The flagship game for the PSVR2 might be a preview for the devices history as a whole. An amazing piece of tech that shows excellent potential but the game itself is shallow with no depth and no reason to ever play it again. It’s a damn shame cause the horizon world is so rich, and it has bows and arrows as its main weapon, that’s VR 101. Instead this is a climbing simulator in disguise, it feels like a first generation VR game, one that I have played plenty of times before.

Let’s do the good first, this is a technical showcase. It is jaw dropping with its beautiful environments, vistas and high quality models. When you come face to face… well more like face to foot to a thunderjaw every little bit of detail in the model is noticeable. The game runs perfectly too which is something many PCVR games have difficulty doing if it’s a high end game like this. Outside of HL Alyx there is no VR game that looks as good.

Part of that is playing to the strengths of the PSVR2 which after going back and forth between it and Quest 2 I think PSVR2 wins hands down as the best VR set on the market. Not only is the display so good, but the controls work so damn well. Call of the Mountain does a fantastic job of showcasing these controls with fun interactive items that have full physics. You can pick up any object and interact with them as you’d expect. Get a hammer and break a glass cup with it. You can get a sledgehammer and wack a gong. You can play on some bongos, grab a small mallet and play the xylophone. You can get a paintbrush and paint the walls of a cave. These were all things HL did as well except in that game they found actual gameplay uses for those things… in horizon it’s ALL POINTLESS. It’s just there to be there so you can go “ohhh I can rotate a bucket!”.

The actual game part of Horizon VR is climbing, so much climbing. You will see clearly marked hand holding spots on a wall and you will move your arms up and down simulating climbing a wall over and over and over and over and over again. Now they mix it up as you gain all kinds of gadgets to make your climb more varied like using pickaxes to climb on ice. Or having a grapple hook to latch onto far points and swing to the next thing to climb. None of these things really add much to the gameplay, at the very least it allows for some minimal variety but it’s never really used in an interesting way. I think maybe in one or two areas you might have an optional path that you don’t have the tool for and you can replay the chapter later with that tool to access it, this is the extent of using items cleverly.

In between the long stretches of just climbing there are combat encounters. This should be where the game shines, horizon was made for VR! Well it shines only if you liked being trapped in some imaginary ring where you can only move in a circular motion around a circular arena where your enemy will be. So let’s say you are fighting a thunderjaw, it’s in the center of this arena and you need to pelt it with arrows. Your defense is using the stick to auto strafe around the circle. In some areas around the circle will be some object like a wall you can get behind to avoid big area attacks. Some health items and powerful arrows are also scattered around this circle of movement. So the battle is just move side to side, shoot arrows and try to hit weak points.

You do have different arrow types, which to make them you have to physically put a few parts together, a wasteful VR a thing to do. You got shock, fire, tear and precision; they all do what they do in the game. The same way you can tear down pieces of the enemies works the same here, but you can’t pick up the parts that become weapons when detached. Oh you also get the slingshot which has fire and ice bombs which are very powerful and put enemies in stasis quick. The limited movement and weapon selection greatly reduces the options that made the fights in the main games so much fun. In here they turn into glorified shooting galleries where your main decision is just which stasis effect to use to get enough openings to damage the weakest parts.

No matter how small or big the enemies get the strategy is mostly always the same. The most creative fight in the game had these electrical lures you had to circle around to and pull a switch which in turn distracts the thunderjaw so you can ignite the fire canisters at the lure. That’s the extent of the combat variety you get in this game. They could do so much with VR combat and so much with the wide variety of robots horizon has and this is the best they come up with?!

As for the main quest it’s like 10 hours long which is a fine length for a VR game. The story is totally throw away, the main character is just a former shadow carja warrior who was imprisoned and now given a second chance to redeem himself and find his brother who is chasing a group who plans to attack the capital city. What I learned is I don’t care at all about the politics of the horizon world when it’s not Aloy trying to uncover the real events happening in the world. At least the story takes you to varied locations and it has some exciting moments where there are chases that break up the quiet moments where the main character is talking to himself nonstop. One of the best moments is the first thunderjaw meeting as it hunts you down as you navigate the inside of old human structures. He is bursting through walls, you can see and hear him stalking you through windows. It’s all scripted but that’s how you use VR effectively. There are too few of these moments, later on there was some great parts with a storm bird. I am so upset this wasn’t more the focus.

