Gleich neun Spiele enthält die Spiele-Sammlung HeroCade für die PlayStation 4 (PSVR), die bisher nur in den USA erhältlich war. Nun kommt das Bundle am 26. September nach Europa und bringt damit das günstige Paket auch nach Deutschland. Für Horrorfans ist das 12 Euro billige HeroCade sicherlich einen Blick wert.
HeroCade: Neun Spiele zwischen nett und Trash
Wie bei solchen Bundles üblich, dürften einen nicht alle Titel interessieren. Zudem ist die Qualität teilweise nicht in jedem Fall zufriedenstellend. Allerdings können sich Horrorfreunde über Dreadhalls und Sisters freuen. Die Spiele sind schon älter, so erschien Dreadhalls bereits Anfang 2014. Einen Review aller neun Titel finden man in diesem Video:
Die Einzeltitel im HeroCade-Bundle:
Dreadhalls (Labyrinthisches Horrorspiel)
Sisters (Horrorspiel)
Jurassic Survival (Survival-Shooter)
PolyRunner (Arcade-Racer)
Space Bit Attack! (Arcade Shooter im Stile von Space Invaders)
Gumi no Yume (Einfaches Puzzle-Spiel mit hohem Süßstoffaktor)
HeroCade is a compilation of nine VR games for PlayStationVR, and while it’s already been out in North America since earlier this year, European countries will finally able to buy the cheap and cheerful game pack this month, which features a number of VR favorites previously available only Samsung Gear VR and PC VR platforms.
Launching in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, UK, Australia, and New Zealand on September 26th, HeroCade offers and interesting mix of genres, recalling memories of the old PlayStation demo discs from the PS1 era. Dreadhalls alone is definitely worth the €12 price tag (or regional equivalent), making for an easy buy for anyone looking for a swath of games with at least one surefire winner in the bunch.
A lot of people have been unhappy with the price of VR games in our new industry’s first year of consumer availability. For the most part, Steam has been flooded with well over 1,000 games and experiences, the vast majority of which are abbreviated teasers, uninspired tech demos, and cheap cash grabs. There are plenty of gems and meaty experiences sprinkled throughout, but they are far from the norm.
In some ways, HeroCade almost feels like a response to that climate. Instead of nickle and diming you for a couple hours of fun, tops, this is one single bundle with nine games total all for a price that’s lower than what you’d pay for many individual VR titles: only $15. We don’t really factor the price into how we review a game, but suffice to say that this is one hell of a good deal.
Of the nine games included in this HeroCade bundle, a little over half (five) aren’t very good at all. Zombie Strike, for example, tasks you with shooting at zombies from a helicopter in the sky. The perspective is so zoomed out you can barely see the figures shambling around and there’s next to zero feedback on your weapon. It’s uninspired and boring. Jurassic Survival isn’t much better. At first it looks similar to The Brookhaven Experiment, but there is very little enemy variety, boring level design, and bad animations. The dinosaurs barely even react when you shoot them.
The bottom of the barrel is also filled with the likes of Gumi No Yumi, a puzzle game that has no business existing in VR at all, and Space Bit Attack, a poor first-person version of Space Invaders that’s one of the most blatant pieces of shovelware I’ve seen in VR so far, and Alpha Turkey Hunt barely masks the fact that it’s just a bland wave shooter with little else to offer.. For the most part, I’d recommend avoiding those five altogether, although I can’t stop you from poking your head in just to see how bad the experiences are.
When you moved past those though and into the real meat of it all with the final four games, that’s where the value is clear. PolyRunner is simple and doesn’t really need to be in VR at all, but it’s still a thrilling endless runner with a strong “just one more time” addictive nature.
Next up is 405 Road Rage, a nice little endless driving game that has you darting in and out of traffic and trying not to crash. I wish it was playable in first-person mode to make it a bit more immersive, but even though it has no real reason to exist in VR, it’s still a fun and well-designed game at its core.
