A few months after its release on PC VR, the platform game Ven VR Adventure has arrived today on Oculus Quest with improvements for Quest 2 owners. If we cite the famous Crash Bandicoot as the benchmark for the genre, VR already has very good actors with Astro Bot on PlayStation VR or Excellent Moss. And so Ven VR Adventure arrives in the middle of these references and we’ll see if they manage to forget about them.
Come on, let’s go on an adventure
The game takes you to meet Finn, a small creature reminiscent of a fox and you will control him in the third person by sitting comfortably in your living room because the game is actually played while you are seated. As for the story, there is nothing very exciting because more often than not, you will have to help your companion to fend off invaders on your distant planet. For this, 12 levels divided into 3 different regions will be presented to you. The goal is to collect all the runes and free youths in each cycle.
If it looks simple on paper and if it’s the first levels already, the adventure will get more difficult as you progress and some segments will give you a regular hard time from the second half of the game. About 5 hours to complete these different levels at once but challenge lovers will have enough to start with New several times to try to complete them all 100%. The game offers 3 difficulty levels that adjust your starting number.
In fact, as you can see in the gameplay video we recorded below, it is very difficult to succeed in collecting 100% of the runes on the first try. Some are well hidden in recesses that remain invisible if you don’t turn on the camera or in secret passages. In addition, we would have liked to be able to challenge each other in the given chronological order, but the functionality was not expected by the developers.
good but perfect
In a lot of areas it’s nice to see Ven VR Adventure even very good, but it still lacks one small thing that would make a difference against the already established competition. On the plus side, the level design offers many different obstacles, nooks and crannies that vary according to the level. The same goes for the very good and varied soundtrack as well. If the number of 12 levels seems low, they are rather long and developers can double that number once they are cut in half. This should definitely bring more dynamism, especially for the levels of great difficulty which can put some off due to their length and risk of game over.
Technically speaking, if your little creature responds well to your controls, the camera’s handling isn’t ideal. It regularly happens that we lose sight of Vin and that it takes several seconds to find it. A point that has not jumped out at us in other games of this genre.
Using VR in Astro Bot on PSVR is of real interest because it’s not uncommon for you to have to lean and turn to reach areas and follow your character. Here, the feeling is less and you have no interaction with the “dummy”. Finn severely lacks charisma, and while it’s very unsettling to see him look you straight in the eyes from nowhere when he stops, the interactions don’t go much further. There is clearly an underutilized point for the game in VR. The same goes for the totally cliched story that doesn’t matter much. For several minutes at the beginning of the game, this story is also presented in English without you being able to activate the French subtitles. But that is the case for the rest of the game.
Referee: 7/10
As mentioned in the paragraph above, Ven VR Adventure is a good game but it doesn’t excel in many areas that could have completely changed our final feeling. The level design is very good, the graphics in Oculus Quest 2 too but there are other points below. Scenario, under-exploitation of virtual reality And the imperfect content management (long levels, no timed challenges) are the points that bothered us a bit.