There are a few secrets to find, the main one being targets off in the distance, or hidden in odd spots of which you shoot with the arrow. There are multiple ones per stage; do they unlock anything… no but it’s just something to do outside the norm. Oh and there is what is probably the intriguing use of VR which is build a rock cairn, so stack rocks. This is where full hand control is needed, you pick up different sized and shaped rocks and try to stack them to a specified height. At least this made me think and actually use the physics in an interesting way. Do you get anything for doing this, again no, just another completionists mark to fill in.

Outside the main quest are two activities, one is a jungle cruise little experience which is a great VR showcase. This is like a river Disney ride through the horizon world and you will see every robo dino up close and personal. I actually really liked this , felt like a virtual tour and it was kind of excited, you don’t do anything but look, still there was Dino fighting and scary moments.

Then there is a challenge area which sadly is just two different challenges, one climbing and one target practice. Target practice is what you thing, shoot arrows at targets and go for a high score. There is just one game, one version… come on. The other is an obstacle course where depending on what items you have unlocked in the main game you can use to reach many alternate paths to get better score. If the main quest had some kind of scoring system or any decision making with multiple paths in climbing then climbing might be interesting. So it’s a cool little course but again it’s just one course. It’s the most minimal of extra content they could put out. Not even a combat arena where you can pick which robot you want to fight.

I’m actually really hard on this game because I’ve done this kind of VR already. This was the first VR kinds of games where just the act of interacting in a VR space was so impressive it could hide the pitiful gameplay. So if this is your first VR experience you will enjoy it way more than I did. There are moments of beauty and awe, moments where the scale is so impressive. But for me I’m already over all this; HL, RE, Walking dead and many more already showed you can translate full incredible games into VR and not limit them to boring mechanics. Horizon VR is a good showcase for the technical side of the PSVR2 but a poor game like so many early VR games.

Overall score: 4.5

Fun in moderation. Physically, it can induce nausea and also tires the arms, but mentally the gameplay easily gets repetitive. I played this one mission at a time (for about 30 min) every couple of days and enjoyed it that way. Neither the story nor gameplay is good enough to motivate me to finish it any time soon, other than for the sake of calling it "done". To be clear nothing about this game is "bad", I just think it's not as quickly appealing as a lot of the stuff out there I could be playing instead.

To expand on the gameplay a bit: I think it's tiresome but fun in moderation because the climbing techniques are interesting and varied, the vistas are often worth it, and the very visual sense of progression all the way to the top of a peak is satisfying in and of itself. The combat is simple but since I enjoy the world of Horizon, it's worth seeing the machines up close and watching their intricate animations.

Horizon VR: Call of the Mountain is a pretty great VR experience and a real showcase for the PSVR2. So no wonder Sony decided to bundle this one with the headset. Together with Half-Life: Alyx this is easily the most impressive looking VR game to date with beautiful vistas, great animations and some truly spectacular scripted events.

Contrary to the main games Horizon: Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West it follows a linear approach and is divided into several levels with a hub town in between. Some levels allow you to choose one path before the other, but you always have to achieve all the main goals so that the game always feels linear. That is not a problem, because of how the developers achieved to mix things up, it never feels boring or “on-rails”. Most of the time you will do climbing. Sounds boring? Yeah, I thought so as well. But I was very wrong about that. The climbing is a lot of fun and offers plenty of breath-talking moments when reaching certain goals. Over the course of the game the player acquires different climbing gear like pickaxes, a rope caster and a climbing rope and the developers found a lot of interesting ways to use these tools in varied climbing areas. It always felt fun and engaging to me.

