Forget Elden Ring DLC, the only thing I’m excited about this week is my hands-on with the PlayStation VR2 version of Skydance’s Behemoth. OK, that’s a lie, I am still excited about Shadow of the Erdtree, but playing Behemoth on PSVR2 was the first time that I’d felt truly thrilled by an experience on Sony’s headset in what feels like an age.
While Behemoth is also set to land on PC VR when it finally releases sometime this autumn, the PSVR2 port that I played feels like one of the first big budget and original VR releases for the platform since launch title Horizon: Call of the Mountain. With even Sony itself appearing to (inadvertantly perhaps) put the brakes on PS VR2 support recently, this hands-on opportunity was a chance to see the headset shine again, and it really couldn’t have come at a better time.
Behemoth has been created by the same team as one of my all-time favourite VR titles, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and it’s clear Skydance has cherry-picked the best features from that open-world survival game and boiled them down to fit into this fairly linear action-adventure. That means there’s accurate climbing mechanics and a blood-soaked combat system that gives a real feel of weight and heft to your virtual weapons. All this is then backed up with some wonderfully detailed visuals that make full use of the PSVR2’s foveated rendering feature. One of the best things about VR is that, when done right, it can make you feel effortlessly cool and powerful. Synapse’s telekinesis features are probably the best example of this, along with the flight mechanics in Iron Man VR, but Skydance’s Behemoth seems to cram in lots of little gimmicks like these that constantly gave me epic ‘wow!’ moments during my 40-minute hands-on.
There’s a Mjölnir-style throw and return mechanic for your ‘hero weapons’ and an easy to use grapple hook for traversal that can be upgraded to snatch weapons out of enemies hands (and later enemies themselves). There’s a button-activated ‘strength power’ that lets you cleave bodies in half (or even smaller portions if you so wish) with your swords, and of course there’s also those absolutely gigantic boss fights the game is named after. All of these features come together to make Skydance’s Behemoth feel like an epic power fantasy come to life, or at least they did in the vertical slice demo that I played. If the full game can keep up the same energetic pace as the demo and keep throwing in little surpises during its 12-hour long campaign, I can see Behemoth easily being one of the best PSVR2 releases of the year.
Want to find out more? You can watch me play through select portions of the demo in the headline video above or, if you’d prefer, it’s also available to view over on our YouTube channel as well.