System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £15.49
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting, Standing
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: AREA MAN LIVES. Or does he? If you could join a radio drama already in progress, talk to the characters and interact with the environments the story painted in your mind, you might find yourself in the world of the area man.
A quirky radio drama unfolds around you in VR while you do your best to keep the radio station humming along as its new DJ. You record commercials, interview callers and try your best to piece together how your actions inside the station impact your listening audience in scenarios so wild they can only live in your imagination.
Review: ‘AREA MAN LIVES’ sees you playing the role of a radio presenter and boy does it chuck you into the deep end. What I loved about the game is that your own voice is transformed into comic font words making it feel like you are living in a comic book world. To be fair the game looks pretty great most of the time and there are lots of things to interact with and touch all around you. But it is the lack of instructions that puts me off recommending this game. It doesn’t help, it doesn’t tell you what to do, you are suppose to just know and it does leave you feeling frustrated.
Give yourself time and you will work out what to do in this game, but it is the lack of content that really lets it down. Sure, you can redo many of the tasks to make them funnier and better, but in terms of new things, you are going to be all done here within a single hour quite easily. However, the lack of content variety still isn’t enough to put me off giving this game the thumbs up. It’s just so much fun and silly that I can’t help but love it, even if I do still think it is overpriced.
