Horizon: Call of the Mountain

Video Game Review

Sony Interactive Entertainment’s premier first-party game for the PlayStation VR2‘s launch, Horizon: Call of the Mountain is certainly as ambitious as virtual reality games come. While many initial releases for the peripheral have been fun jaunts that focus on one or two key gameplay mechanics, this game seeks to fully immerse you in a world where there are mountains to climb, robotic beasties to shoot down and all sorts of hazards and puzzles to navigate your way through. Co-developed by both Guerrilla Games and Firesprite, is this ambitious VR experience worth checking out, or are you better off buying the cheaper PSVR2 bundle and opting to buy different games? Read on to find out!

Horizon: Call of the Mountain has a diverse number of accessibility options, which I would highly recommend using not only at the beginning of the game, but adapting it to your tolerance levels. Due to the nature of movement and combat in the game, and it being the PSVR2’s first showcase of what a normal game could be like in virtual reality, you may not enjoy every aspect of the game psychologically with no accessibility features enabled. In my case, I was five minutes in before hefty nausea took hold of me, and fortunately, amongst the (somewhat daunting) selection of accessibility options, I found something that worked for me. 

While a nasty bout of nausea is probably not da good indication of a positively reviewed game, once you get past it, what you have is an enjoyable and memorable demonstration of everything the PlayStation VR2 is capable of – from the use of the dual Sense controllers to solve puzzles to the implementation of haptic feedback, to more accurately place you in the perspective of your character as they interact with the hazards and environment around them, to eye tracking which enables the game to focus on what you are looking at.

As a third instalment in Guerrilla Games’ Horizon series, it fits in nicely amongst its predecessors, although not attempting to be a major cant-be-missed moment in the franchise. With elements from the main games – including characters, enemies and world design language, the development teams have done more than enough to justify the game brandishing the Horizon moniker. At approximately 10 hours in length, it is perfectly set up to be on the longer side of the VR game spectrum, with a concise but ever-present narrative keeping you moving forward, and both visual appeal and sound design that frequently makes you want to stop and just take in the beautiful vistas in.

Horizon: Call of the Mountain is very adventure/exploration oriented, taking players through hazardous, mountainous terrain which in a non-VR game would probably be a bit more run-of-the-mill, but is much more epic from a first-person viewpoint where you need to properly position your hands and mentally process what is taking place in your field of view. Climbing gameplay is a big one, requiring you to grab onto ledges with your hands and navigate through somewhat adequately marked-out paths to get to the next area. This highlights perhaps the biggest issue with the game, as it isn’t always the most comfortable feeling being so close-up to the mountain, and especially when you inevitably fall, it can be quite jarring. Aside from that, there is a good variety of tasks to complete, mostly involving navigation, but there is also ample opportunity to get into combat. For what it is, the combat system mostly involves flinging yourself around the battlefield using defined dodge movements with the Sense controllers. While equipped with your bow, you perform the actions of shooting the (seemingly limitless) arrows from the unseen quiver on your back. The manual actions associated with doing this are a lot more involved than what you might find in a VR first-person shooter which would typically expedite the reloading process and can be quite challenging, but once you get the knack for it, it is fun being able to do one of the core gameplay systems of the main game – archery – even if you are likely to miss more shots than Aloy would when you play as her in third-person perspective.

Whether you buy Horizon: Call of the Mountain as part of the PSVR2 bundle or as a separate purchase down the line, it is definitely a game worth considering adding to your library at some point. This is truly telling of what a flagship virtual reality game developed exclusively for the PlayStation VR2 can look like, and hopefully is the sign of many first and third-party games of similar quality in the future. While not a game that would likely work without having its player properly immersed with a VR headset, the beautiful mountainous world is so well realised and combined with other elements of the Horizon series makes it one of the best PSVR2 games on the market, to date.

8.5
Sam
Sam
Founder of The Otaku's Study. I have been exploring this labyrinth of fandom these last fifteen years, and still nowhere close to the exit yet. Probably searching for a long time to come.

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