System: Oculus Rift, Rift S
Price at Time Of Review: £15 ($19)
Comfort Rating: Red (Extreme Movement)
Genre: Adventure
Input: Gamepad, Keyboard & mouse, Oculus Touch
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: Yes
Age Rating: PG
Description: World of Diving is the online multiplayer game that will bring out your inner explorer by bringing the murky, mysterious depths of our oceans and their hidden treasures within your grasp. Or step into the shoes of the a designer, and build and share your own diving locations and missions with your fellow divers. If it’s underwater, it’s part of World of Diving – armed with hi-tech deep-sea diving gear and submarine vehicles, a photo camera, and your exploration kit, it’s up to you and your friends to reveal, salvage and catalog the ocean’s mysteries.
Review: Billed as a “randomly generated, open world diving simulator” this undersea mission and adventure game is much more a fantasty game than a real simulation, but I think it I better for being so. Featuring several large areas to explore, each one filled with its own mysterious places and sea life. While you are free to explore whatever and wherever you want there are missions that you are given. But when you are bored of them you can always make your own missions or play some the games community has made.
The multiplay support is pretty impressive and you can set up team dives with friends or explore each others maps that you have made, this gives you almost endless replay opportunities and once you get into the most colourful sea life adventures you will want to keep coming back for more. To be honest, you will probably just do what I did. You’ll find yourself swimming around the different levels, just enjoying the views and forgetting that there are missions to do.
There is a certain, relaxing charm about this game, enough to make you want to play for hours on end. But sadly the VR sickness will prevent most people from doing just that. The good news is there are lots of missions filled with all sorts of challenges to keep you coming back to it. While it looks great, sounds great and has a lot of depth to it (not intended to be a water depth pun), it is not the easiest of games to get the hang of. The realism aspects do take some of the explorer fun away from this game, but given time I have no doubt that this game will be amazing. Every passing week this game seems to get better and better and that makes it well worth paying for now rather than later.
