GORN PSVR Review

GORN PSVR was developed by Free Lives and published by Devolver Digital and will be available on the PlayStation 4 May 19th.

I’ve been waiting for GORN for a long time, seeing people play it on PC was difficult due to wanting to experience it so badly and now finally we have it on PSVR. GORN throws you into the shoes of a random gladiator that is completely under your control, you’ll slash, stab, rip, bash, and most likely destroy something that is to close to you in the environment due to getting a bit too into it. You’ll have multiple levels with new challenges, enemies and objects which you can then mess around with in custom mode. The custom mode gives you access to a cheat like menu where you can activate modes such as god mode, tiny head, big head, low gravity and tons more, I felt the custom was much more fun because it gave you room to experiment and have a good old laugh with. God mode really let me train more to avoid getting killed and helped me learn the weapons I’d picked up.

The gameplay is pretty basic for a VR title, grab a weapon, fight to the death, experiment, and just have a good time doing it. In GORN VR it’s the physics that makes it shine, the AI can be mashed up into pieces, parts of them can be sliced off, some of them can even be impaled and shot with arrows, the way the physics react in the game is so much fun but not for the faint of heart, though for those who don’t like gore you can turn it off and they’ll become pinata enemies. I had quite a bit of fun in GORN messing around but I can’t help but feel the novelty eventually wears off a little bit, the challenges do keep it fresh for a while and the work that has gone into keeping it fun is great but in the end, you will just be killing a lot of gladiators. My biggest issue through my play-through was tracking issues, I’d often lean down to pick a weapon up and it would freak out, leaning forward too much would make it freak out even with limited space turned off, it ruined the fluidity of the combat a little bit. Other than that it’s a game that works pretty well, smoothly and bug-free. The controls are 50/50, the combat is a ton of fun, easy to learn, satisfying to pull off but walking is a pain with the PSVR’s cable, you have to walk as you would in real life but with your arms going backwards and forwards, I hit the cable quite often using this method, I wish there was a way to tie it to a button like in The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners because it can interrupt the combat when you can’t quite get the hang of swinging a weapon around but also working out how to dodge backwards or run away.

GORN PSVR has had to be scaled down a bit from its PC counter-part which is understandable but it still looks great, the gore is as gruesome as ever and it’s pretty immersive. It’s fun if not disturbing to experiment with how each of the weapons can do different things to the enemy to fully understand the physics and design that went into all. I feel that GORN could have used a sound-track to aid the combat to get your heart pumping more but the sounds of the weapons, enemies and everything else is pretty spot on.

Verdict

GORN PSVR is a lot of fun for a while but eventually, it does become pretty samey. GORN is a title I’ll pick up and let people try once they’re aloud round again, it’s one I will probably keep on putting on just for a mess around but while it can be a lot of fun, those tracking issues stood out quite a bit, I don’t know if a patch will help eradicate the sensitivity of it but sometimes grabbing things could be a nightmare. Other than that is GORN PSVR worth the price? Yeah, it’s fun, you’ll play it a lot more than once and it’s great for if you want to show what people can do with the PSVR system. I’m happy I got to play it, grateful that the developers did port it in the end, I just wish there was a bit more.

7.5/10