VR Sports (PC) Review

If the motion controls are accurate enough, sports titles can prove a terrific way to show off the immersion, competitiveness and fun of VR. VR Sports on the HTC Vive does indeed have accurate controls, with smart haptic feedback, immersive 3D audio, and simple games representing the sports of bowling, baseball, soccer, basketball, Japanese archery, clay pigeon shooting and boxing. It all comes together to provide a variety of skill-based, leaderboard challenges that are fun to play again and again.

This is, however, hardly a new concept for VR. Sports titles are prolific for the PC headsets and they cover the aforementioned sports thoroughly. With VR Sports, though, the games are focused enough to concentrate on specific, measurable skills, allowing the competitive leaderboards to function well and encourage returning to the title to better your standings. They're also high quality enough to feel like a collection of complete mini-experiences that can draw players in and demand multiple attempts to truly master the mechanics and grow their skills.

The Homerun Derby game challenges participants to hit as many homeruns as possible, with a variety of different pitches thrown at you to test your accuracy and reflexes. Soccer places the player in goal and challenges them to save all incoming shots, again testing the very same abilities. Moreover, the speed and ferocity of some of these shots can easily force a flinch, speaking wonderfully to its immersion. Basketball challenges you to throw balls from multiple different areas of the court surrounding a basket, Japanese archery requires scoring points by shooting a target, clay pigeon shooting launches multiple clay discs in the air to shoot with your two barrels, and bowling asks players to score big during a set. However, the standout game is certainly the boxing.

Boxing, naturally, has users ducking and weaving around their opponent as they exchange punches, but this is an experience seldom so successfully recreated in VR so far. The opponent AI is smart enough to block, dodge, move and strike realistically, and this certainly proves a difficult but fair challenge, with a pleasant workout built in. Moreover, the room-scale abilities of the Vive are used well to make moving around the ring a viable tactic, and the hit detection is excellent.

Indeed, VR Sports is an excellent selection of sports games that offer a nice variety of different skills to master within the VR space. The leaderboard chasing, workout benefit, and gradual improvement of skills makes it a title worth coming back to time and time again, and on the horizon are a few more sports in a future update, challenging you to master table tennis and go-kart racing. It's a well-designed and enjoyable facsimile of real-life sports that definitely comes recommended for Vive owners.