Sports Bar VR review for PSVR

The only experience I’ve had at an actual sports bar is going to one of those theme restaurants with hundreds of TVs showing different sporting events at the same time. Playing Sports Bar on the PS VR is similar to this, without the overpriced food, loud patrons and smells. It’s neat, but It’s charm quickly wears off and you may feel a bit dizzy after a while.

When you begin, you find yourself in a poorly lit room with neon signs, greeted by a clunky tutorial showing you how do things. This takes a lot of practice, since moving around the room is a chore. Once you get moving down, you can head into the bar itself. Here you will see games like Pool, Darts, Air Hockey and Skeeball. You can move around with the Teleport option (which you will be using a lot) and what they call HULK MODE, where you can turn and reposition yourself. This does not feel very good, and will be disorienting most of the time. Let’s take a look at the games you can play, beginning with pool.

The concept is great as it feels like a real Pool Table, but using the Move controllers is rather twitchy at times. Playing against is fun but challenging as it knows a lot of trick shots, but the more you play, it becomes easier to score victories. Playing online is way better, although I had difficulty finding opponents. When you do find people to play with, it’s kinda hard to not throw beer bottles and chairs at your opponents (Who look like Floating VR Helmets and Move Controllers). Yes, you can actually do this and it’s what the majority of online players will do do in Sports Bar. There are prizes like new Pool Cues and Tabletops and helmets for your “Avatar” you can earn as you play the different games. You can even find foam hands for your Move Controllers, but most people use these as projectiles.

Air Hockey was actually the best experience and the most accurate with Controls. It’s fast, fluid and gets you pumped just like in real Air Hockey. The goal here is to smash the puck into the opponents goal as many times as you can to win. The sound effects are great and are as close to a real Air Hockey table as you can get. By far one of the better games offered here.

Playing Darts doesn’t fair too well, as it actually seems broken when you first play it. Turning on auto targeting helps, but really diminishes the experience. Playing without the auto targeting is just ok, but it is really hard to master. Needless to say I didn’t spend too much time here. It was just too hard to hit anything other than the floor and the wall.

Skeeball was a mixed bag. Sometimes you get it perfectly and score the highest score, then other times it just goes all wrong. I suppose it’s a lot like actual Skeeball in this sense. It was more fun and easier than Darts, but not as fantastic as it could’ve been. Most of the time I ended up hurling the ball way over the machine, and other times it would just roll around and fall on the floor.

I like the look of Sports Bar VR as a whole. Some of the visuals can look blurry or muddy at times, but it’s nothing that distracts you while playing a game. Mostly you’ll notice it in the backgrounds and the other patrons in the bar just hanging out. The people look like living mannequins, and it’s kinda creepy when you look at them up close. Everything sounds like you’re in an actual bar, from the clinking glasses to the music being played in the background. Overall it’s really nice how everything comes together,

Sports Bar VR is fun for the price. It’s super cheap and most of the games work ok. The biggest annoyances come from moving around the bar, and re-positioning yourself to better play the game. Overall, It’s not a bad experience, but better movement and teleportation would of been nice. Sports Bar VR is neat but very basic in its presentation, and after you play everything and unlock some prizes, you will get tired and want to leave. It’s good, but definitely not a game that will sell PSVR units.