Carnival Games VR (Steam VR)

System: Valve Index & HTC Vive
Price at Time Of Review: £15.99
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Party / Mini Games
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Standing
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG

Description: Step right up and play the game where everyone’s a winner! From the creator of Carnival Games, Cat Daddy Games and 2K bring the fun and entertainment from this successful franchise into virtual reality. Carnival Games VR brings an all-new immersive virtual reality experience, allowing you to explore the park, interact with patrons and play up to 12 different games! Enter a themed Carnival Alley where you can play a game and earn tickets for fun virtual prizes or unlock another game. Whether it’s scaling a castle in Climbing Wall, rolling for a high score in Alley Ball or shooting basketballs in Swish – there is something for everyone.

Review: Roll up! Roll up! Come and see the amazing bearded lady! OK, so there is no hairy females in Carnival Games VR, but there are 12 fun carnival games to play and all done especially for VR. Play any of the games earns you tickets for fun collectable items giving the game some much-needed replay value. You can play Golden Arm, Fast Pitch, Ring Toss, Shooting Gallery, Haunted House, Funnel Cake Catch, Quick Basketball Throw, Skee Ball, a there is even a challenging Climbing Wall to scramble up. Throw in horse racing, Balloon Pop Darts and even a Dunk Tank. All this means you will find some serious fun all in one place.

This is a game that was first released on the Wii, but looking back at that, it makes sense that it would be a good game for VR. The motion controls work well with it and I would imagine it wasn’t that hard to convert it into a VR game. With online leaderboards and loads of collectable items to earn the completionists will be playing this for a long, long time. But the rest of us will probably just play score challenges passed between friends, and maybe some self-challenging as well.

Carnival Games VR has something for everyone, there will be a game you enjoy playing here somewhere. Earning the tickets to play those games is a different ball game, it will take a while to get enough to unlock one, let alone all the games that are on offer, but that does mean you will play most if not all the games rather than just one or two. Having played this game on the Wii I find it strange how much this game works in VR, it was like it was waiting for it to come along all this time. It looks great, it’s pretty simple to play (unless you are rubbish at funfair games like myself) and there is more than enough content to keep you busy for hours on end. This is one Carnival that does give you value for money.