GAYMING: SONY RELEASES PLAYSTATION VR2, VIDEO REVIEW

Big launch for Sony this Wednesday February 22nd: the release of its new Playstation VR hardware: the PS VR2.

The long awaited PSVR2 costs 600 EUR / 550 USD (that’s excluding the price of the PS5 itself which costs either 450 EUR/ 400 USD without a disc-drive; or 550 EUR / 500 USD with one).

The Hardware

PSVR2 is the first consumer headset to offer eye tracking and the first also to offer top PC-quality VR without a PC.  

When you’re grabbing the PSVR 2 controllers, they have a solid-feeling. Their layout and accuracy is much better compared to the original PSVR’s Move remotes.

Cleverly, Sony adopted the basic layout of the Touch controllers, with a trigger, a grip button, two face buttons, an analog stick, and a menu or share button on each hand. On top of that, it’s added a PlayStation button to the center of each of them, letting you pair the controllers or pull up the homescreen.

About the headset and more in IGN’s video review below. More regarding the games under that.

The Games

The games, quite the most important topic. The de facto main launch game is Gran Turismo 7. Reviewers love it and find it amazing, it is apparently a “console seller” (the type of games that can make you buy a console just for that game, for us it’s “Final Fantasy” for example, and…. actually perhaps Gran Turismo too, we love racing games).

GT7 takes full advantage of PS VR2’s next-gen features, utilizing optimized HDR tone mapping, as well as the eye-tracking technology (which renders areas of the screen that the player is directly looking at in high definition), as well as some dynamic 3D audio support.

Players can experience a totally immersive gameplay. It’s like you are really in the car. Some sort of a personal home Disneyland attraction some would say. Sony’s Ken Chan writes about that HERE.

Sony promises over 40 games to be expected during the launch window. That includes titles like Ragnarock, Unplugged: Air Guitar, Another Fisherman’s Tale, Tetris Effect, Rez Infinite, Sushi Ben, and more.

Details of the games you can look forward to HERE.

Sony will show information about five more new games arriving later this year at a State of Play on Thursday.

Keep in mind that when it comes to VR, the PSVR 2 is not backward compatible. It only plays PSVR 2 games. In other words, it’s not compatible with the previous PSVR titles. And you can’t just plug it into a Windows PC and use it with SteamVR or Oculus games, like you can with a Meta Quest 2 for example. Instead, Sony being Sony, chose to build a new ecosystem from scratch, with all the pressure on them to deliver a lineup of original games that justify the PSVR2’s price tag.