I’m one of the lucky few. I’ve had a PlayStation VR 2 in my mitts and on my melon for 7 days straight. I’m disoriented. I’m sweaty. And I have a detailed critique to dispense to you. That said, virtual reality is unlike any other medium when it comes to reviews and reviewers.
Motion-sickness tolerances vary greatly from person to person. New adopters of VR have their hair blown back by mechanics veterans would expect as standard. I hate to do a mini LinkedIn-like resume of where I am with VR, personally, but it’s quite important to quantify.
So, let’s teleport right to it.
I have three other headsets in my possession and have been doing VR for years, and PSVR 2 is still an impressive piece of kit to me. I can now say, from an original PSVR owner’s perspective, this follow-up is mind-blowingly better. Despite the odd exclusive for that system you may wish to revisit, that headset is all but obsolete now.
PSVR 2 Review
From a Meta Quest 2 owner’s perspective, PSVR 2 is very impressive in terms of visuals, ease of use and it gives Meta’s love of exclusive titles a run for Zuckerberg’s money. You need only perve upon Gran Turismo 7 and Horizon: Call of the Mountain to confirm this.
From a Valve Index owner’s perspective, PSVR 2 is…slightly less impressive. Sony’s second VR attempt keeps pace in most areas, and exceeds in a few, but falls very short in one area — the ten-finger-tracking controller department. All of this should come as no surprise given the considerable difference in price/technology of both headsets. I mention the Index here only to establish that I’ve seen things from one of the highest VR peaks available. That perspective is useful.
CONSTRUCTION AND COMFORT
The very first thing that blows my mind about the PSVR 2 is how light it is when I pick it up and plonk it on my peanut. It’s 40 grams lighter than the OG PSVR but feels better balanced around your head. Conversely, it’s 57 grams heavier than my Meta Quest 2, but the balance on that thing was heavily on your nose and cheeks. In short, PSVR 2 is the comfiest VR headset I’ve ever worked with. You simply forget it’s there.
Fitting it properly can be done in seconds, too. With a new user, you can simply pull to extend the strap, place it and then twist the knob on the back to laterally tighten. There’s also a button on the front to shift the visor forward and backward, independent of the strap. Lastly, a wheel on the visor’s top left lets you change the IPD range (or horizontal spacing) of the lenses. Easy peasy.
Input-wise, the VR Sense controllers feel perfectly designed. They remind me a great deal of my Meta Touch controllers, though Sony’s take doesn’t feel plastic-y and cheap. Part of that is because they’re a pip heavier at 168 grams (0.37 pounds) and have fancier innards. For the record: both offer capacitive face buttons and capacitive analogue sticks. However, Meta’s middle finger trigger is trumped by PSVR 2’s capacitive grip trigger and Sony has gone above and beyond the Touch’s standard index trigger by making it a haptics-enabled capacitive trigger. More on those in a minute.
Other things to note, Unlike my old PSVR, the silicon material located around the cheek area of the headset easily creates a complete block out of light — a huge deal for immersion. I also love that the new cable is half the diameter and weight of what we were tethered to with PSVR. Rare was the time when I noticed it was there.
Lastly, being able to slap one cable into the front of the console — not a full broadway production of break-out units and extra cables — is bliss. This ease of use, along with an overall boost in comfort, makes the PSVR 2 the most accessible, pick-up-and-play headset this side of the lovely wirelessness of Meta Quest 2.
Also, kudos to PlayStation for including a black and white camera that can be switched to via a forward-placed button. It doesn’t give me headaches like the one on my Meta Quest 2. Likewise, using it to draw out a safe 2m by 2m room-scale space is a breeze.
One thing I will say, though, PSVR 2 made me sweat like no VR headset I own. It certainly handles that moisture well — at no time did I have to lens wipe for fog or excess precipitation. But yeah, I honestly can’t explain the phenomenon. I’ve played the exact same high-movement titles like Pistol Whip on all of my headsets and none of them caused my forehead to go full Niagra like the PSVR 2.
The headset seems to dissipate heat just fine, so I don’t believe it’s that. I’m basically immune to motion sickness, too — so there goes that theory. I’m at a bit of a loss as to why this is. It just is.
THE GAMES EXPERIENCE
When it came to testing software on this thing, in some senses I had no shortage of options and in another sense of the term I,…well, did have some limitations to work with. I smashed through 20 launch titles, many of them games I’d clocked before on other headsets, which sure helped. But the timing of this review was less than ideal for big-name launch fodder like GT7 and Resident Evil Village — despite my protests, their updates simply weren’t ready to go.
That said, I played the crotch out of the apex experience – Horizon: Call of the Mountain. It’s the game Sony’s choosing to bundle with this hardware. It’s a true, first-party showcase that uses all of the PSVR 2 hardware and features to their fullest extent. You could call it PlayStation’s hope of a killer app. The rough approximation of what Half-Life: Alyx was to Valve’s Index.
I’m going to pen a dedicated review for that game, but as it’s inextricably tied to this piece of hardware, I will use large excerpts from that review in this hardware appraisal. I’ll steer clear of major plot spoilers because Horizon is a 7-hour experience — twice that if you want to see every path not travelled as you 100% collectables.
Dropping into the world as Ryas, a Nick Offerman-sounding Shadow Carja is an impressive experience. Your window into this world will feel all-encompassing if you’re coming straight from PSVR and Quest 2’s roughly 90° of FOV. The PSVR2 offers a more Valve Index-ish FOV of roughly 108-110°. That makes for some serious there-ness.
