Sports Bar VR is the PSVR version of Pool Nation VR that I reviewed back in August on the HTC Vive. At that time the game was still being heavily updated with tweaks and new games like Skreeball, but what was there was pretty good; at least when it came to the pool and the air hockey. Sadly; and this seems to be the case with nearly every PC game being ported to PSVR, the game isn’t nearly as good in Sony’s virtual world.
It’s an interesting dichotomy really because what the PC lacked – a good social community – the PSVR excels, but unless you are in this for chatting to a bunch of odd floating hat avatars and the occasional game of air hockey, there is no real reason to visit Sports Bar VR. The limited tracking ability of the PS Camera and Move controllers makes most all of the activities in this game, at best annoying and at worst unplayable.
A back room tutorial allows you to navigate several menus and visit some question-mark hotspots for tips on how to play the various games once you enter the “real bar”. You’ll get to pick your dominant hand and set your floor and height distance, or manually enter in your height if you know the metric system. There are additional setup options in the main bar for picking AI difficulty and customizing the game.
As the PC title hinted, pool was the central focus of this title and sadly, without room scaling and full 3D motion capture, pool is a chore to play. You’ll spend 20x longer playing a single game of VR pool than you would in real life all because you’re trying to fumble with the controls. On the Vive it was so easy. You could walk around the virtual table and line-up your shots just like real life. On the PSVR you are forced to teleport around the table. If you take more than two steps in any direction in reality you’ll get a camera view warning from your PlayStation. Expect to see a lot of those warning playing darts as well if you lift you hand too high…but back to pool. You’ll naturally want to pivot to face the table, which is invariably always behind you after you teleport, but as soon as you do the camera can no longer see the Move controllers so your cue stick will go all janky and you get another tracking warning. I tried over a dozen times to play a single game of pool to completion and gave up every time.
Moving on to darts, once again the lack of accurate tracking with the PS Move made this a complete waste of time. The mechanics of throwing darts is gamey and unnatural. You position the dart in front of you then lock in and move the other controller to adjust force, which seems to be a crap shoot because sometimes the dart would arc limply to the floor and other times it would bounce off the wall above the machine. But the PS Move has always had trouble accurately tracking depth, so this really wasn’t a surprise. The graphics are so fuzzy that it was hard to even see where a dart landed, and it was impossible to aim with any real-world accuracy, so every game of 301 or 501 ended with me struggling to hit one final sector and being unable to do so. Again, over a dozen games attempted and none of them finished.
Skreeball suffered from the same problem it had on the PC in that in VR you can never get the starting height of the ball’s release to match the height of the table surface so you usually end up lobbing the ball halfway down the ramp or even directly into the scoring surface. They would have been smarter to put in one of those basketball free-throw machines.
All that was left was air hockey; my favorite pastime on the PC version and the only functional and redeemable part of Sports Bar VR on the PlayStation. The designers even tweaked the AI to provide a proper challenge. There were more than a few of the 20+ games I played where I actually lost, and several were excitingly close.
Much like the PC version you can zip around the bar observing the emotionless human caricatures that populate the establishment and tinker with objects like chairs, bottles or even giant dominoes. If you happen to know other people with PSVR you can invite up to five of them into your own virtual sports bar and play these games against each other while chatting and complimenting each other’s latest new hat. It all sounds good in theory but when the games are pretty much unplayable alone I’m not sure why you’d want to share the misery. Of course multiplayer isn’t restricted to friends and you can open your bar up to strangers where anyone can drop by to chat or play. This is when the “shield table” option comes in handy so those not playing a specific game can’t mess with yours.
Even though the alcohol is cheaper at home you may want to visit your actual sports bar if you want to play any of these games or chat amongst friends. The $420 coverage charge for Sports Bar VR is pretty steep and with the exception of air hockey, the games all suck and are mostly unplayable. It’s sad really because on the PC, Pool Nation VR is a fantastic game that does everything it promises, but the limitation of the PSVR, both in graphical horsepower and motion tracking (or rather a lack thereof) makes Sports Bar VR one of the last places you’ll want to visit in the line-up of launch titles for PSVR.