To mix things up a little bit more there are some mild puzzles and, of course, combat. Most encounters take place in an arena and lock the player to the outer rim of that arena where they can move or dodge left and right. Sounds limited? Well, it sure is compared to games like Half-Life: Alyx, Pavlov or Boneworks. But I can see why the developers took this route to introduce new players to the VR space. And honestly, it is also a lot more fun than I thought at first. Really, I was very worried about the combat being dull and boring. But once you face a T-Rex-sized Thundermaw you forget about the limitations and just enjoy the spectacle. It also helps that shooting the bow feels satisfying. The devs also did a great job to simulate impact. There are a lot of parts that can be shot off the enemies, they are fantastically animated and 3D audio does the rest to fully immerse you into the combat. Pretty much just like the main games.

The most disappointing part of the game was the story to me. Horizon is known for great storytelling and vast amounts of lore. But there isn’t much of that in Call of the Mountain. Instead of that you get some generic revenge story that doesn’t even make too much sense when you think about the villain's “great” plan. Another problem for many people might be the short play-time of around six hours for the main story. There is a hunting ground, but with only two challenges - climbing and shooting - and plenty of different collectibles inside the levels to lengthen the play-time for a few more hours, but you have to be the kind of person to enjoy that stuff.

Bit of a mixed bag here.

It is easily one of the best looking VR games I've played. Visuals have always been a strong point of the Horizon series and they translate well here with few obvious sacrifices.

It is a great showcase for some of the new features of PSVR2. The gaze tracking is a great way to handle menu's in VR and I really hope others take advantage of it. You also can't even notice the degradation of resolution on the edges of the screen as your eyes are tracked.

As for gameplay its mostly climbing with some combat sections breaking things up here and there. The climbing is at its best when it incorporates the gadgets you get to overcome certain obstacles. But the game is a bit slow to give you all of these and in one instance uses them very little after the section it was given to you for making them feel wasted. Climbing is also could be more interesting if it was more freeform but in this game 99% of the time you have to climb a very specific path.

Combat is fun but quite limited. It is done where you are only able to move left or right in a circle around your machine enemy. You try to hit its weak points while dodging its various attacks. Simple but it works fairly well and is at its best against some of the bigger bosses you'll face. You start with just a bow and well that doesn't change much as things go on which is disappointing for a series that has such cool varied weapons. You do get something else but it comes much later then you'd expect/want. This is rather forgivable as combat is a smaller chunk of the game compared to climbing though but it feels like a missed opportunity.

I do want to give it credit for having some very cool set pieces. The intro is a great way to showcase the scale of Horizons robots and the various climbs you do over the course of the game give some fantastic views of the surrounding. There's a few gameplay sections that manage to spice up the climbing gameplay in some exciting ways, I particularly think the last level stands out in that regard.

Ultimately this game does have some cool stuff worth checking out if you are a Horizon fan or want a good showcase for PSVR2 but isn't some system seller the hardware is really going to need.

If only every game in this generation of Playstation VR could have this level of investment in the visual experience. These environments and your interactions with them are genuinely spellbinding. Overwhelming enough that it's impossible to not leave the game with a positive opinion. I've read reviews that suggest that you spend 80% of the play time climbing and that just wasn't my experience at all. I would say climbing is less than 20% of the overall game. Areas of over ground traversal and arenas of ground combat are separated by short stints of climbing. But even if the game was overwhelmed by climbing, it's not cause for complaint. The climbing is fun, especially as you unlock more and more fun gadgets that aid in vertical traversal.

Bow and arrow combat feels great in VR and is especially so here with eye-tracking aiming. I'm not sure why the movement is railed when in combat. We've had years and years now of free movement combat in VR action games like this, and it's never been an issue. Strange that these developers didn't trust the players to accomplish this without the rails. Either way, it was awesome to engage with the surprisingly huge robot beasts from the 'Horizon' series.

Even this short game has too much lore and too much series-specific jargon, ever a problem with the 'Horizon' series. But there is much to enjoy here even if the fiction is hard to penetrate.

