When Arkham VR works, I am Batman breathing in the ambience of Gotham City. When it fails, I am a human being in my basement struggling to convince suspicious technology to behave correctly. This creates a curious dichotomy, one that actively embraces virtual reality’s capability to transform the world while also bearing the burden of a concept in its infancy. Whether or not Arkham VR can find balance may come down to a set of personal preferences and, to a certain extent, luck.
Arkham VR’s opening screen is an expression of VR’s power. You’re on the perch of the police station at night in Gotham. There’s a full moon out, zeppelins dot the sky, and the Gotham Herald and a billboard advertising Vicki Vale’s show are visible in distance. Looking over your shoulder reveals a complete 360-degree rendering of your surroundings. Suddenly, disembodied hands appear and immersion takes a severe hit. This is the rub. We have competent virtual reality, but a certain level of abstraction remains unavoidable.
Inside of PlayStation VR’s boundaries, however, Arkham VR can make a great case for the hardware. Transforming from Bruce Wayne to Batman—finding the secret elevator to the bat cave, riding it down, and virtually inserting pieces of the batsuit on your person—sells Arkham VR in ways a traditional experience could never achieve. Physically becoming Batman would be a waste of time in a regular Arkham game, but the novelty of suiting up inside of perceived reality is a completely different experience.
Two Move controllers stand (float?) in for Batman’s hands. His belt, true to form, is a mobile tool shed. Holstered on his right hip is his trademark grappling gun and on his left is a multi-tool scanner. In the center is an interminable supply of batterangs which you can deploy everywhere like a gleeful misanthrope. Batman’s belt is cool because his toys are always there. Like, if you look down the grappling gun is there and you can reach down and pick it up and hand it to your other hand. Again, this is an incredibly small detail! It’s like the people who saw a movie for the first time and got scared when a train approached the screen. But it’s an excellent demonstration of the power of this technology.
Batman’s call to action lands with the disappearance of Robin. He seeks out Nightwing, which leads to a gruesome sequence as unexpected as it is dramatic. This propels Batman into detective mode, where he must scour a crime scene for clues. This instance, along with a sequence later at a morgue, plays out with Batman shifting about the environment and searching for information with his scanner. The player doesn’t “move” Batman—PlayStation VR isn’t equipped for walking around, and it also tends to make people sick—but rather teleports to specifically marked points around the environment. It’s common solution to a recognized problem.
The remainder of Arkham VR traces Batman on his path to find a perpetrator. Both the scanner and the grappling gun come in handy in certain instances, and the player’s ingenuity with these tools is called upon a handful of times. Arkham VR, where movement is controlled and every batterang hits its mark, almost feels like an elaborate but subdued theme park ride. It’s a convincing argument, for sure, but it prefers players to witness action rather that immediately take part.
Arkham VR delights in providing a show for its audience. At one point Batman must reassemble a detonated pipe bomb, and on the player’s end this means manipulating multiple pieces in three dimensional space. Picking stuff up as it’s suspended in air, twisting and turning it until it fits together — this is awesome! It’s essentially a parlor trick, but Arkham VR is loaded with sequences designed specifically to impress newcomers to virtual reality.
It’s also smart about the ways it connects players to the world. There are a couple sequences where you’re presented with a mirror and holy shit you’re Batman. His expression remains predictably stoic, but his head moves in perfect harmony with yours. With the VR headset on it basically feels like you’re wearing a cowl anyway, further selling the illusion. In the reflection his hands are actually connected to his arms, and it looks natural until you inevitably start performing a dance routine.
While it threatens immersion, I almost wish Arkham VR had embraced the implicit weirdness granted by the freedom of virtual reality. Early in the game Alfred stops by to provide a lecture and hand off a key. On my second run through Arkham VR, I removed a picture frame and some other items near me and threw them at Alfred’s head. I tried to insert a red telephone in his mouth. He did nothing in response, obviously, but it remains a threatening disconnect to experience a new level of freedom and only small amount of potential action inside of it.
Arkham VR comes to a close after about forty-five minutes. On successive runs The Riddler creates a bunch of extraneous challenges around the same environments, and there may be a couple of extra things to fiddle with that you overlooked the first time around. If value is measured in time then Arkham VR’s $20 asking price is a poor investment, however, as one of the first substantially immersive experiences on brand new hardware, its role as software is crucial. Its tricks only work once (which is why I really haven’t talked about Arkham VR’s story in any sort of depth) but it’s an impressive looking show.
Rez Infinite, Thumper, and to a lesser extent SuperHyperCube—most of the other PlayStation VR games I’ve played are for people who already really like games. Arkham VR is destined to impress both gamers and those who aren’t as deep down the rabbit hole. I can’t wait to show this to my dad, for example, whose conception of a Batman in a videogame died with Sunsoft’s 1990 NES classic. Arkham VR will obliterate his mind and I cannot wait to watch it happen.
Arkham VR was also my first time where PlayStation VR hardware stopped playing nicely with its software. Donning the batsuit requires one of your hands to extend, grab the Batman logo, and pull it toward your body. Whenever I tried this my virtual hand would turn blue and dissolve as if it was out of range of the camera. Repeated recalibration was ineffective, and I briefly thought I just wouldn’t be able to play Arkham VR until I got lucky. By reaching in and grabbing the logo really fast, the camera wasn’t able to lose my position. A handful of similar instances required me to overcome the limitations of the hardware in order to make progress.
It’s aggravating because the entire process is so cumbersome. Adjusting my camera required removing the headset, removing the Move controller strapped to my wrists, taking off my headphones, and safely setting all of that equipment on the floor where my cats wouldn’t try to fight it. Arkham VR did work, eventually, but the path that got there is riddled with pratfalls that wreck an otherwise savored moment of my free time. Overcoming these barriers isn’t necessarily Arkham VR’s problem, it’s shared by Sony and the infancy of their hardware, but it remains a solid point of frustration.
A maiden voyage with new hardware reveals a world of undefined possibility. Repeated trips, as two Kinects and six years of the Wii have taught us, may call into question the viability of the entire service. This is the case with much of Arkham VR; I can’t deny that what I’m doing is awesome, that feeling like I am Batman is nothing short of revolutionary, but it’s difficult to determine if this is genuine or if I am just lost in the moment. Time will judge Arkham VR better than any review, but right now, in this moment (and if you can get the hardware to cooperate) it’s a successful case for the power of PlayStation VR.
