Feel better about your PlayStation VR with sweet new games Astro Bot, Firewall

Enlarge / Alongside the PlayStation VR headset, which will work on both units. (credit: Kyle Orland)

There's only so much breathing room between the season's biggest video game releases, and that has meant an incredibly brief respite at Ars HQ. What do we gnaw on between massive games like Spider-Man, Forza Horizon 4, and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey? (Let alone Red Dead Redemption 2 around the corner.)

In my case, it's been PlayStation VR-a stint that I admittedly kicked off after testing the Oculus Quest. PSVR currently sits in a cushy point between PC's awesome-but-expensive systems and ho-hum phone-VR solutions. Sony's set thus feels to me like the closest Quest corollary (which relies on a mobile Snapdragon 835 SoC) ahead of that wireless headset's "Spring 2019" launch.

This season's biggest PSVR games, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission and Firewall: Zero Hour, are both good and bad news for anybody getting excited about the Quest's possibilities. The good news is that these games deliver great gameplay while leaning on simple, lower-powered graphics (and in Astro Bot's case, still looking gorgeous). But Oculus fans will probably never see these first-party Sony games on next year's wireless kit, and it's a reminder that sometimes, smart development (and triple-A money to fund it) can beat any futuristic tech possibility.

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