost.

The Square and Triangle buttons turn left and right, respectively. By default, turns are by staged angles, likely to lower the chance of VR sickness for those inclined- something I switched to smooth straight away. The PSVR want you facing the camera at all times, so if you actually twist, or step outside the ever-present little circle on the floor you will get an immersion-breaking warning.

The X or circle button puts the suit in a hover mode. The basic repulser fire is via by placing palms out and pressing the Move button. As you progress the suit get upgrades to its flight dynamics, armament and weapons. The first upgrade is mini-rockets launched from the suit’s forearms, which are armed and locked by bending your wrist down and painting your target and them firing with the Move button. Unless you are hovering, and a stationary target, using your weapons means relinquishing your flight control.

The developers have done a very good job of implementing the characteristics of flying an Iron Man suit using the PSVR and move controllers. But it’s fair from perfect. And that’s more of a hardware issue than the game, itself.

If you’ve seen the first Iron Man film, you will remember Tony Stark’s first test flight in his garage and how difficult it actually is to fly as Iron Man. Unfortunately, the game also replicates the likely enormous learning curve any real-life rocket-man would need to overcome.

Just like games in the flight simulator genre, the powered flight of Iron Man takes time to master. Whilst I found it, by far, the most interesting part of the games, it suffers from the limitations of the PSVR’s camera-based tracking system and the ergonomic design of the move controller (which was never deigned as a VR controller.

The PlayStation camera can only tack what it sees. Whilst the accelerometers in the Move controllers do a good job of translating the twist of your wrists to alter flight direction the desire to turn your body away from the camera rather than use the imprecise button-bases rotation is high.

The Move controllers’ buttons are too tiny to be used in VR. I fumbled with the controls continuously. Even the use of the trigger for thrush and not fire resulted in some accidental boosts.Whilst all those buttons are a bit of a mission to remember at the best of times, in the heat of battle, when under a bit of stress, they become all over the place.

With a better controller and proper tracked room-scale VR, the flight mechanics and controls in Iron Man VR would shine. On PSVR, they don’t work that well, unless you are prepared to conquer controls that work against you.

The missions themselves are pretty good fun, if a little repetitive. But I’m not sure what else they could do. You are Iron Man you fly and shoot stuff. As you play you unlock points which can be spent upgrading the suits systems and weapons.

Whilst some of the action sequences are quite immersive and really feel like you are Iron Man, I found the time trial events that pepper the game to be a little annoying. The reset of the time it’s a bit of a duck shoot destroying identical-looking drones.

I also faced a number of game-breaking bugs, like one of the Move controller’s illuminations failing just in the game, and object that I just couldn’t pick up. A restart sorted it out.

The visuals look better in VR that any screen-grab. Standing in front of the armour, it looks great. Also, the holographic look of the heads-up display is spot on. The rest of the visual are a little below par, even on the PS4 Pro, but the framerate and overall VR performance is sound.

Iron Man VR is a game that I would have lapped up back in the early days of the PSVR. The flight model and implementation are authentic, but this makes in a hard game to master.

As polished as the game is, overall, it feels confined by the limitations of the hardware. The control issues being annoy, but the long loading times being inexcusable.

I desperately wanted to like Iron Man VR a lot more than I actually did. Other Iron Man fans should like the game, but it may need a bit more patience that most players have to spare to really get to grips with it.

The post Iron Man VR (PSVR) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Marvel’s Iron Man VR exclusive to PlayStation and PSVR is your chance to be Tony Stark inside the Iron Man suit.

Recently the game itself has gone Gold, releasing on the 3rd of July 2020, and has given us a decent lengthy play demo, which I fully recommend downloading free from the PlayStation store.

Thanks to PlayStation NZ Shane was given the rare opportunity to speak directly with Ryan Payton, the founder of Camoflaj Studio and former Halo 4 director and Metal Gear Solid 4 producer, about the upcoming virtual reality game – Iron Man VR.

Ryan Payton – Founder of Camoflaj Studio

Shane: Can you tell us a little bit about Camoflaj Studio and how Marvel’s Iron Man VR game came to be?

Ryan: Oh, sure. My pleasure. So Camouflaj was founded in the Seattle area about close to nine years ago. And it’s a studio that I started with the same ambition of not being a indie game studio, but being the next great independent, high quality game studio that does big ambitious games like Marvel’s Iron Man VR. As you might have known our first game was a game called Republiq, which we’re incredibly proud of.

But the team has grown in size, significantly since the release of Republiq to match the scope and scale and the ambition level of of Marvel’s Iron Man VR.

And to answer the second part of your question, which is like how this came about, it all started with a fateful meeting between Camoflaj and Marvel Games, I was introduced to them through a mutual friend.

Marvel was looking for a developer to build the quintessential Marvel superhero driven VR game. And we were we were challenged with, like, what character we want to focus on. When we talked internally within Camoflaj, it was really quick to come up – we couldn’t think of a more perfect Marvel superhero to pair with VR than Iron Man. When we thought about the way that his helmet works and his 3D HUD works on pairing that with the PlayStation VR headset it’s a perfect pairing, as well as the thrusters where Iron Man flies and then there are pulsars, how Iron Man shoots then pairing that with the PlayStation Move controllers, for example, was also just a perfect pairing.

