System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £6.99
Comfort Rating: Red (Extreme Movement)
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: Dodge cars, dogs and tornadoes as you grow your subscriber base and expand your paper route in this arcade-inspired newspaper delivery game. Requires a supported VR headset. Now with full controller and VirZOOM support! Arcade inspired scoring and progression, Traps including cars, dogs, tornadoes, grannies and more! Gain bonus points for smashing lawn gnomes, knocking over trashcans and breaking windows of non-subscribers! Progress through 28 game days unless you lose all your subscribers before then! Four neighbourhood sections. Route expands into a new section each game week. ”Sunday Special Edition” At the end of each game week players collect coin pickups to pay for all the tossed papers while encountering boss fights with the rival paper. All while still keeping up with their daily deliveries!
Review: Are you old enough to remember playing the original Paper Boy by Atari Games, in the arcades or on your console? Then much like myself you should stop playing games, you are far too old. But if you do remember that game, you will remember that you are from a rebellious era and will do what you want. But for everyone else who doesn’t remember that game, the idea is to post your newspapers in people’s post boxes while avoiding a load of obstacles as well as other road traffic.
The idea of the game really hasn’t changed, but this time it is in VR and you have to control the bike and throw newspapers at the same time. Even with the touch controllers, this is a very difficult task. You need to hold onto the bike’s handlebars as well as reaching into your basket to grab a paper to throw. I will be honest, it took me a fair while to get used to this, but I persevered and once I had got the hang of it I started to enjoy the game a lot more. This game is pretty unforgiving, the traffic is moving too fast and there are far too many obstacles in the early levels. I will say that despite the low polygon graphics it looks pretty good and some of the animations are pretty good. There is much fun to be had by hitting a character in the head with a paper and watching them fall over. The better you do in each level, the more people will want a newspaper next time, so it does get repetitive fast, but looking back the original game wasn’t all that.
When it comes to classic arcade games remade for VR some work and some don’t, while this game is fun, it is nowhere near as playable as the arcade original Paper Boy. The bike is hard to control, the difficulty of the game starts too high and it is also pretty nauseating, which of course the 2D arcade game never was. If you loved the original Paper Boy arcade game, you will love this. But you will also come to the same conclusion I did about it not being as good.