Likewise, having 2000 x 2040 per-eye resolution @120Hz rockets PSVR 2 to the top of the heap in terms of VR visual fidelity (at a consumer-grade price range at least). Obviously, it kicks the crap out of PSVR’s 960 x 1080 offerings. Even better, I’m happy to say that Sony’s fancy eye-tracking tricks — which render the things you’re actually perving at — work seamlessly. Mind you, this tech doesn’t solve some very distant mountain views which still have their fair share of blur.
Beyond that acceptable shortcoming, everything within a reasonable distance looks great. The framerate is buttery smooth. The Dinobots you face all move and react fluidly, each offering a real sense of scale and threatening presence. Vertigo sufferers may also have a tough time finishing an adventure that feels like 80% climbing. It’s the best wall-scrambler I’ve played since The Climber 2 on Quest 2.
Before we talk controls, feedback and finer gameplay mechanics, it also has to be said: eye-tracking is an under-sung game-changer in terms of world connection. Shifting your stance and having a chatty NPC follow you with their eyes, really puts you in the scene. Reaching out to high-five them — only to watch them shift focus to your hand and recoil in alarm — is…well, crazy stuff. And creepy. On your behalf.
HANDS AND HAPTICS TRIGGERED
PSVR 2 and Horizon Call of the Mountain will wow your eyeballs, but what about your other senses? As I said about the Sense Controller earlier, it exceeds the Meta Touch controllers in almost all areas but, obviously, falls well short of the 10-finger tracking wow factor of the Valve Index controllers. Mind you, one pays a kidney to own those things.
I want to get the bad news out of the way early, though. The internal battery life of a Sense controller seems to be roughly 5-ish hours, which isn’t amazing. Also, Horizon doesn’t represent the best finger tracking the Sense Controllers can deliver. I like to do comical gesturing when I play my VR games, something the Meta Touch controllers allow for as they will reliably know and represent when you’re index pointing, closed-fisting or giving a thumbs up.
Horizon can do all that – plus the peace symbol for some reason – but getting the Sense controller to reliably interpret those gestures took way more effort than I expected. Most of the time it’d misread my intention. Not a huge deal, as I have played three or four other third-party titles that offer Touch controller levels of finger-tracker sureness. It’s quite odd that Horizon is unpolished in this area, given it’s the flagship experience.
In all other categories of movement tracking, the Sense Controllers pass with flying colours. Handling your two projectile weapons or a surprisingly wide variety of climbing implements feels natural and effortless. More complex actions like switching and/or crafting arrow types are one of those “I love doing this, but it’d be tedious in any other game” things.
Speaking of tricksy interactions, Horizon impresses with incidental objects that offer multi-point gripping, breakability and surprisingly realistic physics interactions with one another. The devs have even aped the much beloved musical instruments and free-painting time-waste objects that are lying about in games like Half-Life: Alyx. Sometimes it’s the little things that impress us the most.
It also has to be said that haptic triggers and the vibration in the headset are game-changers for VR. The former is felt in thwacks from hammering climbing axes into stone, followed by a slight trigger tension to let you know you’ve got the angle of your swing right, and you now have purchase. Likewise, you don’t even need to glance at your bow to know it’s fully drawn — your fingertips have felt the string become taut.
You really can’t imagine how much haptics can add to VR gaming until you replay something like Pistol Whip or Star Wars: Tales From the Galaxy. The percussive punch of a pistole and the pulse of a techno beat truly elevate the former. The meaty chug of a full-auto blaster barrage feels boss in the latter. It’s enough of a difference to make those third-party titles feel like they’re definitive editions on PSVR 2.
One last comment before we move on — the actual headset vibration is used far too sparingly for my tastes in Horizon. It’s so “barely there,” I thought it was a marketing gimmick until I played Rez Infinite which used it as an orgasmic thumping beat. That game sold me on it instantly. So yeah, developers, if you’re listening: spare not my melon, go hard with your head vibrations next time.
I wish I had space to detail the 20+ third-party titles I sampled. Some of them are mere upgrades on PSVR titles. Others are VR games I (and many of you) have played on other platforms before. There are too many to critique in the timeframe I have.
A WHOLE MOUNTAIN OF FUN
At the end of the day, there aren’t a lot of bad things I can say about PSVR 2. Is it expensive? Yep, but for the asking price (and in the context of some seriously more expensive competitors) I think it delivers decent bang for your buck. Obviously, that bang is bolstered by it doing things on the haptic and eye-tracking fronts that the others are not.
This newcomer is also a mixed bag of blessings on the gaming front. Is it a shame your PSVR library can’t be played on this? Absolutely. However, free and moderately priced upgrade paths are available for many of the good ones. And let’s not underestimate the pull of Alyx-level exclusives like Horizon and GT7 which — by all hands-on accounts from contemporaries I trust — is one of the best VR racing sims on the grid. Incidentally, check the pinned comment of this vid in a few days for my updated thoughts on that statement. My instincts on games aren’t often wrong.
When it comes to pros, PSVR 2 is a huge leap over its predecessor in terms of graphical capabilities, comfort, 1:1 tracking and plug-it-in-plonk-it-on ease of use. VR on PlayStation began as a shaky-footed “what if” gamble for Sony. PSVR 2 feels like an all-in commitment to market competitive apex-level VRing. It’s expensive, but if you want to kiss the sky like few gamers can take the leap and absolutely love where you’ll land.
PlayStation Australia provided a PSVR 2 unit for this review.