And then once we actually built our initial prototype, and then drove down to Los Angeles and showed that to Marvel, they were all in from that point on and then we just got started working on the game and it’s been just whirlwind experience as we get close to the July 3 (2020), release date for the game.

Shane: Why was Iron Man chosen as opposed to like, Spider-Man, or any of the other Marvel characters?

Ryan: One thing I thought was fascinating about the development of the game is that literally within the first week or two, we nailed the flight mechanics, which players are now really enjoying and having a great time with with via the free demo that we released last Thursday. And early on in development we also really nailed the combat, the melee attack as you could do like a rocket punch to enemies and how you can blast your pulsors from the palms of your hands and also blast enemies with a gesture so you can fire auxiliary weapons from your gauntlets like missiles and anti-tank missiles and things like that.

But one thing that was missing early on in development, which we of course corrected as soon as we possibly could, is that while we felt like we had a great light based VR action simulator, didn’t feel superhero enough for us. We didn’t feel like we were Iron Man enough. And that’s when we started integrating additional elements that we at least internally call superhero actions.

We have three of those represented in the demo. For example, when you go up in in and extinguish the fire on the jet in that one mission, or you repair the wing or you release the landing gear of the jet. Those are three examples where players are doing unique things that leverage the special strengths of PlayStation VR, but also allow players to really feel like they’re a superhero. And so from that point on, we just started to integrate more and more of those elements throughout the whole campaign. So players are continuously reminded that this is beyond just an action simulator that you are Iron Man, and you’re doing these things in a way that only VR can afford.

Shane: Iron Man VR releases on July 3 (2020), what can PlayStation gamers expect?

Ryan: Well, what PlayStation gamers and especially PlayStation VR enthusiasts can expect is, I think a lot of ways what they are looking for. I’m a big VR player. I’m a huge PlayStation VR enthusiast and along with millions of the other, you know, owners of the hardware I think I could I could speak for a lot of them that they want bigger, more robust, more ambitious VR games that they’ve played up to this point. And I think that they’re going to ask for that because I think the early years of VR are really fun and really important, but developers weren’t given a lot of time to get comfortable with the hardware and to make content. And one of the amazing things that we’ve been afforded thanks to our partners and friends at PlayStation and Marvel is that they understand that what players want is a really big VR, a big and ambitious VR experience with Marvel’s Iron Man VR.

So we’ve been given the amount of time to be able to execute on that. And so I think what players can expect is not only Camoflaj executing on the Iron Man simulator aspect of the game, but it’s what’s coming is that it’s also a really great Tony Stark simulator as well. What I mean by that is that the story is at its core about Tony and Tony facing up against his own demons. And we wanted to put players in the shoes of Tony Stark, this genius inventor, who’s not only tweaking the suit in his garage, and doing all the fun things that Tony is all about. And in coming face to face with classic Marvel characters like Pepper Potts, and Friday and Nick Fury, and villains like Ghost, that they also are able to go deeper into this character, who, like all of us has his own share of struggles. And through VR, we want players to really be able to empathize with a character like this and walk away from the game once the campaign is over, hopefully changes people in some way.

Shane: I know that developing games is not easy and VR probably even more trickier. So what were some of the most amazing, ‘oh wow’ moments?

Ryan: Yeah. So, there are a lot to say. And that’s one of the fun things about game development is that on a daily basis, you’re confronted with challenges. And one of the fun and addicting things about game development is overcoming those challenges and moving on to the next one is as you’re doing that the game is getting better and better and better.

Now we’re at my favorite season of Game Development. Because the game has gone Gold officially, now we’re in that final phase where we’re just bug fixing and polishing the game. And and that’s my favorite part of development.

But to answer your question, one example I can think of where we overcame a challenge, and it was just so invigorating, was early on in development, we were loving the flight mechanics, but we wanted to have a space that really leveraged that mechanic. And I think one of the first environments we built was a downtown Metropolis city environment. Because we couldn’t think of a better place to really test out the mechanics when you’re flying between buildings, ground pounding to the floor and avoiding enemies, and like, circling around an enemy that was chasing you and, like, losing them in between buildings. That environment has stuck with the game all the way until we ship it and is now represented in a downtown Shanghai environment. That is like one of the big, big temple environments and missions in the game.

Shane: So Iron Man VR, 3rd of July. What is next up for Camoflaj after that date?

Ryan: We don’t know. The whole team at Camouflaj is focused on making Marvel’s Iron Man VR, the absolute best PlayStation VR exclusive game we possibly can make. And the only thing else about the future is that the team loves VR, we hope that we continue to develop in VR and we believe that VR has a really, really bright future. But in the meantime, we’re just focused on making this game as awesome and as great as possible leading up to launch on July 3 (2020).

Shane: Fantastic, we are looking forward to the full release of Iron Man VR. Thank you so much for talking the time to talk to us today and also a huge shout out and thanks to yourself Ryan and the team at Camoflaj for making one the greatest PSVR games to date.

Iron Man VR is an exclusive release to PlayStation for PSVR. There is a free demo available now from the PlayStation store, the games’ full release is the 3rd of July 2020.

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The post Interview w. Ryan Payton from Camoflaj Studio appeared first on Shane the Gamer.