A Taste Of Futuristic Mechanised Sports In PSVR’s RIGS

Virtual reality gaming is fundamentally a different experience to sitting down in front of a TV. Your view into the game world is so all encompassing that it completely changes how many of the staples of modern gaming will play and feel. It’s not as easy as simply expanding the field of view and letting you loose in whatever war torn country Call of Duty heads to next.

It’s a recipe for motion sickness if poorly handled, with the fact that your own body motions don’t match up to what’s being seen in front of you likely to induce nausea. Yet first person shooters are a hugely popular genre that will appeal to many of those looking to buy into the first or second generation of VR. That’s what makes RIGS so fascinating and so important for the future of VR, because it is essentially a first person shooter and one that managed to deliver fast paced action without leaving me feeling queasy.

Very quickly after the first prototype VR headsets became available a few years ago, developers realised that some of the best games and genres for this technology had you sat within a cockpit, emulating your real world body position in game. Racing games like Project Cars and space dogfighting in Eve: Valkyrie both work very well because of this. Guerrilla Cambridge have borrowed this idea for Rigs and put you in a mech suit to keep that subconscious layer of abstraction, while still giving you a familiar-feeling first person shooter and letting them keep the pace of the game high.

This is actually a strange futuristic sport of sorts. Two teams of mechs – Valkyries vs. Reapers – go head to head in a bright and utopian looking arena, with plenty of ramps and levels to keep the fight interesting and varied. While gunning down the other team is the bread and butter of the game, the Power Slam mode is more than that. Get three kills and you become overcharged, meaning that you’re able to score a goal by heading to and jumping through the map’s central hoop. It’s a clever spin that blends Team Deathmatch with Capture The Flag, and manages to feel like an actual sport, if you don’t think about it too hard.

Playing against the AI isn’t particularly tricky – regardless of how impressed the guys looking after the PS VR units were – especially when you get the hang of controlling the mech suits. It’s standard twin stick FPS fare to move around, albeit with your suit featuring a weapon on both triggers. Aiming, however, is a little bit more futuristic, with the two guns pointing to wherever your head is and letting you quickly and easily pinpoint an opponent. There’s even a little bit of auto aim and target lock-on once you start firing, which makes things even easier.

I actually hope the aim locking is removed, but not just because it will mean that a mite more skill is required. It’s actually a tiny bit jarring when it happens, given how my mind had quickly ingrained these as visual points of reference for this reality. At the same time, the verticality of the maps and leaping around can induce a little vertigo if you’re ever foolish enough to leap from several stories up while looking down. Thankfully, if you die and eject, the screens or windows in your cockpit are tinted green to avoid that particular shock to the system.

I soon learnt to avoid looking down when jumping, but it’s a sign of how manoeuvrable and flexible these mechs are, despite being imposingly tall when it rises up out of the ground during the introduction. There’s a lot more to them than just dashing around and shooting guns, though. For the purposes of the demo build, I had a double jump and the ability to regain health when destroying other mechs, but the AI mechs stomping around had a variety of other abilities and weapons, from a pulse cannons to the ability to drop a bomb upon your death. It’s here that you can see where some of the longevity with the game will be, with customisable mechs and progression through unlocks.

While Rigs is the most convincing in-house example of what Sony can achieve with the PlayStation VR, it also demonstrates some of the weaknesses of the system as a whole. Though the graphics were bright, attractive, and ran without any noticeable hiccups, aliasing was clear to see on the sharp and aggressive lines of the mech suit. It’s simply a consequence of the PlayStation 4’s limited power, though I’d expect to see certain improvements as the game is polished and optimised before release.

Guerrilla Cambridge have been very smart in working around the challenges of VR to create a handsome looking combat sports game. It’s got that wow factor that’s much more likely to appeal to the more testosterone and adrenaline fuelled gamers out there than the more bitesized approach we’re seeing elsewhere at Sony. To my mind, Rigs is by far the most convincing of the in-house efforts with PlayStation VR.