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Island Time VR

Island Time VR

We've been stranded on Flight School's desert island.

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Island Time VR is a small game in several ways. The download doesn't even weigh in at 500 megabytes, the developer certainly doesn't have many employees, and then there's the fact that the area on which the entire story takes place is just two or three square meters in size. The reason behind this diminutive play space is a shipwreck that leads the player to this small and solitary island, an island which is shared with a talkative crab Carl. This little guy could easily be a relative of Mister Krabs from SpongeBob and he makes some genuinely funny comments, although sadly these are repeated all too often.

This babbling does give us a few clues about what to do, however, because Island Time VR sees itself as a survival game and as part of that experience starvation threatens to rear its ugly head after just three or four minutes without food. In other titles in this genre, the exploration of a large playing area is often at the forefront of the gaming experience - instead of defining the whole plot of the game as is the case here.

The playing area hardly extends beyond your own outstretched arms in Island Time VR and it doesn't take long before you feel right at home. While that might not be particularly novel for those playing on PC via the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets, the game also tries to create a kind of room scale feeling on PSVR. The player is supposed to move around the space - the game doesn't offer any other alternatives, apart from the option to rotate your view 90 degrees at the touch of a button.

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Island Time VR
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And so you have to keep everything within reach and experiment with whatever you find because in principle Island Time VR works best like a classic point-and-click adventure. To progress the experience you have to combine items cleverly with one another, so it's difficult to talk about the gameplay without hinting at some of the solutions, and to do that would be to completely rob this intriguing VR game of its charm, because it's been fun to hang out on this little island and experiment and find out how things work.

In this respect, Island Time VR bears a passing resemblance to Job Simulator, apart from the fact that it offers significantly less content. In fact, that lack of content is probably the biggest problem we had with it. It's also worth noting that the game doesn't always function optimally due to the technical limitations of the PSVR headset, and there were some unwanted side-effects from the in-game physics that cost us lives much more often than we died from making our own mistakes. While you could go easy on it seeing as how games like Surgeon Simulator thrive on the haphazard experiences they create, this isn't a Surgeon Sim.

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What's more, £11.59 for a game that, with a little luck, can last up to two hours is a bit much if you keep the quality level in mind. Titles like Batman: Arkham VR might not offer much longer playing times, but at least they offer fascinating locations and significantly more varied tasks to challenge players. That said, fans of games like Job Simulator and Surgeon Simulator are advised to at least take a closer look.

Island Time VR
05 Gamereactor UK
5 / 10
+
Some fun to be had when experimenting with items, nice little premise.
-
Not much to do, funny lines repeated too often, not much replay value.
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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Island Time VR

REVIEW. Written by Kalle Max Hofmann

"To progress the experience you have to combine items cleverly with one another."



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