Being an ex VR-head and huge Marvel fan, Iron Man VR had piqued my interest for sure, so getting to play a hands-on demo at EGX was a real joy for me. I had to book a slot due to the busyness of the VR section, and in I went, a salty ex-VR lover.
The demo opens up (after some tests on where your arms are etc) with the classic Iron Man helmet closing down on you, as you’re flying above the ocean and are instructed to essentially move forward. This is where the demo impressed me, you had to use your hand repulsors to fly around and had to point them at the correct angle behind you to fly forward and up, this took a few minutes to get used to but really made me feel like I was in the suit. You’re also told that if you double tap the trigger button (which you’ve been holding to fly) you do a boost which feels awesome. After learning to fly forward I then came upon Stark’s House (essentially what it is in the MCU), and had to land on a giant rock. From here I then had to blast at targets which popped up; the repulsor blasts didn’t really feel like they had much weight behind them, but blasting at the targets was definitely fun. The repulsors are simply used by aiming your hand up and pulling the trigger button, and I gotta say it’s the closest I’ve ever felt to feeling like Iron Man. The whole time Stark was interacting with Friday (I guess Jarvis has already become Vision) and Pepper which added another layer of fun to this demo.
You’re then also taught to punch by kind of swinging your Move Controller forward when a certain target pops up, having to use this to knock down a shield before repulsor blasting them to smithereens. The last part of the demo then consists of you combining all of these to fly around a kind of assault course they’ve set up; it really took a lot of control to keep yourself flying in a straight line whilst still successfully using your blasts to take down the bots. Upon completion, Stark says something along the lines of he hasn’t broken a sweat and you’ve then got to fly around and take out moving targets with the skills you’ve learnt, finally landing back on a rock to end the demo.
Now overall the gameplay was really fun; it’s easy to mess up and accidentally boost into the sky or miss your target, meaning you need to be relatively good at using your suit. I also really liked how it wasn’t on-rails, there was a relatively large area to fly around in whilst completing the set objectives. The VR cynic in me just thinks this will probably be a 2 hour game and the gameplay most likely won’t evolve far past what I played but these aren’t things I know at all, even the friendly guy helping with the demo didn’t know that. All I can say is I really enjoyed my 20 minutes or so with the demo and it’s the closest I’ve felt to being a super hero.
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