I will be avoiding story spoilers here, so no worries there. I go into gameplay stuff and talk about some mechanics, but I don't detail any specific items or enemies here.

There's a lot to unpack with this one.

Graphically, it looks great in the headset. Each mountainside you approach looks really nice up close, allowing for great immersion. However, there's some texture pop-in issues that you will notice quickly. It's nothing disorienting, but it is a little immersion-breaking.

Aside from a few rare dips in framerate, the game ran fine, overall. There are also plenty of accessibility options to help make the game more enjoyable if certain gameplay styles cause motion sickness.

The story is pretty weak. I didn't really get attached to the characters, and the plot is pretty straightforward. Don't go into this expecting a jaw-dropping narrative, or much of an interesting narrative at all, sadly.

Where this game shines and flickers, though, is its gameplay. Climbing mountains, ropes, and other things feels natural, for the most part. Moving too rapidly to quickly climb a mountain can cause some controller detection issues that can rarely lead to you missing an important grab and making you fall, but for the most part it works well.

Throughout the game you'll acquire different traversal tools to spice up climbing. Some of which you'll be using constantly throughout the game. However, there's one item you get that sadly doesn't get much use outside of the first area you get to play with it in. You'll reach the end of the game and forget it exists. The final traversal item gets plenty of use in the end, but you'll often need to be using it while looking directly up, which can make your neck pretty stiff after a while. If you have lights on in the room you're playing in and they're above you, this will also cause the VR headset's cameras to lose track of your environment, causing the game to stop for you to reorient yourself.

One half of this game is climbing and traversal. The other half is enemy encounters. Sadly, this is the weakest part of the game. Enemy encounters feel like they're designed for you to be facing one or two enemies at once at max. When 3 or more enemies appear, it quickly goes from exciting to stressful, requiring you to keep track of multiple enemies all doing different attacks while finding small pockets of time to allow you to shoot or eat a healing item.

As you progress, you'll acquire different types of ammo for your bow that cause status effects when you shoot enough of them at an enemy. Because enemies are constantly moving, for the most part, you'll either miss shots or spend too much time trying to aim. Along with needing to hit the enemy with enough of a status type, you also need to hit them rapidly. Wait too long and the status effect meter goes down, nullifying your hard work. It would be better if one or two arrows did the job regularly, instead of the multiple enemies and bosses require.

Speaking of bosses, there are some here. Visually, they're impressive. Fighting them, however, is kind of a nightmare. Bosses have multiple area-spanning attacks that will quickly tear through your health bar. You'll spend more time hunting for tables with apples on them during these matches than you will be actually fighting back. Enemies and bosses all have weak points that the game shows to you, allowing you to do good damage to them. It's great for common enemies, but when it comes to bosses, they can often be small or hard to hit, and with some bosses moving around rapidly, aiming for these points becomes an arduous task.

Enemy and boss arenas contain not only infinitely respawning healing items but also a limited number of special ammunition. Using special ammo is encouraged, if not required, for having a more fun experience fighting bosses as you expose weaknesses with them. However, the fun stops when you run out of special ammo. At this point all you can do is unload your basic infinite ammo into a boss until it falls over. Bosses take very little damage from regular ammo, turning fast-paced fights into boring slogs.

Perhaps the worst part about fighting bosses is that there is no checkpointing during them. If you're a few shots away from taking one down and you die, you restart from the beginning of the fight. This is highly frustrating, especially if a certain fight is dragged out due to previously mentioned special ammo problems.

Overall, I don't hate this game, but I don't think I'll be returning to it anytime soon. It does some cool stuff and is a long playthrough, so you do feel like you get your money's worth here. It's also a great workout, since you're moving your arms a lot during gameplay sessions.

If this game ever goes on sale for like $20 or $25, give it a shot if you want. While this game is not without its flaws, it isn't something I dislike.

One thing's for sure, it made me realize just how big the robots are in this universe. Honestly the coolest part of the game is getting to see these things up close. You can just boot it up to look at them and you'll immediately get your money's worth, if ya ask me.