PlayStation VR2 Is Delightful, Expensive, And Needs More Video Games

The first time I tried virtual reality was Nintendo’s infamous Virtual Boy, and all I remember is the color red. The next time was at Sega’s old GameWorks food ‘n booze arcade—a shooting game, probably? It was more advanced than this, but not by much. Virtual reality didn’t make an impact until a dev kit for the original, Kickstarter-funded Oculus Rift ended up in my lap. Goddamn, that ugly device was a genuine revelation, and I became convinced virtual reality had a robust future in games. It was more than immersion, though its ability to generate a connection was striking, thanks to the claustrophobic proximity of the visuals. 

Virtual reality gestured at a path of becoming physically and emotionally closer to worlds. At their best, virtual reality games are more than just an opportunity to look around at the sky while you play an otherwise normal video game, but are transformational and transportive. 

Next week, for more than the cost of a PlayStation 5 ($500) and only as the company is just catching up with demand for PS5s, Sony will release an expensive add-on, the PlayStation VR2 ($550). It’s the most comfortable headset I’ve ever put on; I’ve tried them all, and most suck. It has the best screens for sinking away into a digital world, hands down besting Valve’s high-end Index. There’s a decent catalog of games, though nothing, at least at launch, that feels truly revolutionary. It feels like a device building off the hard lessons since virtual reality first tried to enter the mainstream with the Oculus Rift in 2016. It’s well-made.

And yet, despite being a virtual reality enthusiast myself, a person with several boxes full of old cables and headsets, PlayStation VR2 is a hard sell. It’s expensive, and so far, without enough platforming-defining games to justify the upcharge. That might change, but for the moment, the vast majority of the PlayStation VR 2 library are old video games. The screens, controllers, and comfortability are best-in-class, but that much better than a $400 Meta Quest 2, which also connects to a high-end PC, granting access to a library of games that you don’t have to wait around to be ported, and can be lugged around fully without wires? The PlayStation VR2 headset does rumble, though, and it’s very cool!

If you’ve waited until this moment to try virtual reality for the first time and you already own a PS5, Sony’s made a tremendous entryway device for you. You’re set. You’ll benefit from an established library of excellent games that define VR’s potential, like Pistol Whip, Thumper, Rez, Moss, Tetris Connected, and others. You also get exclusive games that take advantage of Sony’s penchant for big budgets and cinematic flair, like Horizon: Call of the Mountain, which is both gorgeous in exactly the way you’d hope and imagine a virtual reality game set within the world of Horizon would be and plays just as well. It’s Hawkeye-meets-Horizon, and taking down robo dinos with dozens of arrows is as exhausting as it is exhilarating. It’s great.

(Curiously, Sony has not ported its best older VR game, Astro Bot. It’s a criminal oversight, because it’s a VR platformer as good as anything Nintendo’s ever produced. Sony also did not provide access to another premiere launch game, FantaVision 202X, in time for review, and as someone who doesn’t care for car sims, I can’t speak to Gran Turismo 7’s VR mode.)

Many older, already-proven VR games have been updated to take advantage of PlayStation VR2, and to their credit, look utterly spectacular. It took only seconds for Thumper, a so-called “violent” music rhythm game where players pilot a vibrating beetle through psychedelic Lovecratfian worlds, to get under my skin again. Rez is still Rez, and that will be a compliment until the end of time, even if it’s technically based on a 2001 Dreamcast game. 

Again, some of the judgment here is previous experience and investment. Is Rez on PlayStation VR2 enough of an upgrade to warrant purchasing it a second or third time? Nah. Should everyone experience Rez in virtual reality at least once in their life? Absolutely. It’s worth noting many games, with exceptions like No Man’s Sky, are charging for upgrades to PlayStation VR2, because importantly, there is no backwards compatibility. All those original PlayStation VR games only work on the old hardware. The interfaces are different, so it’s an understandable charge, but the $5 or $10 nickels and dimes add up, especially in an already pricey package that can’t be bothered to include a microfiber cloth to clean the headset’s lenses, something you will do with regularity, even if this headset is much better at managing breath and sweat than most. 

(It sounds goofy, but older headsets, as recently as the Meta Quest 2, were notorious for clouding the lenses if you breathed heavily. PlayStation VR 2 doesn’t have that issue, but dust and debris add up over time, especially after handing the headset around to others.)

The original PlayStation VR was a tangled mess of wires, cameras, and other oddities. You had to use those weird PS Move controllers, remember? Frankly, I try not to! But for a device produced by a giant electronics company, it felt positively skunkworks. That part was neat. The PlayStation VR2 is extremely slick, and thankfully, requires only one wire. There’s no onboard computing happening on the headset itself, which also means that it’s very light, but one wire is still one wire, and even though it only takes the tap of a convenient button to turn the headset into a mixed reality mode that lets you see a fuzzy version of your surroundings, that’s still a wire that’ll get tangled around your arms, legs, and chair. It never disappears.

The goofiness, perhaps flaws inherent to VR, is present elsewhere. Virtual reality remains finicky, despite the obvious advances made here. It’s easy for me to point at the PlayStation VR2 and see how Sony has made it easier to put on and fit (more) comfortably around your head, but it’s still impossibly weird to anyone who doesn’t already know what’s going on. If you have a headset in your house and want to share it with a bunch of normal people, you’re still going to have to sit with them and get the headset adjusted, help them find the controllers, and guide them through the PS5 interface. 

And too often, despite your and the device’s best intentions, you’ll have to establish a new “play area,” the defined space where interactions can occur. Or the play area will break. PlayStation VR2 goes out of its way to make moments like this as frictionless as possible, often by infusing the interface and tutorialization with cuteness and joy, but it’s always a small hurdle, the kind of small hurdle that, over time, adds up to a virtual reality set collecting dust when the dazzle wears off. It’s just easier to turn on a TV.

The biggest frustrations are when you and the headset are both at a loss. During an extended session, the headset, over and over, lost track of my “play area.” I’d get booted out of Horizon: Call of the Mountain for a moment, before the headset figured out how to fix things and snapped me back in. I kept wishing there was a way for me to soothe the device, and declare that even though the conditions weren’t ideal, it could chill out. (My running theory is a lack of light, because it was cloudy.) I never figured out what was causing the issue—it just stopped happening. Later, when I moved the device out of my office and a projector in another part of my house, I was unable to point at anything in Pistol Whip. The controllers worked fine in every other game, but Pistol Whip? Nothing. But it worked fine when reverted back to my TV.

[insert shrug emoji]

None are deal breakers, and for the moment, the PlayStation VR2 is my preferred virtual reality device. It’s the most spectacular way for a newcomer to experience virtual reality, and I’m jealous of anyone taking a dip for the first time. It’s come a long way from the fuzzy goggles and wall-mounted cameras of years past. But because PlayStation VR2 is chained to a PS5, it’s also chained to Sony’s ability to convince (or pay) developers to port their games to a platform with a brand-new, unproven user base. It’s also reliant on Sony releasing a steady stream of exclusive games. Horizon: Call of the Mountain is spectacular and worthy of its $60 price tag, but how many games will Sony produce that can only be played on an expensive accessory? There’s no knowing, and we won’t know the answers for a little while yet. 

PlayStation VR2 is a slick device, but for now, one that probably requires some patience. 

P.S. Sony, please pony up and pay Valve to port Half-Life: Alyx to this thing.

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is patrick.klepek@vice.com, and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).