SportsBarVR

The VR Pool at the heart of this is great, and the other games are fun to try out as well, but your fondest memories will be of pushing the game’s limits and seeing what shenanigans you can get up to.

It’s finicky, but worth your time if the concept intrigues you.

Sports Bar VR needs a couple of important patches and some polishing here and there, but what it already offers is unique; even unforgettable, if you are lucky enough to find the right company in its virtual environment.

While Sports Bar VR captures the look and feel of a sports bar, the control scheme combined with Hulk Mode made me feel drunk, complete with hangover. The four games on offer are hampered by inconsistent physics, resulting in an unsurprisingly uneven experience. None of that, somehow, interferes with the game being a stupid-fun experience with friends.

SportsBarVR is a solid collection of multiplayer sports bar games, with pool and darts being the stand out experiences. However, the other experiences on show seem to have been rushed a little to hit PlayStation VR's release date, and the small pool of online players detracts from the overall appeal of the package a little.

As a pool game, Sports Bar VR nails it. It’s as close to the real thing as you can get without leaving your house. The other modes are variable though and while the setting is quite nice in VR, the package is a little thin right now. However, it gives you more than Hustle Kings VR but maybe less than you might have expected overall.

Over-sensitity of Move controllers can be frustrating as can the incredible efficient A.I., but overall Sports Bar VR is a fun party game when playing online.

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.

As a place to hangout with friends, and cause chaos, it doesn't get much better than SportsBar VR. [Issue#180, p.48]

As it stands, Sports Bar VR is more like a virtual hangout reminiscent of Playstation Home, a social gathering where few patrons indulged in any of the mini-games within and remained content to treat it as a console-based Second Life. It is perhaps for that reason that Sports Bar VR will turn into a cult favorite among early adopters, but for anyone hoping for even a semi-accurate recreation of competitive sports bar activities, they may consider sticking to the real smoke-filled hangouts until a more precise alternative is released.

It's a neat idea, to be sure, but its execution leaves an awful lot to be desired. If anything, air hockey in VR is an enjoyable way to spend a couple of minutes. This, however, is in no way enough to justify the price tag.

Though Sports Bar conveys a convincing sense of space, any sense of immersion is nuked from orbit by wonky physics and jittery motion tracking. [January 2016, p76]