VirZOOM Arcade (Steam VR)

VR Shop Score – Silver Award

System: Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift & Windows MR
Price at Time Of Review: Free
Comfort Rating: Red
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Keyboard & Mouse
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: Yes
Age Rating: 15+

 

Description: “Play VR. Get Fit.” That’s what VirZOOM does. We make virtual reality games for an active motion controller where your pedalling and leaning propel you through race tracks, battlegrounds, soaring skies, and pictorial countrysides in the forms of an F1 pilot, a tank commander, a Pegasus, a cyclist, and more.

Other online players automatically drop in and drop out of your games to provide competition and cooperation in matches up to 8 players. Make friends and challenge them to ghost competitions over a period of time, winner take all! Or choose your own workout and goals, collecting coins along the way to upgrade your avatars.

Review: VirZOOM Arcade is a collection of demos that are all designed to be exercises in some shape or form (when played with the bike). The idea is you play this once a day and get fit the VR way! With 5 exercise experiences: Cowboy, Kayak, Cycle, Tank or even Pegasus! But you don’t get to choose them, you have to play them back to back. To be honest, most of it is about leaning left or right, but there are some other movements involved. Sadly this list of demos is supposed to be used with the VirZOOM exercise bike which we sadly didn’t have. But you can always do what we did and grab a controller, limber up your neck and away you go! While none of the games is really explained you’ll soon work out what you have to do

While VirZOOM Arcade is a great little collection of good looking experience that I am sure would have been a lot more fun with the exercise bike, so please note that this opinion is done without one. I think each one should have been a game in its own right, not as part of a back to back playlist. Also, there are some truly nauseating moments especially the Unicorn riding. But overall each of these experiences does have its own potential and I could easily see some of them, if not all of them getting turned into standalone VR mini-games. An odd collection indeed, but maybe there are some idea seeds inside of it.