So yesterday Survios and HBO released Westworld Awakening and I have to admit at first I was a bit skeptical because lets face it, some of the franchise based games released in VR so far have been really bad. Well, after only playing for a few minutes all those fears that this was just going to be another lame VR movie/TV show tie in were quickly laid to rest!
As a fan of the show I was blown away by all the attention to detail that has gone into this game/experience. The environments are gorgeous and the overall feel of the game definitely has a Westworld vibe to it. The graphics look amazing in the screens of the Pimax 5K+ and I couldn’t imagine playing this one in anything other than high FOV now… Games that incorporate a cinematic VR feel just benefit so much from this headset!
Now there were a few slight issues that I ran into such as a seemingly small bounding box that in some instances would gray out the screen and stop the gameplay even if I moved only slightly off of center. This brought back bad memories from other games like Wilsons Heart that have the players locked into a single standing position and it was just not comfortable at all! I highly encourage all VR developers to stop this practice of limiting a players movement in any title these days… or at least give the options to turn this off! Admittedly I did not go deep into the menus to see if this option was there but even if it is I don’t feel it should be enabled by default! The only other annoyance was the controllers but this is not the fault of the game… Unfortunately I still have to use the Vive wands with my Pimax headset until I can score some Index controllers or better yet if Pimax would finally just release the Damn Sword and Sword Touch controllers!
So overall as a fan of the show I was very impressed with what Survios and HBO have cooked up with Westworld Awakening. Even if you have never seen an episode of the series or just want a very polished horror/adventure experience then I would recommend giving Westworld Awakening a look. The game clocks in at around 3 hours for $30 so keep that in mind while making your decision on this one… $10 per hour for something that doesn’t have a lot of replay value might be a hard pill for some to swallow but as a fan of the show and good VR experiences in general for me it would be worth every penny!