Horizon Call of the Mountain

You will find yourself in the role of the former rebel Shadow Karji. Rias is doomed to atone for his sins by joining a special expedition to stop the new threat. On the territory of Sundom, according to the story, about a few weeks after the events of Zero Dawn, along with new and already known characters, you will go to the mountains.

After about 6-10 hours, you will be climbing, solving puzzles, talking, exploring, interacting with various objects, as well as fighting, archery and trying to survive during enough adrenaline episodes. Call of the Mountain can definitely be a tense experience from start to finish. It looks quite complete and offers beautiful graphics. What may not be as noticeable in the surrounding screenshots is because they are distorted – they only capture the output to the TV, which is limited to a lower resolution than the displays in headsets, which have 2000×2040 pixels for each eye.

Horizon: Call of the Mountain is a climbing adventure game. Exclusively available only for PlayStation VR2, it offers a breathtaking showcase of the skills of SONY’s new hardware. Looking around in space, you will look for different levers, interact with objects, shoot from a bow, and also participate in various prepared action passages.

You will not find such beautiful views of the countryside in games. And certainly not in VR. Add to this the shiny details of the machines – visually, this is one of the most beautiful games that I have ever seen in virtual reality. It is difficult even to begin to state this name in more detail, because it intertwines a series of actions. And it’s all the more difficult when it’s presented in beautiful settings but offers nothing but mediocre game mechanics. They’re well made, but I couldn’t help but feel like I’d actually already played the mini-game variant.

The game is not primarily focused on action sequences, as it is an adventure game with a main focus on mountain climbing where you will spend most of your time – which does not necessarily mean that you will be bored while climbing, luckily you will get access to a range of tools that will complement your gaming experience. In many cases, the name is able to charm precisely with its “firsts”. For example, presenting a story in which the beautiful jungle boggles the imagination and episodes of interviews with different characters, it even offers you dialogues to choose from.

Any interaction will bring a smile: smashing bowls with a hammer or throwing them on the ground is purely out of curiosity. Light up the beam. Throw items. Or just experiment. Sooner or later, a stream of stereotypes will pour in, as all this will be repeated without much surprise. You climb mountains or structures for a while, then face some puzzles, talk, find your way, and at the end of each level, you will probably be attacked by one of the huge scary machines in the form of a boss fight. .

Luckily, there are action sequences because as soon as the game locks you into a round arena, the whole archery system starts working perfectly.

For each attack, you have to dodge, find or create your own arrows and grenades. The crafting system is a great idea that I’ve always liked. When you have to assemble each of the basic tools together and then wrap a string around them, it often gives you goosebumps at how far virtual reality has come.

You move around the world either standing or sitting, using the joysticks or moving your left and right hand as if you were walking in real life.

This may seem amusing to observers. However, I was surprised at how well the system works. I tried the seated mode, but ended up standing up most of the game, where interactions take on more importance. However, the game also thinks about less capable individuals, let’s say, so in the accessibility mode you can adjust a lot of details – for example, climbing strength or damage from cars. It’s good that the game has so-called profiles – so you can immediately select a set of settings that will cause you the least motion sickness.

Against this, developers perfectly use all known tricks – from view binding, through vignetting to image snapping / capturing. Everything then works hand in hand so you can interact more with the environment. Peeking around a corner, jumping onto a tight rope or raising your head up – all this is taken into account in the game. For example, when you bend down to pick up some items from a drawer, or sneak through the grass, or perhaps hold one hand over a precipice, you really feel like you are part of the world.

The tactile feedback also helps: your helmet will shake too, including controls that can create resistance to triggers, similar to Dual Sense, only with the difference that their force is noticeably less.

In this way, immersion messes with the typical problems of almost every VR game I know. For example, space tracking, which in PSVR2 improves rapidly over its predecessor, is still, unfortunately, imperfect, and the image can often wobble from side to side, such as when I bend down to pick up an object.

The fingers on my hands made constant gestures that I did not want. Or my hands often disappeared. Did the character go down the ledge even though I was clearly holding the correct button and didn’t move my hand.

The hand just fell off. To some extent this may be due to the environment I was playing in, but in a moderately lit room, if the PSVR2 is intended for living room use, I was surprised at how often game tracking fails and I definitely hope after 7 years of waiting for the new version of SONY will be more consistent in this.

I had similar problems with the PS Move camera. It makes me even more frustrated when the cost of getting the kit is similar to the cost of a standalone Oculus Quest 2 that doesn’t have the issue in the same room, which is what I cover in my PSVR2 review.

However, what the Quest definitely lacks is the eye-tracking feature, which has fascinated me and works great.