Black Friday sales have become a thing in the UK, in spite of the fact that we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.

A lot of retail outlets go a step further, and start their sales a week (or more) prior to the big day itself.  That was when several shops started advertising they would be selling the PlayStation VR bundle with VR Worlds for £249.99 (around $334.00 at time of writing), with many including an option of either Skyrim VR or Gran Turismo Sport.

It’s now a month later, and I find myself looking back at the investment and wondering if I am happy with my purchase, so I thought it might be helpful to share my experiences.

The PlayStation VR bundle itself did not come with the PS Move controllers, but I still had a set from the days when motion control was the direction that the console manufacturers wanted to take their market. Though they have had the sole purpose of gathering dust for a few years.

I couldn’t really afford to buy it, but if I chose the Skyrim bundle, I would be getting a £49.99 game included in the purchase, so I justified the purchase by the fact that I would be saving around £150, as well as already owning a couple of VR titles thanks to the PlayStation Plus offerings of RIGS and Until Dawn : Rush Of Blood.

It’s now a month later, and I find myself looking back at the investment and wondering if I am happy with my purchase, so I thought it might be helpful to share my experiences.

What I have been the most surprised with is the interest from my friends and colleagues.

On the day I rushed to the store during my lunch break to grab the unit before they inevitably sold out, I had several people asking to have a look, and perhaps understandably, some not even understanding that you’d need to plug the system into the PS4.  However, once I had explained all this, my manager told me I should leave the office early to go home, wire it all up, then tell him how great it was so that he could try and persuade his family it would be a great present for Christmas!

It didn’t take long for a few colleagues to invite themselves over an evening to try it out.  At this point, I had only really tested the waters by playing through the Rogue One X-wing mission in Star Wars Battlefront (a free DLC content pack), which I guarantee will astound any Star Wars fan, although you can quickly establish if they have played any kind of flight game before by how fast they get confused by the controls.

One of my colleagues was a little older than me, and although she had a Wii, clearly hadn’t used a PlayStation controller before, as she was constantly confused by the buttons, but aside from that, was clearly blown away.  When the next player put the kit on, I could hear comments such as “It’s a shame you can’t get this for the Wii”, as well as quietly discussing how much money would be required to invest whilst also having to order the PS4.  Although I was not in the office the next day, I heard that she was so impressed she was telling everyone.

I’ve travelled to see friends over the holiday season, and having purchased a carry case to store the headset when it is not in use, I’ve taken it with me to let others try it out, and even the friends who were initially resistant at thought of stepping in to virtual reality have changed their mind and asked for go with the feigned reluctance of, “Oh, I suppose I’ll give it a try since you’ve set it all up…”.

I feel I should make it clear that I have not been showing off the VR as a demonstration to my friends as a kind of humble brag.  It was purely because the price point means that the average potential buyer will not consider it, as it is too much of a risk if they don’t get on with it.  I had had the luxury of trying it myself at a friend’s house before I bought my own.

But getting all my friends to try it is not the only use it has received.  Far from it!  I have had quite a lot of fun streaming games on twitch.tv.  When using the PS4’s native broadcast mode, chat comments are displayed as pop-ups on the view screen inside the headset, rather than reducing your field of vision by having the chat bar along the side of the screen.  Whilst this is very handy, it doesn’t display the message for long, and if you don’t have the chance to read it, you can’t exactly scroll through the chat to find it again.  I guess it is also open to abuse if you had a lot of users in the chatroom spamming messages.  You’d probably want to disable your comments at that point.

So far, there have been two elements of occasional frustration.  The first is the tracking of the headset and the move controllers.  There are plenty of videos on youtube that will help you reduce this by setting up the camera correctly and calibrating the headset for you.  It does a pretty good job right out of the box, but some people have wider faces than others, and this can lead to the vision being a little off because the image is not directly in front of your eyes due to an average position being adopted.  You can also suffer from your move controllers going out of the cone of vision of the camera, resulting in frozen hands in the game.

The second obstruction to blissful gaming is that some players will be more susceptible to nausea from movement in certain games.  By far the worst offender for this is the game RIGS, which as the name suggests places you in charge of a mechanical rig, which turns its torso as you turn your head.  Because the game is designed to be fast-paced, there are multiple “comfort settings” which need to be toggled until you find what works for you.  I found it took a couple of days of playing in short bursts before I could tolerate more than 1 match before quitting.

When you have everything set up correctly though, you can find yourself totally immersed.  You take for granted that other characters are a little cartoony, but even that feeling disappears as you forget you are sat in your living room (or whichever room you set it up in), because these characters are talking to you with the sort of volume you’d expect from someone being a foot to the right or 6 foot in front of you.  I played Star Trek Bridge Crew for the first time yesterday, and found that I played for a straight sitting of 6 hours, as there is no in-game clock to tell you of the time in the real world.

Bizarrely, I still haven’t tried Skyrim, but I’ve watched it being streamed.  The only reason I haven’t installed it myself yet is because I know that I will lose far more than 6 hours!

I should also point out, as some people may not be aware, that the PSVR will shortly be sold as a newer model.  The PSVR model 2 will be largely similar, but will have some sockets in the headset casing to store the earbuds that come bundled with the system, as well as an upgraded processor box that will allow HDR passthrough.   Currently, if you have a HDR-enabled tv you need to disconnect the box to enjoy the extra benefits over a standard tv.  For me, that isn’t an issue as I currently don’t have a 4K / HDR television, but if you have upgraded it is definitely something to consider.

With the Playstation Experience showcase highlighting 80+ games in development for the hardware, I am confident that this is not going to be yet another case of Sony releasing a product and letting it slowly die by not supporting it.  Games like Skyrim VR and Doom VFR being available, and hopefully Fallout 4 VR being migrated to the PS4 in 2018, there is a lot to feel confident about.

Ultimately, this reflective piece was intended to confirm if I think I wasted my money on the PlayStation VR, or if I feel that it will certain reward my investment.

As of right now, I am definitely happy to have bought it.  The variety of games available means that there are experiences available for everyone, ranging from peaceful experiences such as Eagle Flight and Ocean Descent, to role-playing games, such as Star Trek and Skyrim, to scary games like Resident Evil 7 and Rush of Blood : Until Dawn, and not forgetting puzzle games like Tumble and Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes.

 – Justin Smith has been a podcaster for over 6 years, and has been visiting the cinema regularly for 4 of them. When he’s not playing games with Star Wars themed miniatures, he spends time with video games.