But the real highlights of this package and the main reason I’d recommend picking it up are for the two horror game standouts: Sisters and Dreadhalls. Sisters is only about 5-10 minutes long and is really nothing more than a slightly-guided jump scare, but the setting and sound design are great. Definitely worth trying at least once and is a real treat to put people through after they get their beginning VR bearings.
Dreadhalls is 100% worth the price of admission all on its own, though. In the game you’ll explore an elaborate dungeon with procedurally generated layouts. This helps ensure that the game is slightly different each time you play it, upping the replayability and making it even scarier to tip-toe around corners. It plays out similar to a game of hide-and-seek with creepy monsters that stalk you in the shadows.
With all of the other games you get in this bundle, Dreadhalls is still clearly the best of the bunch. Most of the rest are little more than filler because saying there are nine games is a lot more appealing on the surface than just two or three. Even still, the game is showing its age. There are better horror games on PSVR now (such as Resident Evil 7) and it doesn’t really do anything you haven’t seen before. But it’s still great seeing one of PC’s first awesome VR horror titles making its way to Sony’s console.
Final Score:7/10 – Good
The HeroCade bundle on PSVR does a great job of collecting a large amount (nine total!) of games into a single package. They’re all tied together with a loose “narrative” of sorts but about half of them are hardly worth even playing. Dreadhalls and Sisters are easily the best of the lot, but the sheer breadth of games on display is commendable. Worth a grab if you haven’t tried Dreadhalls yet, but I wouldn’t recommend it for the other eight games on their own.
When we first found out about HeroCade it seemed like the price to value ratio was perhaps too good to be true. Nine PlayStation VR (PSVR) games for $15 sounded ridiculous, but it turned out to be very much real. And now we know for sure that this coming April 18th, the full pack of all nine games, including two well-made horror games in the form of Dreadhalls and Sisters, as well as seven titles from Lucid Sight by way of PolyRunner VR, 405 Road Rage, Zombie Strike, Space Bit Attack, Gumi No Yumi, Alpha Turkey Hunt, and Jurassic Survival.
Interestingly, HeroCade is trying to also offer more than just a simple hub to access these nine standalone titles. According to a prepared statement from the company, “HeroCade is more than just a simple bundle. Rather than a hub where players select unrelated titles, HeroCade presents players with an underlying narrative––a mystery to solve. The titles of HeroCade may feature intuitive controls that make playing easy to learn, but only the dedicated will climb the universal scoreboard and unlock a history long forgotten.”
For more information about HeroCade you can check out the official website. The entire bundle will be available digitally on April 18th for PSVR for $15. We’ll have a full review of the bundle leading upt to launch.
What do you think of this strategy? Do you think packaging several smaller games together is a good approach for VR content? Let us know in the comments below!
If you’ve bagged yourself a PlayStation VR recently, then you’ll have seen some of the diverse range of content available for the headset even in these early days. From AAA titles to small indie projects, there’s been a continual influx of videogames of varying lengths and quality. Recently indie studio Lucid Sight – which has released five virtual reality (VR) during 2016 – announced a new bundle offer that would include nine titles for one low price called HeroCade.The studio is combining several of its VR experiences with other indie studios work to showcase the broad range of content that’s being made for the format.
The nine titles are:
Dreadhalls (Winner of Proto Awards’ Best Sound Design) – White Door Games
Sisters (Sundance 2016’s New Frontier Selection) – Otherworld Interactive
Jurassic Survival
405 Road Rage – Lucid Sight
PolyRunner VR – Lucid Sight
Space Bit Attack – Lucid Sight
Zombie Strike – Lucid Sight
Turkey Hunt – Lucid Sight
Gumi No Yume – Lucid Sight
“We wanted to give the gamer a taste of many different VR games at a reasonable price point,” said Randy Saaf, CEO of Lucid Sight. “VR is such a new medium, consumers want to see all the different experiences that have never been possible before. We wanted to include nine games at a price point below $15, so players could try a lot of different stuff. Each game will be less than a couple bucks.”
There’s no solid release date set for the PlayStation VR bundle, just that it’ll be ‘late 2016/ early 2017’. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Lucid Sight, reporting back with any further announcements.
