Forget Elden Ring DLCOne thing I’m excited about this week is my experience playing the PlayStation VR2 version of Skydance’s Behemoth. Okay, that’s a lie, I’m still excited about Shadows of the Aardtree, but playing Behemoth on PSVR2 was the first time I felt genuinely excited by an experience on Sony’s headset.
While Behemoth will also be coming to PC VR when it finally releases this autumn, the PSVR2 port I played looks to be one of the first big-budget and original VR releases for the platform since launch title Horizon: Call of the Mountain. Even Sony themselves (perhaps unwittingly) seem to be of the opinion Recently put the brakes on PS VR2 supportThis hands-on opportunity was a chance to see the headset shine again, and it really couldn’t have come at a better time.
Behemoth is made by the same team behind one of my all-time favourite VR titles, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, and it’s clear that Skydance has picked the best features from that open-world survival game and boiled them down to fit this fairly linear action-adventure. That means it has precise climbing mechanics and a blood-soaked combat system that gives your virtual weapons a real sense of weight and heaviness. All of this is then backed up with some wonderfully detailed visuals that make full use of 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, as well as the flight mechanics in Iron Man VR, but Skydance’s Behemoth feels packed with so many little gimmicks that it constantly made me say ‘wow!’ during my 40-minute hands-on. Gave moments of.
There’s a Mjolnir-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 from enemies as well). There’s a button-activated ‘strength power’ that lets you cut bodies in half (or even into smaller parts if you prefer) with your swords, and of course there are those absolutely massive boss fights that the game is named after. All of these features come together to make Skydance’s behemoth feel like an epic power fantasy, or at least they did in the Vertical Slice demo I played. If the full game can maintain the same energetic pace as the demo and continue to throw in small surprises throughout its 12-hour-long campaign, that’s a big deal.
Want to know more? You can check out select parts of the demo in the headline video above or, if you prefer, it’s also available to view on ours. Youtube channel Too.
