Gravitational (Steam VR)

VR Shop Score – Bronze Award

System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £15.49
Comfort Rating: Yellow
Genre: Adventure
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting, Standing
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG

 

Description: In Gravitational, we are a few decades in the future. Humanity continues to prosper and the race to discover new technologies grows every day. Play as Sebastian, a physically challenged scientist of Gravcorp who leads and develops the gravitational project. Now he has to overcome a big challenge, the collapse, and the inaccessibility on the path until the reactor.

Review: First up, I want to give kudos to the developer Electric Monkeys for making the main protagonist a wheelchair-bound person. This simply doesn’t happen enough in video games and especially not in VR games. As for the game itself, I really am going to try hard to build it up into something great, but that will not be easy at all. The good news is this game has the promise of a grand adventure with plenty of head-scratching puzzles and wheelchair-bound exploration to enjoy. There are even times when the game looks pretty great and it is clear from the start that a lot of time and effort has gone into making this game. But…

Sadly this is where it all goes wrong and that is when it comes to gameplay. Moving your wheelchair about is nothing short of a pain and this is not a representation of the accuracy of its movements, it’s just a plain nightmare! You soon realise that it is best not to move about much at all that takes the exploration fun away from you. It also makes the puzzles far harder than they should be. Having a son in a wheelchair I really wanted him to be able to enjoy this and sadly he can’t. For that reason, I simply can’t recommend it at the moment.