Ma[PSV]Rch Day 6 part 1: Dexed is the kind of boring game that made me abandon PSVR in the first place

This series: Part 1. Part 2.

On day 6 of Ma[PSV]Rch I encountered my scariest enemy yet. Screen smudging. Putting the PSVR on isn’t hard but it’s very easy to rub the lenses against your forehead or cheeks or whatever while adjusting it. Skin oil can create unpleasant smudges that make everything look cloudy. I cleaned it with a microfiber cloth and that helped but apparently a lens pen is the way to go, so I’ve ordered one of those. This is a reminder of how much more annoying the PSVR is to use than just a traditional TV and console set up. You need to clear space for it (I’m currently keeping a clear playfield so I don’t do that daily, but it is a concern) and you need to deal with all the wires and adjusting it on your head, and then there’s keeping the lenses clean and the various controllers charged (at least Dual Shock and 2 Moves) and it’s a whole thing. Traditional consoles have moved to make everything easier, with being able to turn them on via the controller and accessing games digitally so you don’t even need to swap discs, but PSVR makes you work for it a little bit. Considering that I can’t play VR games for hours like I can traditional games, it’s definitely a higher bar to entry.

I also experienced some drifting during play for the first time. One of my Move controllers went completely haywire and was pointing the opposite direction. I had to turn them both off and back on to fix it. I also found myself out of the play area and totally disoriented at one point. I thought I was facing the TV and camera but I was actually perpendicular to them. It was fine, I just re-oriented myself, but it’s a reminder of how not ready for prime time this tech can be.

I’ve broken this blog into two parts because I played two games on day 6 and had very different reactions to them, and as a single unit it was a bit too long and lacked flow. A link to part 2 is at the bottom.

Let’s start with Dexed.

Dexed is the kind of game that made me stop playing VR games in the first place. That’s a harsh thing to say about a game that isn’t terrible to play or broken, but in a way I find Dexed worse because everything works and it accomplishes the things it’s trying to do. The problem is that what it’s trying to do is boring. A lot of early PSVR games were boring. There are dozens upon dozens of tech demos in the platform’s library that show that a certain concept can work in VR or serve to demonstrate that a developer knows how to make a VR game, but fail to provide a reason why anyone would want to play THIS particular game, in VR nor not. Dexed is one of those games.

So what is Dexed? It’s a rail/target shooter. In this case it’s a rail shooter with a bit of a gimmick, in that you have two Move controllers that represent fire and ice and you shoot ‘enemies’ of the opposite element, Ikaruga style, with a Panzer Dragoon style lock on system. I put “enemies” in quotes because outside of the arcade mode, where you just get a big half dome full of holes that enemies pop out of sort of like whack-a-mole and doesn’t even have the interesting backgrounds, there aren’t really any threats in the game. Enemies generally don’t shoot at you, and while they shoot back if you hit them with the wrong element, getting hit just impacts your score. In the normal levels you don’t even have a health bar. Things can get a bit more complex with a shield mechanic and a combo system, but the main game is really just a score attack of shooting a bunch of targets that don’t react to you at all and it’s dishwater dull. I am not averse to arcade experiences, and in theory a railshooter in VR could be very cool, but Dexed ain’t it.

Part of Dexed problems also stem from its production values, which are low. This is a cheap game ($10) and there’s not much of it (4 short levels, a ‘boss fight’ against a squid, and an arcade mode). Even considering the low cost and the “VR tax” that comes from developers working with unfamiliar tools and for a limited audience, it’s paper thin. The levels themselves are visually quite boring, with themes like “underwater” and “forest” but just not much going on. The underwater level has a whale but is lacking in other sea life. The winter level has a giant snowman. His head falls off. It’s mildly amusing the first time, but if you’re going to play Dexed for more than the 30 minutes it takes to see everything it has to offer it’s not going to hold your attention through the visuals. The music is barely there and a little annoying. It’s meant to synchronize with the sounds of the target shooting, and it does that, but the effect is uninteresting and we’ve all seen games do this in the past, and better. Based on trophy completion rates it seems like a lot of other people thought Dexed was boring too, because even the easy trophies have low completion rates.

I remember when I first got my PSVR. I downloaded the full version of Sony’s VR Worlds and I did the non-interactive sea dive animation. It was awesome. There was great animation, some fun mini-story telling, and a real sense of place and adventure. I even showed it to my elderly mother and step father and they enjoyed seeing it and thought it was cool, then never mentioned or asked about it again. It was like going to a consumer electronics show and checking out a demo of some neat tech that would eventually become something. A taste of what’s to come.

The problem with PSVR is that too many of its games never crossed beyond that tech demo status. The promise of things to come. Eventually you stop caring about the promise and you want the thing, especially if you’re paying for the software and trying to justify the $400 hardware expense. That costs as much as a PS5 digital, and it required already owning a PS4 to work. Games like Dexed just weren’t going to cut it. And they didn’t for me, which is why I stopped using mine.

I don’t mean to sound like Dexed is the worst game ever because it’s not. It works, and there is some fun to finding your rhythm in hitting the targets with the different PS Move controllers. When you’re in the zone a little bit and you intuitively know which you have to hit with the fire and which the ice, and the controllers feel like part of your hand, it’s kind of neat. The visuals are basic but not terrible. There’s nothing offensive about it. If you are really into score attack target shooters then there’s some depth with the combo system and whatnot. If the PSVR was as easy to set up and use as just turning on a console and a TV I could even see myself coming back to it from time to time to run through a stage just as a way to kill five minutes. But there’s not enough here to justify even the meager price, let alone pulling out the VR set and clearing room in front of the Tv to play it. It’s a 5 out of 10 boring game, and VR alone can’t change that.

The other thing of note about Dexed is that it was made by Ninja Theory. The same studio that made Hellblade, which is a game I really enjoyed. So this is not an untalented studio. This game was something they put together at the same time as Hellblade, presumably as practice for making a VR version of Hellblade, which they never released on PSVR (presumably because the system couldn’t handle it) but did put out on PC. So it literally was a tech demo and a practice project for their real game. Which was just a VR port of a game they already released on conventional platforms. And that’s what a lot of the early PSVR games were like. Even Moss, a game with some real heft that I actually loved, was clearly something of a tech demo; just providing the first chapter of what was conceived of as a longer story. More than 4 years after PSVR’s launch there are still too many projects that show what VR could someday be rather than demonstrating how good it currently is.